Hu Jintao Gambles on the West

For Chinese President and Communist Party Chairman Hu Jintao, the run rises in the west. Now in the last 12 months of his first five year term as China’s boss, he is busy elevating loyalists from his own Communist Party factions to top positions, many of them with long service in the outlying western regions of the country.

While the bulk of Hu’s protégé…