By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING, Sept 6 (Reuters) - China joins World Trade Organization! Beijing to host Olympics! Communist Party opens doors to capitalists! Another year of spectacular growth!

When Jiang Zemin retired five years ago, he could reel off a long list of front-page headlines crowning his 13 years at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party.

But rather than pursue his predecessor's recipes for success, Hu Jintao has made a series of policy shifts to help China grapple with less savoury by-products of the Jiang era, such as uneven growth, a widening wealth gap and growing social unrest.

Along the way, he has chalked up successes in Taiwan and Hong Kong and against corruption. But analysts say it is too early to gauge how effective his policies have been. Hu faces resistance at local levels from officials who pine for the old boom days, and his measures remain vulnerable to a potential economic shock.

When the dust settles on the Party's 17th congress, opening on Oct. 15, Hu will almost certainly be better placed to implement policy priorities at loggerheads with those of his predecessor, who has been reluctant to see his legacy dismantled.

"In the next five years, Hu Jintao's policy will prevail," said Cheng Li, a China scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "But if for example the stock market crashes, people will start to doubt Hu Jintao's economic policies. Then there will be some adjustments."

Jiang's buzzwords included coastal development strategy -- the notion of letting eastern provinces prosper first and then pulling up the rest of the country -- globalisation and foreign trade, which Hu acknowledged as valid but not top priorities.

"Hu is more concerned about distribution, redistribution, or social harmony, or what sort of cost you will pay for economic growth," Li said. "So those two policies compete against each other. Sometimes one section will prevail, sometimes the other."

RETIREMENT PARTY HANGOVER

The widening wealth gap was accompanied by a somewhat alarming rise in social unrest that spilled into Hu's tenure. China saw 10,000 mass protests and incidents in 1994, five years into Jiang's 13-year reign. That had swollen to 58,000 in 2003, Hu's first year as president, and to 74,000 a year later.

Motives for unrest vary. Builders razed whole neighbourhoods, sparking protests by the evicted; polluting factories alarmed nearby villagers; corruption by local officials sparked riots.

Hu responded by pushing policies for the countryside, scrapping central government taxes on farmers that dated back 2,000 years, offering free education to rural children and setting up a basic medical health care system across China.

Some of Hu's proposals, however, have met resistance.

Concepts like "green GDP", emphasising sustainable development, have been ignored by some local officials, who regard them as fine for other parts of China but not necessary in their patch, said a Western diplomat.

The former Party boss of Shanghai, a Jiang ally, clashed with Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao over what he regarded as draconian central economy-tightening measures. Chen Liangyu was later sacked for corruption and is awaiting trial.

Social policy aside, Hu has also charted a different course on issues from self-ruled Taiwan, which China regards as its own territory, to Hong Kong, which Britain returned to China in 1997.

Where Jiang had shown a more belligerent stance on Taiwan, Hu took initiatives to ease cross-Strait tensions by engaging Taiwan opposition leaders and providing economic sweeteners.

On Hong Kong, Hu rebuked Tung Chee-hwa, the Jiang-era chief executive, in 2004 after hundreds of thousands protested in the streets over a controversial anti-subversion bill. Tung, who had ruled since the handover, resigned less than a year later.

And on Tibet, Jiang was reluctant to deal with the Dalai Lama, the Himalayan region's exiled spiritual leader. But Hu's administration is in talks with the Dalai Lama's envoy on his possible return, and Hu may have an opportunity to normalise relations, China watchers said.

Hu managed to orchestrate some of these changes while continuing to massage Jiang's ego, making his selected works compulsory reading for 73 million Party members and allowing his predecessor to rake in millions of yuan in royalties.

"On the surface, Hu and Jiang respect each other and maintain relations. But in private, they gnash their teeth in hatred," political commentator Wu Ke said. (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard)

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