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2007-10-21 | All chapters

China's Master Problem-Solver Retires
Joe McDonald, Associated Press, 21st October 2007

For the past decade, when Chinese leaders had a mission of national importance, they gave it to one woman.

Wu Yi oversaw negotiations in the 1990s on China's entry to the World Trade Organization, winning a reputation as tough but personable. She directed the fight against the SARS pneumonia outbreak in 2003 and has represented Beijing in a dialogue to ease trade friction with Washington. In August, the government put her in charge of whipping product-safety enforcement into shape and restoring China's battered international image.

But now Wu, who turns 69 next month, is retiring, leaving Beijing to find a new top problemsolver for challenges ranging from improving drug safety to stabilizing unruly financial markets.

On Sunday, Wu, a vice premier and the only woman in the senior leadership, left the Communist Party's Central Committee along with many other retiring leaders as the party installed a new lineup to guide the country for the next five years. With that, Wu will have to relinquish her vice premiership, at the latest when a new government is announced in March.

U.S. officials say Wu is due to take part in one more round of economic talks with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in December. But they say after that, China has given no sign who will take over her duties.

A petrochemical engineer by training, Wu rose through the oil ministry and then government hierarchies to become China's highest-ranking female leader. Forbes magazine this year listed her as the world's second-most powerful woman, behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Her departure is unlikely to affect policy in a system where key decisions are made by more senior party leaders.

Still, she is one of several leading officials with economic portfolios stepping down. The party leadership has few candidates to turn to with the charm, intelligence and negotiating skills that won Wu wide respect among world political and business leaders.

"One of the great defenders, one of the great openers-up of this economy is Vice Premier Wu Yi," Joerg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce, said in September. "She personally is one of the great advocators of free trade."

"She will be difficult to replace," said William Hess, chief China analyst for the consulting firm Global Insight.

Wu, who never married and has no children, shows an unusual degree of personal warmth in public for China's stiffly formal official system. After talks in December in Beijing, she and Paulson held hands as they met reporters.

Domestically, Wu has tackled some of the government's most critical problems, stepping in to restore public faith after Chinese leaders initially sluggish response to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. In 2006, she supervised an investigation into China's drug-licensing system after a former regulator was charged with taking bribes to approve untested medicines, some of which killed patients.

In August, Wu was put in charge of overhauling China's product-safety enforcement after a string of recalls and warnings abroad over drug-laced seafood, toxic toothpaste, faulty tires and other goods.

Wu joined the ruling party in her early 20s. She spent 15 years at the Beijing East is Red Refinery before becoming a chemical company executive and in 1988 a deputy mayor of Beijing. She became a deputy trade minister in 1991 and a member of the party Politburo in 2002.

Wu has given no indication what she might do in retirement.

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