"Zhu said he knows the trip won't be easy, but he is amazingly calm, " says Fred Hu, head of Asia economic research for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong and a former student of Zhu's at Qinghua.
Actually, the weakness of the Hu-Wen regime was initially a little difficult to see, precisely because so many of the policies that Zhu had set in motion carried forward with a momentum of their own.