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He's the most powerful leader in the world. He rules over more than a billion people, controls a nuclear arsenal and runs a gigantic economy. He’s the number one challenge for the incoming American administration of President Donald Trump Yet we know little about Xi Jinping, the man who is the new emperor of China. Why?
I began to study Xi more than a decade ago. At first, I thought he was another dreary Communist in a suit – the kind King Charles once called “appalling old waxworks” when he met them at the handover of Hong Kong.
I watched him sit for hours in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, unmoving as a statue. But when he spoke, it was in a confident imperial voice.
The reason we knew little about Xi when he came to power in 2012 was that Chinese leaders live behind a veil of secrecy. Obsessed with security, the regime doesn’t even publish his date of birth. It’s June 15, 1953, by the way, but we only know that because his “friend” Vladimir Putin sends him a telegram every year.
Bit by bit, however, the veil has fallen away.
With the help of Chinese researchers, drawing on a few courageous dissidents and publishers, we now know that his life story is one of incredible hardship, strength of character and persistence.
He has endured things that would have broken many politicians reared in the comfort and safety of the West, however much they tout their own backstories of overcoming humble origins or prejudice. Xi thinks they are soft.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, should not underestimate him as they try to chart a new course with China. This man is from the hardest school on the planet.
He was born near the Forbidden City in Beijing where the emperors once ruled. His parents were Communist revolutionaries, following Chairman Mao Zedong. They rode into the capital, seized power and set up home in the nicest houses. Little Xi Jinping – pronounced SHEE jin PING – went to an idyllic kindergarten, where they waved red flags and sang songs to Chairman Mao. But it all went wrong when his father fell from power in one of Mao’s purges. Xi lost his parents, his home and his education.
Denounced as the son of a “gangster”, he was bullied, beaten and paraded on a stage to be abused. Then he was detained by Mao’s fanatical Red Guards.
One rainy night, he escaped and ran to the small house where his mother was sheltering. She turned him away and reported him. More punishment followed.
“They told me I could be shot a hundred times,” he once recalled, “so I thought, ‘What isthe difference between being shot once and being shot a hundred times? What was there to be afraid of?’”
Eventually, Xi was sent as a teenager to work in one of the poorest, most isolated parts of Central China, joining millions of youths exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave, eating gritty food, with a wooden barrel as a shared toilet. Life was so hard that he escaped again.
But he was caught and put to work in a labour gang digging sewers. Then he was sent back to the remote village to get on with it.
Astonishingly, Xi made key decisions right then. He wouldn’t fight the system. He would rule it. He joined the Communist Party after trying eight times, madehimself a village leader and eventually got back to university to take a “worker-peasant-soldier” degree.
He had almost no secondary education but he worked hard. It turned out that his family still counted: Mao forgave his father and the path to power was open again.
It took Xi decades to climb to thetop. He did it by persistence and scheming. One by one, his rivals fell away. The biggest threat to him came from a populist genius named Bo Xilai.
But Bo fell foul of a scandal after his wife was convicted of murdering a British businessman, the Old Harrovian Neil Heywood, by poisoning him over a business dispute.
My inquiries for the book convinced me she could not have committed the crime and she was simply framed in a show trial. No matter, Xi triumphed.
In power, Xi has been ruthless. He punished more than a million officials in a campaign against corruption. He has sacked generals and jailed bankers. Deaths in custody and suicides are common. His own hand-picked foreign minister, Qin Gang, a fluent English speaker who served in the Chinese embassy in London, vanished amid rumours about an affair, a love child and the CIA. Two defence ministers have fallen.
So what does he want?
Xi wants to Make China Great Again. He once told Joe Biden that China had suffered so much at foreign hands that “the lesson we learned is never give in on anything”.
He thinks the Americans should get out of Asia and says the world trade system helmed by the West is wrong – even though it has led the Chinese people from poverty to prosperity in his lifetime.
Then there is his strange “friendship” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Xi stood on a red carpet in the Kremlin and declared that the two of them were “driving changes in the world not seen in a hundred years”.
He has backed Putin’s war in Ukraine with weapons technology and trade deals, while talking peace. For him, the prize is a new world order led by the autocrats.
Yet plenty of people in China think he’s got it wrong. China and Russia are not real friends. I was given declassified American documents showing that Xi himself was tutored as a young man by China’sdefence supremo to fear and distrust the old Soviet Union.
And even though Xi is actually making Russia a satellite state by extorting tough terms for his aid, what good can come of it? It makes no sense, say his critics at home, to wreck China’s economy, already slowing down, by alienating the West.
The rich who have done well out of China’s rise don’t want a war with the Americans and their allies – a war, make no mistake, that would involve Britain. Nor do millions of ordinary Chinese people, who are working hard to make better lives for themselves.
The worry in Western intelligence circles is that Xi is badly informed – and that he is also a risk taker. The other worry for this country is that Xi has no love for the United Kingdom.
He was taught as a child that Victorian England stole Hong Kong, peddled drugs and plundered China in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century.
That is a distorted history lesson but one which is still compulsory in Chinese schools.
His own views did not improve when his first wife, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, divorced him and left to live in London.
In my book, I tell how he heard stories of her spending too much time with an eminent professor in Cambridge and how she gossiped at dinner parties about his habits. She has not been seen in public since going to China for her father’s funeral in 2019.
David Cameron came face to face with Xi’s stony-faced intransigencewhen he led a forlorn delegation to Beijing in 2013 to promote the “golden era” between our two countries.
The prime minister’s Etonian charm fell flat at a moonlit banquet atwhich neither jokes nor flattery broke the ice. Undeterred, Cameron later invited the Chinese leader to pints in his local pub, but it was already closing time for the “golden era”.
Then there was Xi’s excruciating state visit to Buckingham Palace, when the first couple of China exchanged wary pleasantries with Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh.
While Xi’s second wife, a famous singer named Peng Liyuan, is renowned for her social graces, the Queen was unimpressed when other Chinese guests at a state dinner sat scrolling on their mobile phones and scoffing their own takeaways. Frivolous or not, impressions matter in a culture that prizes “face”.
When protesters in Hong Kong – now under Chinese rule – decided that the portly Xi looked like Winnie-the-Pooh, postersand internet memes of the lovable bear appeared and spread all over China, a code for the leader.
It took a while for Xi’s army of censors to wake up to this threat to national security. They may not have dared to tell their boss, hastily opting to stay on the safe side.
Winnie-the-Pooh is now banned in China. It sounds laughable, but nothing is left to chance when you work for the most powerful man in the world.
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and his New China, by Michael Sheridan (Headline, £25) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25
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