Whether in commissioned official biographies of business tycoons or political leaders, a lot of essential and factual truths are unfortunately omitted perhaps to erase sad memories or tragedies. However, it is important to appreciate the crises a great leader has gone through to better understand where his character and guts came from. Hu Jintao has a photographic memory, and his official biographies omit to mention that he likes table tennis and ballroom dancing. As the leader of the fourth generation leadership since Mao Zedong, Hu was elected president of the People’s Republic of China on March 15, 2003. He is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Official biographies given out by his entourage during his speech before the joint session of Congress or at the grand welcome reception only listed Hu Jintao as "a native of Jixi, Anhui Province, and was born in December 1942." Our own research, however, showed that Hu was most likely born in the eastern Anhui province, but people are unsure of the actual county or town.

One version of the Hu Jintao life story said that he was born in Taizhou, Jiangsu province and not in Jixi, Anhui, as officially listed. His ancestors resided in Jixi before they transferred to Jiangsu. During the chaotic Cultural Revolution, which started in the 1960s and lasted a decade, Hu’s father Hu Ningzhi was a tea shop owner who was publicly humiliated, dragged on stage for public denunciations by rabid leftist radicals, jailed and physically tortured. The elder Hu died in Taizhou in 1978 at only age 50 due to the harsh persecution. Hu Jintao was then 36 years old and serving in another province. The elder Hu was unjustly persecuted as an alleged bourgeois capitalist.

Shocked and grief-stricken by his father’s tragic end, Hu tried to convince the local officials of their hometown to restore the honor of his father, but they refused. A local anecdote recounts that some local politicians recommended the best restaurant in town for Hu Jintao to host a banquet for a meeting on the matter with local Communist Party officials. He paid 50 yuan (equivalent to 1,500 yuan or $181 nowadays) to host two tables for a sumptuous lunch. He waited up to 2 p.m., but nobody showed up. By 3 p.m., a bureaucrat came to inform Hu that the local politicians were in a conference the whole day. The arrogant bastards in the local political leadership snubbed his banquet. Hu was forced to invite the chef, cooks and dishwashers to join his relatives to partake of the delicious foods and rice wine in stoic silence.

The tale recounts that Hu Jintao left his Taizhou hometown, swearing never to return. It is said that the elder Hu’s honor was rehabilitated only in the 1980s. Twenty-six years later, with Hu Jintao rising as supreme leader of China, the local officials of his hometown quickly beautified and cleansed his ancestral home and even the elder Hu’s tomb. They hoped for his visit, which he never did even after he learned of the preparations.

Was this tragedy one of the reasons Hu Jintao evolved into a strong leader? His mother died when Hu was only seven years old. Was the traumatic family tragedy of his father’s unjust persecution by radical leftist communists, the same tormentors of Deng Xiaoping before, one additional reason Deng trusted Hu Jintao to continue his market-oriented reforms which went against the frivolous political bickerings of the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution?

Hu joined the Communist Party of China in April 1964 and began to work in July 1965 after he graduated from the Water Conservancy Engineering Department of the prestigious Qinghua (pronounced as "Tsinghua") University, where he majored in the study of hub hydropower stations. Unlike many of our politicians who have been predominantly lawyers, most of China’s leaders in the modern reformist era were engineers like Jiang Zemin, ex-Premier Zhu Rongji and incumbent President Hu Jintao.