China’s Best Westerns

In the relative privacy of the minibus, Chen Zhu lets down his guard. "It's a shame," China's health minister almost whispers, glancing at his hands. Between stops on a whirlwind morale-boosting tour of Beijing's outlying health facilities, he's remembering the worst crisis since his appointment to the job in June 2007. "There was a warning," he says. When he heard of a strange epidemic of kidney stones among Chinese infants last September, his first thought was of the American dogs and cats that died after developing kidney stones from eating melamine-tainted pet food from China in 2007.

Those pet deaths should have alerted China's food-safety authorities to the risk that melamine, which gives falsely high protein readings, might resurface in other foods, Chen says. "I believe there was not much attention paid to that [North American] case—not enough," says Chen, whose ministry took over food safety in mid-2008. "Otherwise, if the management was a little bit tighter …" Instead, corrupt officials tried to cover up the baby-formula problem for months. Six infants died and 300,000 were sickened because the formula wasn't taken off the market fast enough. "We cannot say 'If, if'," Chen adds. "We have to face the reality here. But these are the lessons we've learned." The minibus pulls up at Chen's next stop, and he climbs out, smiling and shaking hands.

Evidence that these lessons have been taken to heart came this month, when China's Parliament passed a new food-safety law, ensuring that the issue is now overseen by a cabinet-level body and that Chen's Health Ministry leads a huge project aimed at improving Chinese standards. Beyond that, however, Chen's moment of introspection was remarkably revealing. Most apparatchiks are obsessed with projecting an air of determined competence, if not infallibility; mistakes are admitted only under duress.

But Chen, 55, is no bland bureaucrat. He's only the second Chinese minister not to be a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 36 years. The first, Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang, was appointed in April 2007. The two of them are leading members of a generation of Chinese officials just now coming into power—men (and a few women) who take a more sophisticated approach to governing. They're defined by a "growing professionalism, a greater emphasis on functional expertise, a greater emphasis on actual performance as opposed to who might be in your network … [and] a growing emphasis on pure competence," says Kenneth Jarrett, a former U.S. diplomat who served as Asia director on the National Security Council from 2000 to 2001. Non–party members are growing increasingly influential in China's public life. Though there are no reliable statistics, Chen says that there are now many of them at the provincial level. "When I go to the provinces, I meet many people of this kind," he says.

Many in this new generation of leaders were trained in the West and are heavily influenced by Western trends. Science and Technology Minister Wan got his doctorate at Germany's Clausthal Technical University in 1991 and later became a senior designer at Audi. He has since become the father of China's clean-energy R&D program, which involves both electric and hybrid vehicles. The mayor of the Chaoyang district in Beijing, Chen Gang (no relation), says he learned cutting-edge administrative techniques when he studied at Harvard and is now promoting greater transparency in dealing with citizens' complaints. The heads of some of China's most vital state-owned companies, including oil giant CNOOC, also studied abroad. Health Minister Chen studied at Paris's St-Louis Hospital. And his current job is of particular interest to the outside world, as he's responsible for day-to-day coordination on food safety, as well as tracking infectious diseases like bird flu.

Chen has a refreshingly rough-hewn air. He's wearing a suit this day while making his rounds, but his rumpled mien somehow makes him look less like a CEO than the farmhand he once was. The son of two Shanghai doctors, Chen was sent to a dirt-poor village in Jiangxi province as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution. After realizing "my life in the countryside would be quite long," he says, he asked his parents to help him learn a few simple medical treatments. He performed his first operation on a woman with a stomach ulcer; the only anesthetic he had was a set of acupuncture needles, which he still considers a "simple but effective technology." He worked in the village as a "barefoot doctor" from 1970 to 1975. His reward came when a grateful local commune sent him to a district medical college, where he became a teacher.