It is 2014. Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan are on a state visit to the Netherlands. King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima receive the couple in the Royal Palace on Dam Square. There is a banquet, the meal is served by footmen in red livery. The ladies are in long, the men in skirts. Except Xi. He is wearing a dark blue Mao suit with a small stand-up collar. No tie. In this he differs from his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who appeared in a western suit and tie as standard during international visits. Xi doesn’t want to be a fake Westerner, but a real, proud Chinese.
He shakes hands with invitees. He is quite hefty for a Chinese and indeed resembles Winnie the Pooh, the good-natured bear he was first compared to when he was in 2013 walked next to Obama. Not funny, Xi thinks, and so references to Winnie the Pooh have been censored in China ever since.
He smiles affably as he shakes the hand of this newspaper’s correspondent as well – but surprisingly, he has virtually no charisma. And that for a man who holds more power than even the President of the United States.
Xi Jinping is President of China, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Head of the Central Military Commission. He also heads a whole series of committees that, more than the ministries, set the course in almost all areas of society. This ranges from economics to media and from foreign policy to internet security. There is nothing left of a collective leadership, instituted after Mao’s death in the late 1970s. Xi is the capo di tutti capi, the undisputed leader who determines everything.
But little is known about what kind of person he actually is and what motivates him personally. He no longer gives interviews, not even to Chinese journalists. That is not only beneath his dignity, it is also impossible to control what comes out. And control, security and stability are Xi’s obsessions.
One of the most interesting sources about Xi as a person is therefore an American political science professor of Chinese descent. This man met Xi in his late teens and then dated him for about fifteen years—between 1972 and 1987. That was the time when Xi was fighting his way up within the CPC. The professor’s name has never been released, but we know how he characterized Xi because discussions he had with an employee of the political department of the US embassy in Beijing between 2007 and 2009 were later leaked via Wikileaks.
In those conversations, it now appears that the professor has already predicted Xi’s future course. He is said to have always been disgusted by corruption and deeply disliked the comprehensive commercialization of Chinese society. He struggled with the loss of values, dignity and self-esteem in China from an early age. According to the professor, Xi would also look down on businessmen and anyone who has joined the Party late, purely in the hope of material gain. They are nothing more than grocers in Xi’s eyes, they have no right to leadership positions. Xi himself does, because his father fought for the liberation of China in 1949. He therefore belongs to the Red Elite: the exclusive class of descendants of high communist leaders who helped to liberate China. The professor predicted that Xi would launch a fierce campaign to tackle what he sees as the greatest evils of society, possibly at the expense of the wealthy.
Not sparkling, not a bon vivant
And that is exactly what Xi will do when he comes to power in 2012. He first focuses on corruption within the Party, then on wealthy private entrepreneurs like Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who he believes have taken far too much power.
Like Xi, the professor was born in 1953. They both grow up in special residential areas separated from society for the families of the Red Elite in Beijing. They are raised as if they were members of a royal family: they are made to realize that they are destined by their bloodline to take control of their parents’ land. So not really communist – more imperial.
Incidentally, the professor is not very impressed: Xi is not exceptionally intelligent or sparkling, nor is he a bon vivant. In the eyes of most women, Xi is above all a deadly boring man, says the professor.
That dead boring young man has already been through a lot in 1972 that has shaped him. His father, Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002), was a communist from the very beginning who took a reformist and economically liberal course at many crucial moments in his life. It is one of the reasons why many expected the same from his son when he came to power, but that expectation has not come true. Father Xi joined the CPC as early as 1928 and became deputy prime minister in 1959. That went with big ups and downs. In 1935 he was nearly executed during an internal party conflict, in 1962 he was again purged and tortured. His retirement in the late 1980s had also been enforced: he had sided with Hu Yaobang, a reformer who was sacked in 1987.
Son Xi knew how tough the power struggle within the CPC could be, and how cruel life as a communist could be. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), one of his half-sisters was tortured so badly that she committed suicide out of desperation. He himself was sent to the countryside as the descendant of someone who had taken ‘the capitalist road’. That hit him so hard that he fled back to Beijing. When he was arrested, he was punished by digging trenches in a labor camp.
Yet Xi is not turning away from the CPC or from politics. While others will have had their fill of anything that even smells of politics by the end of the Cultural Revolution, Xi sees that this is where the most opportunities lie for him.
The professor said that in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution he and his closest friends mainly focused on love, drink and Western literature. He read works by De Gaulle and Nixon and “tried to make up for the lost years by having fun.” Xi does not participate in that. He prefers to read Marx. He “chose to survive by becoming redder than red,” says the professor.
Xi chose to survive by becoming redder than red
That gets him very far. In 1974, his father was still imprisoned, Xi became a member of the CPC. Not without a fight: he has already been rejected nine times, probably because his father is politically controversial. He is educated at Qinghua University, in which Marxist ideology is an important part. In 1979 he graduated as a chemical engineer. That year he married Ke Lingling, the daughter of a diplomat, but the marriage broke up after three years.
After graduating, Xi starts as personal secretary to Geng Biao, who becomes defense minister in 1981. He gets that job as a favor to his father; Geng is a former subordinate of Xi senior. It opens up the possibility for Xi to continue working within Beijing’s bureaucracy for the rest of his life. Safety, security. But he is too ambitious for that. He holds government and party positions in the economically advanced provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, and later in Shanghai.
In 1987, he marries again, this time to Peng Liyuan, a famous singer with the People’s Liberation Army, where she sings sweet songs about how beautiful China is, and how beneficial the CPC is. Xi has already started his political advances: he is now deputy mayor of the southern Chinese city of Xiamen.
In 1997, he was elected an alternate member of the CPC’s 15th Central Committee. He is not very popular: he gets the fewest votes of all 151 deputy members, probably because his colleagues are not fond of people who come to the surface mainly because they are part of the privileged Red Elite. But the Red Elite is proving resilient, and Xi is steadily climbing.
Ten years later, it becomes clear that Xi is destined to become the most powerful man in China. He is appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee of the CPC. That committee has nine members and is the highest body of power in China. Xi is higher on that committee than current Prime Minister Li Keqiang, and everyone knows from that moment that Xi will succeed Hu Jintao as China’s supreme leader. That will indeed happen in 2012, when he becomes the head of the Party. He will also become president in 2013.
Before that, something very unusual happens: Xi disappears completely from the radar for a few weeks in 2012. Nobody knows where he is. He has canceled planned meetings with, among others, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Rumors abound. Does he use the time behind the scenes to ensure that his friends in particular are appointed to high positions? Has disagreements with other members of the Red Elite over the division of power turned into a physical fight? Did he injure his back? Or was a power struggle yet to be decided between him and the later disgraced Bo Xilai, the flamboyant son of a high-ranking revolutionary who was very popular among the population? Or did he have a heart attack? The rumors, often based on anonymous Chinese sources, come out through foreign media, but it is never clear what was really going on.
NGOs and critical media wiped out
In the nine years between 2012 and 2021, China has changed beyond recognition. Xi is very firmly in the saddle: his ideas are included in the Chinese constitution, he is the central leader. There is no longer any visible sign of any form of dissent within or outside the Party. There is no longer any doubt that he will be appointed for another five years in the fall of 2022, and perhaps longer.
Shortly after taking office, he starts a campaign against corruption. It leads to large-scale purges. In 2017, at the end of his first term as Party leader, 1.3 million people have already been prosecuted. He also restructures the army and makes it clear that it is the Party that leads the army. In mid-2015, two hundred dissident human rights lawyers were also arrested. It is becoming increasingly difficult for NGOs, state media are again emphatically becoming a tool for the propaganda of the CPC. China’s already limited civil society is soon almost gone. Nor is the commercial media, which used to be good for much of the critical reporting. There is fear: soon no one will dare to criticize Xi out loud, or take initiatives that may upset him.
Much more than his predecessors, he strives for a uniform unitary state, where cameras and rules keep citizens in line and morally correct behavior is required of everyone. Many citizens accept that: it gives them a sense of protection and orderliness.
Much more than his predecessors, Xi is striving for a unified unitary state
But the Uyghurs have a hard time under Xi. He sees this ethnic group, mostly Muslim, related to the Turks, as potential terrorists. Only if they fully assimilate do they, in his view, no longer pose a threat to the stability of China. At least a million Uyghurs under Xi end up in so-called re-education camps. According to eyewitnesses there is rape, forced sterilization and torture.
Xi’s foreign policy is more aggressive than that of his predecessors: he believes the US and the West are in decline – and China on the rise. In his view, China has a superior political system, and he is increasingly propagating that idea internationally. Tensions with the US over Taiwan and the South China Sea are rising under his rule. Xi is the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping, who opened China to the outside world, and perhaps even Mao.
But Xi’s strength is also its weakness. He can hardly resign or die, because it is completely unclear who should succeed him. Nobody dares to talk about an orderly succession procedure. And who guarantees the now undisputed leader that he will not be arrested after his resignation by senior party members who silently loathe him?
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