Xi Jinping: China's Greatest Chessmaster

Great empires rise, great empires fall, but China always remains. From the days of the Romans to the Holy Roman Empire, from the age of exploration to the age of the internet, the Middle Kingdom has watched the tides of history rise, fall, and rise again.

Over the course of millennia, China's endured, it's prospered, and in the modern day, it's become the world's preeminent rising superpower.

Today, it's a nation of 1.4 billion people, defined by one man. A ruler, a dictator, an enigma. Xi Jinping is the President of China, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and the paramount leader of China and its people.

But if Xi Jinping, the leader, is one of the most important men in the world, then Xi Jinping, the person, is a man who lives shrouded in secrecy. His personal history has been rewritten into propaganda. His intentions are hidden underneath directives and grand pronouncements.

His grand vision for China, by necessity, is a grand vision to shape the entire world. But it's a grand vision that is known only to a tiny circle of close confidants, and possibly only to Xi himself.

On today's special episode of War Fronts, we're going to pry into the locked box that is Xi Jinping, from an upbringing more intense than what most world leaders will ever experience in their lives, to a calculated Machiavellian rise to power.

We'll explore his global ambitions, his relentless purge of his enemies, and the trail of blood and gold that he's left in its wake. We're going to tell the story of China's most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, and a ruler who's already shown that he's more cunning and more dangerous than Mao ever was.

This is the life of Xi Jinping, China's ultimate chess master, and the architect of China's grand destiny.

On the day he was born, that's the 15th of June 1953, in the Chinese capital city of Beijing, little Xi Jinping had everything. He was the third-born child, and would be the eldest son of a powerful man in 1950s Beijing, Xi Zhong Zhong.

He was born to a loving mother, Qi Xing, in a city that was rapidly evolving from a centuries-old center of dynastic power into a bustling and slowly modernizing world capital.

His nation, at the time of his birth, was under new management via the Chinese Communist Party, triumphant after back-to-back victories, liberation from Imperial Japan, and the overthrow of China's prior ruling party, the Kuomintang.

For most people in Beijing, at the time that Xi was born, life was still difficult, red lines were long, electricity was scarce, and water still had to be fetched and brought to people's homes. But Xi's family lived a very different life than most people in the capital, or indeed, most people across China.

After all, Xi Jinping was the son of Xi Zhong Zhong, and, at least for a time, that was a position of unbelievable privilege. For any person, for better or for worse, our parents have the power to define us, but for Xi Jinping in particular, every great triumph and every bitter scar traces back in some way to his father's legacy.

In order to understand Xi at all, we've got to understand the man who made him, a man who was himself once a boy in the rural outskirts of China's Shangxi province.

Xi Zhonghong, who for clarity's sake we're just going to refer to as Zhongsheng instead of the family name, was the son of small plot farmers in Shanxi, growing up at a moment of rapid change across Chinese society.

Zhongsheng was born in 1913, and the Chinese Communist Party was founded eight years later in Shanghai in 1921, meaning that Zhongsheng's primary school years coincided perfectly with the spread of communism among Chinese intellectuals, students, and better educated rural elites.

Zhongsheng became a member of the Chinese Communist Youth League as a young teacher in the 1920s, in a moment when China's nationalist leaders were still trying to work together with the rising wave of communism in their midst.

At that time in modern Chinese history, the communists and the nationalists were working together in an alliance called the First United Front, combining their powers to take back control in areas that had been taken over by local warlords.

In backwater areas like Zhongsheng's little corner of Shangxi province, neglected and ignored by China's centers of power, communism had caught on relatively quickly. Peasants started to associate into organized cadres, defending against exploitation by local elites, while labor unions became increasingly popular in their own right.

That all changed, however, in 1927, a year after Shishengsheng became part of the Party's Youth League. In that year, the relationship between China's communists and its nationalist leaders broke down catastrophically, starting with the Shanghai Massacre, in which thousands of communists were purged from the city and spreading outward into the White Terror.

It's difficult to say precisely how many people were killed in the White Terror across China, with estimates usually settling in the multiple tens to the multiple hundreds of thousands.

But the violence of the period was incredible, and it quickly spread outward to the rural provinces. At just 14 years old, Shishengsheng moved to take part in the communist resistance in Shangxi, as a series of small-scale peasant revolts gave way to the local Weihua uprising.

Along with two of his classmates, Shishengsheng was tasked with carrying out the assassination of a local school administrator.

But the attempt failed, and Shishengsheng would join thousands of other young communists in prison. He'd eventually be let out when his ailing father was able to prevail on the head of Shangxi's government to see him released. But he emerged into a period of intense famine in the countryside.

Between the time of his release and the time he turned 18, Shishengsheng had watched his mother, his father, and two of his sisters die of starvation, becoming the new head of a household with ten mouths to feed. But even amidst the death and decay of this period in rural China, it would be a very long time before Shangsheng's luck ran out.

Over the following years, he'd be rewarded for his loyalty in prison service, an anti-nationalist circle. first leading a rebel army of guerrillas, then becoming an ideological instructor at an insurgent camp and then as the chairman of a locally imposed Soviet government.

Around this time, in the early 30s, China's communists were starting to put together growing parcels of captured land and, as they did, well-positioned leaders like Xiong Xiong enjoyed the benefits of the rising tide.

Xiong Xiong was less of a fighter than ideologue, making a name for himself in all sorts of senior postings, and by the time he was 22, he was chairman of an entire region.

In 1935, he'd go back to prison in something of a mix-up with the larger Communist Party as it fled into lands he controlled as a result of the gruelling military retreat known as the Long March.

But Xiong Xiong was released after Mao Zedong interceded, and he and his local government would later be acknowledged as saviors of the entire CCP, having built a stable base of power that would serve as communist headquarters for more than a decade.

During the war with Japan, Xiong Xiong was able to keep his work strictly political, avoiding the bloodshed while growing in power and influence and making a name for himself with Chairman Mao. One of Mao's most enduring political slogans, the party's interests come first, was written directly in Xi Xiong Xiong's honor.

From there, Xiong Xiong was well-placed to participate in the takeover of China and to reap the rewards that came with it.

To hear official Chinese sources tell it, Xi Xiong Xiong played a critical role in the defense of the city of Yan'an and was a guiding influence in other military offensives, working from his role of political commissar as a relative equal to communist military commanders.

At the same time, he led an institute of political education campaigns and other reforms within the Northwest Field Army, which would quickly become a model for ideological reforms all up and down the communist military infrastructure.

When, in 1949, Northwest China was declared fully liberated from the nationalists, Xi Xiong Xiong was heralded as one of the primary architects of victory. His reward was nothing less than Northwest China itself, and for years there was no decision in that part of China that didn't run through his ultimate authority.

Still only in his thirties at this point, Xiong Xiong had turned himself into an icon of Chinese communism.

He was the youngest of all of China's regional leaders, and he had built a reputation as one of the most effective, but one of the least violent among their number.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had demonstrated a keen awareness of the social and cultural balance within his region, managing to quell the beginnings of a rebellion without a need for bloodshed. He had also managed to navigate several potential crises through negotiation, after his peers had bungled things so badly that rebellion was imminent.

By 1952, Xi Xiong Xiong had been asked to bring his talents to Beijing, leading the CCP's propaganda department, as well as the committee that led cultural education. For long, he was Secretary General of the CCP State Council, the body charged with day-to-day leadership of the entire Chinese state and direct oversight of its provincial governments.

It was a this time in xi xiang cheng's life that he and his second wife ki xing bore a son xi jinping they had already had two daughters and xiang cheng had three other children from a prior relationship but out of each of xiang cheng's children it was xi jinping who was born into arguably his finest hour xiang cheng would oversee the state council for a

Full decade becoming a vice premier in the process and playing a defining role in the effort to build the chinese state that know today an ideologue and a negotiator above all else xiang cheng was a key influence in building china's internal propaganda its self-concept as a nation and its diplomatic approach to the rest of the world he was a hero not quite

On the level of mao's dong but at least in some corners of the ccp he wasn't particularly far off the xi family was on the rise and for the first few years of xi jinping's life it would seem as if they were fated to achieve historic greatness the fates of course would deliver that historic greatness to xi jinping but not in a way that hero's family could

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Want to support this channel and get a ton of content in return please do join us at france.co the son of a high-ranking party official in beijing xi jinping lived an early life of relative luxury sure sometimes those luxuries were that the family could reasonably expect access to electricity and didn't have to till crops each day in order to just subsist

But in some ways xi's upbringing was on par with that of children in highly placed families across the world as a young boy he was sent to the beijing bai school where in this period the bai school was the prime destination for the children of ccp leaders expected to one day become leaders themselves these children were afforded every educational privilege

Still subject to indoctrination of the party of course but schooled in elements of language science and mathematics that were utterly unknown to their peers in countryside villages the students lived an insular life not just because they lived in the same places and showed up at the same state dinners with their parents but because their lives were utterly

Unlike the lives of average chinese children despite what the ccp would have propagized to both communities a young xi jinping had little more in common with a child from his father's home village than he would have had in common with a martian but it was in the early 1960s leading up to and then coinciding with xi's 10th birthday that the family's life in

Beijing was turned upside down enter the high ccp official kang shang a well-placed leader who was deeply involved in the internal security of the party and specifically the work of its innermost secret police kang shang had spent the early 1930s in soviet russia watching closely and studying the work of the nkvd a brutally violent secret police force that

Kang would export to his home nation by the 60s kang was an architect of the movement that would lead to china's cultural revolution and in 1962 his attention settled on the publication of a book called lu jidan now for our purposes today the content of the book is less important than the way in which kang intended to use it accusing the book and its author

Of trying to rehabilitate a party official who had been purged in the mid-50s that official gao gang had come up in the same part of china as xi zhangzheng and it helped zhangzheng rise to prominence before gao gang attempted a murky leadership takeover that zhangzheng wasn't directly involved in so when this book came out supposedly trying to rehabilitate

Gao gang zhangzheng was one of a few ex-allies of his who came under immediate suspicion after months of tense political investigations kang was able to secure the verdict he wanted with the committee agreeing that the book didn't just try to rehabilitate gao gang but was directly trying to elevate xi zhangzheng an offense tantamount to treason since it

Implied an attempt to place oneself high above the rest of the communist party by 1963 when xi jinping was just 10 years old his father had been purged from the ccp's leadership and sent to work in a factory far from the capital for a time the younger xi was able to navigate his change in circumstances and lead a fairly normal life alongside the rest of his

Family they were able to remain in beijing where she continued his schooling and split his time between the prestigious by school and an alternative canadian influence school called beijing number 25. no doubt she must have endured some form of ostracism or bullying by his peers who would have been well aware of his father's ouster and the disgrace of xi's

Entire family but despite his father's physical absence she was able to remain on the track that his father had set out for him until a far larger shift across all of china placed his family directly into the crosshairs yet again now this time change came by way of china's cultural revolution a massive political and ideological purge that was intended

According to Mao himself, to purge capitalism and pre-communist Chinese culture and tradition from the new nation.

As Mao told it, China was being infiltrated by corrupt elites that sought to restore capitalism and overthrow or subvert the communist regime, and it was up to China's most dedicated party members, especially its students, to save their very nation.

Beijing, the city that Xi still called home, would be the epicenter of the Cultural Revolution, with students rapidly forming into so-called Red Guards, paramilitary units that began to seize power from local officials and institute their own strict interpretations of Chinese communism.

Although we don't have the opportunity in today's episode long enough to dive into the intricacies of the Cultural Revolution, we can at least give you an idea of the scale of the thing.

Somewhere between a million people on the low end and two million or more on the high end would be killed, with tens of millions of others either being imprisoned or displaced. But rather than being asked to take part in the uprising alongside his classmates, Xi Jinping was made into a target. And to be clear, we don't just mean that his father was a target.

When the Cultural Revolution took hold in 1966, Xi Jinping was 13 years old, just a year younger than his father had been when it tried to assassinate that local school official back in the early communist days in Shangxi.

And in China, where the Communist Youth League was a massive part of everyday life and adolescents were expected to be active participants in party activities, 13 was entirely old enough for Xi to be placed in the Cultural Revolution's crosshairs.

Xi's family saw their home raided and torn apart by student red guards, and he and his family were subjected to relentless targeted persecution by members of their own community.

Although many of the details of this period in Xi's life haven't been related to the public, possibly because quite fairly Xi might prefer to leave these memories buried, the early Cultural Revolution would see Xi endure one of the great personal tragedies of his life.

One of his older half-sisters, Xi Heping, died during this time by means that the official Chinese sources describe as having been, quote, persecuted to death.

In practical terms, that likely means that Heping endured such intense political targeting that she was driven to commit suicide, something that New Yorker writer Evan Osnos described by writing, quote, it was suicide.

Close associates have said to me, on the record that after a decade of persecution, she hanged herself from a shower rail. It's not known precisely when Xi Heping died, although it was most likely around 1970 when Xi would have been an older teenager. Nor is the precise nature of Xi's relationship with his half-sister known for sure.

Xi Heping would have certainly played a role in his life, enough of an elder figure that Xi would have been something between a big sister and a grown-up auntie, and as a seemingly unmarried woman in mid-20th century China, she likely would have remained at least somewhat involved with the family.

But in this case, it's the absence of information about her that's really telling. To this day, Xi Jinping has now... never even spoken of his sister's existence, let alone her death in any medium that was either intended to be public or leaked after the fact.

Perhaps that's for political reasons, perhaps it's because they weren't particularly close at all, or perhaps it's because when you're the most powerful man in China, you can ensure that subjects of extreme personal pain are never brought to the fore.

Either way, the ghost of Xi Heiping is a barely acknowledged part of Xi Jinping's official life story, despite her worsening condition and her eventual demise during this portion of Xi Jinping's life.

Xi's father was made a personal target of the Cultural Revolution, forcibly kidnapped from the factory where he worked as a cadre of the Red Guards before being imprisoned and forced to endure public torture in the form of struggle sessions.

These struggle sessions were a hallmark of the Cultural Revolution, where targets would be singled out and publicly denounced, often by groups of people, and quite often beaten or tortured in the process.

In many struggle sessions, a person's children, spouses, close friends, or other loved ones would be manipulated or coerced into testifying against them, and for the elder Xi, it was no different. His wife, Xi Jinping's mother, was forced to denounce him publicly while Xi and his siblings were branded as capitalist roaders, essentially traitors.

Xi's father would then be taken away, again setting off a years-long saga that Xi Xiong Xiong would personally survive, but would see immense suffering in his name. Because of his prior influence, Xiong Xiong was able to correspond directly with Mao Zedong during this period, and he was a frequent pen pal of China's premier at the time, Zhao Enlai.

Possibly as a result, he was able to live out the Cultural Revolution across nearly a decade of almost complete isolation in a small room at a cadre school, rather than being forced into hard labor and probably being killed.

Instead, other people died, or were imprisoned in his name, thousands of them, including locals who had tried to protect him from the Red Guards. Back in Beijing, life was hardly any kinder to his son. At the age of 13, Xi Jinping was subjected to his own denunciation for the very first time.

Forced to wear a heavy iron dunce cap that labelled him as counter-revolutionary, Xi was subjected to accusations and rallies against him by his own classmates, and once again Xi's own mother was forced to chant and scream for his downfall as part of the crowd.

In today's China, it's practically unheard of for a member of the public to call for Xi Jinping to be toppled, but the quiet, well-hidden Chinese dissidents of the 2020s can take comfort in the fact that Xi heard those calls at least once in his life. The exact line the crowd went with was a simple one.

Down with Xi Jinping. The chance directed at a young teenager who, at that point, had nothing to be toppled from except the chair on which he sat.

According to a manual published by the Red Guards around this time, Xi's school was, quote, a cradle for pampering the sons of senior cadres, a place that marked its pupils as bourgeoisie enemies of the real Chinese nation.

Said one of Xi's former classmates about this time, who, like Xi, had seen his father purged, quote, quote, we were the blackest in the class, and the others all despised us they wouldn't come near us and we also despised them from there she's life didn't get much easier he was sent to a center that was a combination reform school and detention facility

Meant to house and re-educate the children of party officials who had been purged from the ccp these children were known as members of the so-called black class practically untouchables in chinese society of the day children whose parents were known to have filled their heads with all sorts of ideas about inheriting the chinese state and who were thus

Destined to grow up polluted by an anti-communist ideology unless of course they could be properly re-educated that is today those children are known as china's princelings many of whom grew up to assume real power in the modern chinese state but at the time they were no more innocent than their traitorous parents for children in the black class it was

Common to be interrogated repeatedly about their parents and families beaten at times in order to extract information they were frequently made to participate in private and semi-public denunciation sessions sometimes against their parents but quite often just against themselves in facilities overseen by the red guards children could expect constant scrutiny

Mistreatment from staff members humiliation and in the event that they were ever let out constant harassment and risk of being abducted and brought back in the dead of night in some ways xi xiangxiang had prepared his son well for a life of pain and austerity although she grew up as part of a privileged elite before his family was purged it always been made

To show signs of humility wearing hand-me-down clothes even from his sisters despite the fact that his family could buy more and reusing the same bath water for multiple baths and laundry despite their ability to source water whenever they pleased she would endure occasional beatings especially if he failed to show traditional displays of deference to his

Father on the lunar new year and regular long lectures directed at xi and all of his siblings the objective according to she himself later in life was to instill a belief in xi and his siblings that they would be the successors to china's revolutionary legacy a belief that was common among the elite families that she grew up with but the treatment seemed to

Instill in the younger xi perhaps not all the skills required to survive life at the butt end of the cultural revolution but at least the basics that he would need to endure and find a way forward now that's not to say that the young xi adapted well to his circumstances relatively early on he was able to escape through a window and make his way home to his

Mother hungry and soaking wet from torrential rains but even that would turn out to be a hard lesson for xi courtesy of his own family knowing that two of her children had yet to be denounced but that they would be subjected to the ordeal if their mother was found to be harboring a denounced family member xi's mother turned her son back out into the cold

Immediately without so much as a hot meal and then reported him but once she learned that his problems couldn't be solved by running away in a nation where there was no place far enough to run from the ccp he decided to take the opposite approach young xi had no intention of allowing the party to abuse him so relentlessly but nor could he afford to push back

And thus to confirm the party's suspicions about what he really was.

Instead, he would go in the opposite direction and hug the Chinese Communist Party so bloody tightly that he would have no choice but to eventually return his embrace. Xi couldn't possibly have known it at the time, but that approach would ultimately be more effective than he or anybody else could have ever anticipated.

In 1968, two years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, Xi made an appeal to be transferred out of the Bailly School so that, instead, he could uproot his entire life.

Xi's father had just been sent to his long-term solitary incarceration, and Xi understood that, try as he might, he simply wouldn't be able to transform Beijing back into the home it had once been.

Around this time, it was all the rage for young party loyalists to leave the cities for the countryside to join the humble socialist workers tilling the fields in what was then called the, quote, up to the mountains and down to the countryside movement, because, of course, Mao Zedong was excellent at naming things.

Xi requested that he be allowed to do the same, and the request was granted. But even before he was given his assignment, Xi had reason to suspect that his ultimate destination might be among the less comfortable options available to the young workers of Beijing.

Xi had begun lodging requests to officially join the Chinese Communist Party, a request that would be reputedly denied for years before he was eventually allowed in.

The reasoning for the party was pretty simple. She was disgraced. He had gone through a very public, disgracing process, and he really should know by now that the party didn't want him or his family around.

As difficult as that reality must have been to accept, she had little choice but to work within the confines that he was given, and if the party wanted to make his life difficult, well, then he would just endure.

Xi was sent back to his father's home province of Shang-Chi, to a set of rural villages that modern state sources openly describe as underdeveloped, run down, and just outright backward. When speaking about his time in the countryside, Xi related publicly that he was forced to deal with what he termed his five hurdles.

Food, life, labor, thought, and, well, number five, fleas. Indeed, Chinese media places a central focus on this part of Xi's life. A difficult few years when, despite moments of weakness, Xi was transformed from a privileged elite boy from a disgraced family to a proper man, a proper worker of the CCP.

Once, Xi told a story to the Chinese state media about his arrival to the village of Liang Qihi, where he fed some stale bread to local stray dogs and found himself greeted with horror from villagers who couldn't believe that he would throw away food so easily.

According to sources that were close to the Xi family, when his relatives and friends came out to visit him, he would beg them not to tell his mother of the squalor, and most of all, the fleas, that defined his new situation. And Chinese state sources openly admit that the situation became too much for young Xi to bear.

According to documentaries that have aired on state television, Xi fled the countryside after just a few short months, making his way back to Beijing, but then he was arrested and punished with a role performing hard labor.

After a year putting down sewer pipes, the official story goes, Xi came to understand just how wrong he had been when he tried to run away.

He chose to return to the same small village where he'd initially been assigned, not just resuming his work as he did before, but choosing to live in a cave while dedicating every waking moment to the community and the people that he'd once thought that he could just ignore.

Just how much of this story is accurate is open to debate. Living in a cave seems a bit far, but maybe. But assuming that Xi's entire flight back to Beijing isn't a fabrication, then it seems that he really did decide to persevere despite the challenge of his circumstances.

Now, when he returned to the village, part of his role was to work as a village administrator, despite the fact that by then, he still wasn't a member of the CCP. He'd spent a total of seven years out in the countryside, eventually growing so popular that according to official retellings, multiple villagers would end up fighting over who got to keep him.

Eventually, after nearly a dozen attempts, Xi's application to join the party was finally approved.

His plan to grit his teeth, suffer embarrassment, and make himself impossible for the party not to accept, had finally worked. To hear Chinese sources tell it, Xi's admittance into the party would unleash a beast.

Not the kind of beast that ran amok and threatened the countryside, but the kind of beast that simply couldn't be stopped from improving the lives of Chinese villagers, no matter what forces of nature or human exhaustion tried to slow him down.

Xi would reportedly study and then bring biogas technology into his small village, with his findings rapidly spreading across all of Shang Tsai province. He drilled wells, he helped new sorts of crops become established in the area, he helped to reclaim land from muddy marshes, and much more.

In an interview about his time in the countryside, he claimed to have carried massive amounts of wheat on his back for ten miles at a time, never switching shoulders to try and better bear the weight.

Today, the village where he worked, Liang Zhiyi, has been converted into a tourist attraction, and although in a practical sense that's largely a propaganda effort to serve the story of Xi as Chinese leaders, the impression that one is supposed to get while traveling through the village is that it was practically made modern by the great Xi Jinping himself.

Now, Xi's personal life during this time was a bit more complicated than official sources would suggest.

His little brother would move to Hong Kong while it was still a British territory, becoming known mostly for capitalistic displays of wealth and consumption, while his sister Anan would emigrate to Canada, where she's lived with a practically non-existent public profile ever since.

His father would remain imprisoned until the mid-70s, and was so secluded that his family, on the single occasion that they were allowed to see him in 1972, he could hardly tell Xi apart from his brother. But, in his career, Xi no longer seemed to suffer the consequences that might otherwise have come from his family ties.

In 1975, he began a four-year program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, sending him back to the capital for a degree in chemical engineering.

There, he was one of the Chinese worker-peasant soldier students who were ostensibly sent to universities because of how well they'd performed in one of those other three roles, thus proving themselves worthy of the best education that China could offer.

And during his time at university, Xi Jinping became the beneficiary of the greatest gift that the Chinese Communist Party could have possibly bestowed upon him, Chairman Mao Zedong died.

On the day of Mao's death, September 9th, 1976, a great many changes began across the PRC, but where Xi was concerned, the most important change of all was the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Officially terminated just under a month after Mao's death, the Cultural Revolution had been a catastrophic failure, with the CCP acknowledging as quickly as the early 1980s that it was, quote, responsible for the most severe setback that China had experienced since the Communists took power.

China was left reeling from what had been a ruinous social campaign. At least one to two million Chinese had died in its aftermath, and well, now was the time for some major reform.

And after a decade under a totalitarian program that had relentlessly persecuted the children of China's former elites, many of whom had been rounded up and imprisoned or killed for practically no reason at all, well, there was no better place to start a reform than by welcoming China's persecuted sons and daughters back into the fold.

More than perhaps any of the other Chinese princelings of his era, Xi Jinping had proven that he was worthy of his welcome back, and there was no way that Xi was going to let this opportunity slip from his grasp.

Now, it's about this time that Xi Jinping moves on from the crucible of his upbringing and pivots into the political rise that would ultimately see him lead China.

But before we tell that part of its story, it's worth taking a moment to focus on the young man that Xi Jinping had become, not just as an individual, but as an avatar for his generation.

Xi was among the first children to be born at a pivotal moment after the Chinese capture of the nation, but also late enough that he was too young to remember the chaos and upheaval of the immediate post-war years.

At the same time, he was old enough to remember the time before Mao's cultural revolution, even if only faintly, and then to have lived through the entire ordeal at an age that made him an active participant in that entire span of Chinese history.

Not only that, but he was a prominent member of a group that would one day be known as the princelings, the sons and daughters of the first generation of CCP leaders before Mao's purges truly got out of hand.

Raised together, educated together, and eventually persecuted together, the princelings grew up internalizing the idea that it was they, not their ordinary peers, who would lead China into the future.

At the same time, however, they grew up learning to honor and venerate Mao, only for Mao to be directly responsible for the movement that toppled their families from power, saw their parents imprisoned, or even... left them dead in its wake the princelings of xi's generation had seen the full scope of what early communist china had become and they had the

Education the secretive family wealth and the connections to a few steps ahead of their new upstart rivals when the cultural revolution finally came to a close but the ordeal had also been deeply personal delivering lifelong scars of trauma to each one of them and for the most part that responded in one of two ways those who had put their heads down and

Survived the cultural revolution had gotten used to quietly getting by seeking gain or favor when it was safe to do so but only when they could avoid upsetting the carefully balanced lives they'd been able to build others turned their backs on the ccp and became parades outcasts traitors or at times casualties of the cultural revolution itself xi jinping

Along with a small handful of others had been able to walk the middle path granted she and most of his peers had been granted very little choice in the matter but now with the pain and tyranny of the cultural revolution behind them their harrowing experience came with real benefits she was entirely aware of the ways that a totalitarian bush could alienate

And disenfranchise even the people who were most loyal to communist china just look at his father or even xi himself he understood what it meant to rebel against the state not just by being part of a tainted lineage but actively seeking escape from the cultural revolution when it came to him he an elite chinese princeling if there ever was one now understood

How dangerous a tool populist rage could be if it were ever allowed to be directed toward a ruling class but he also understood how potent the cultural revolution had been how it united hundreds of millions of ordinary chinese and oriented them toward a guiding vision one that many of them continued to uphold despite their own intense personal pain and

Communal tragedy he had experienced firsthand how that sort of movement could elevate or even rehabilitate a person who had seen the light or at least to claim to it's impossible to name with any certainty the list of lessons that she took from this period in his life but we can take his known and suspected personal experiences during the cultural revolution

Take a look at the modern china that she has created and draw at least a few conclusions on what those lessons may have been populism mattered the will of the people mattered but the will of the people wasn't a tsunami it was a gun it could be pointed and it could be shot by a person who knew how to wield it so long as they ensured that the gun was never

Turned on themselves the place of the elites was precarious it had to be protected shielded and justified to the people if the uppermost class of society was to survive nationalism worked nationalist further could make the right sort of person do anything except anything endure anything in the name of a venerated leader or a nation destined for greatness and

Although people could rebel and indeed there would always be people who chose to rebel many of those rebels could either be convinced to see the light or otherwise otherwise convinced that it was in their best interests to pretend that they saw the light in all likelihood a young xi would have had a hard time translating his experiences into an approach to

National leadership after all xi jinping of the immediate post-revolution years was still a man unlikely to ever inherit china as his father had promised but whether or not it was intentional at the outset xi's political philosophy bears the scars of his years-long ordeal to this day when she finished his time at the prestigious xinhua university he did what

Any young aspiring future leader would have done and he placed himself at the mercy of the party the ccp chose to keep him in beijing where he would become one of three personal secretaries operating in the entourage of a man named geng biao now that time biao was one of china's vice premiers and during xi's time with him he would become the minister of

Defense he was a red army veteran who had been severely wounded in combat it served in ambassadorships and ministerial roles across scandinavia and south asia and it been a key part of the push to retake china from mao's closest allies after his death it also moved in the same circles as xi's father from the wartime years after the long march through to the

Period of peace before the cultural revolution in fact xi's father would later call geng biao his quote closest comrade in arms although the degree to which they actually intersected during this time is unclear either way the younger xi's place at geng biao's side was certainly no coincidence nor was the message that the party had sent by accepting his

Appointment the xi family was back in the ccp's good graces and the family's favorite son was on track to leadership during those years at geng biao's side she would operate in the shadows as one part personal assistant and one part political fixer they went around party halls dressed up in a military uniform dealing with the day-to-day minutia of

Bureaucratic government helping to make procedural decisions that are hardly relevant at all today but during that time he made a series of connections that would serve him for decades to follow not just with senior military leaders but aides and advisors closer to his own station each of whom was also seen as a future leader in the party during that time

His family's return to high status was made official the ccp central committee formally exonerated xi's father and made him a part of the political elites with xi zhongzheng returning to a major leadership role within just a couple of years the younger xi would also go through a key personal trial in those years his marriage and then his divorce with a woman

Named ki lingling the ki family was well placed in chinese society at the time ki ling's father ki hua was moving up quickly on the ambassadorial track and had been made ambassador to the united kingdom in 1978 just a year before his daughter tied the knot with china's future leader but the marriage wasn't a happy one according to their neighbors at that

Time the couple was fighting constantly and ki ling wanted to move to the uk while she had by then committed fully to political future in his home nation you Two would divorce by 1982, with no children, and Qi would move to the UK.

She wanted to. After a nasty divorce, it's hardly unusual that a person would want to shake things up a bit in their personal life. You get a new haircut, you go backpacking, you join a local sports league.

I mean, pick your poison. But even by the standards of a recent divorcee, Xi Jinping's next move was a surprising one. He requested that the party send him from his comfortable, well-connected post in Beijing to a poor, remote part of the countryside.

Now, in reality, the move was probably one that Xi had been planning. And in fairness to his now ex-wife, it must have made for one hell of a contrast with the life she intended to lead in Britain.

But although Xi might have welcomed the opportunity for a change in his personal circumstances, this was far from a cry for help or a reflection of some quiet despair.

Xi was about 30 at the time, still looking to distinguish himself as a party official. And although moving out of the countryside was an unorthodox maneuver, it came with a real political upside.

At that time, as the country was finally recovering from the Cultural Revolution, millions upon millions of young Chinese citizens were flocking to the cities, while at the highest levels of the CCP, competition among young party elites had become incredibly fierce.

Everybody was operating in the name of personal advancement, but few people were showing the sort of initiative that proved they could be trusted to do the difficult work that had to be done.

Xi, of course, already had experience out in the countryside from his Cultural Revolution days, where he'd become a favorite of the local communities where he had gotten his start. And now that his family was powerful again, he could be swiftly recalled back to a more comfortable station as soon as rural life had become tiresome.

Xi didn't have to travel particularly far to his post. Instead, he arrived in Hebei province, the region that wraps around Beijing in China's northeast. But despite the fact that it traveled less than 300 kilometers from Beijing proper, he was practically in a different world.

Zhengding County, where he initially landed, was an agricultural area with very little going for it, other than its proximity to the capital. Nor was Xi in a place where his party connections could make his life simple.

The leader of the province had the power to install Xi as the country's secretary, and was expected to do so, basically making Xi the leader of the area.

But the man who led the wider province of Hebei at the time was bitterly opposed to the class of young elites that Xi was a part of, and insisted that Xi serve in a deputy role that he would then have to split with a colleague.

It was the sort of insult that would have incensed most young princelings in Xi's position, and at the very least prompted an immediate political war that wouldn't end until the young appointee was treated as he wished. But Xi handled the situation differently, and quite frankly, he handled it a whole lot better than most of his peers probably would have.

Xi accepted the position, despite the thinly-veiled insult, and got to work quickly, improving the state of the county and the lots of those who lived there. Within the first year of his tenure, Xi was able to petition Beijing to reduce quotas in the area and relieve some of the intense pressure on local farmers.

At the same time, he increased profits. restructuring the province and nearly tripling the annual income of farmers as a result he began to develop the county rapidly leveraging connections in beijing to secure additional funds and restored a local temple before building it into a tourist destination and constructing other sites to entice tourists to the

Area he improved local sanitation built out local businesses and ensured that when those tourists did arrive they could enjoy an area that was still rural but wouldn't offend any delicate urban sensibilities essentially she had taken advantage of the country's close proximity to beijing and created a relationship that worked in two directions instead of just

One before his arrival the county had simply been expected to send agricultural yields the wealth of its local elites and even the minds and bodies of its young aspiring workers funneling them into the capital after a couple of short years alongside she beijing was now sending rich tourists outward pumping money into the community making it more appetizing

For young people to stay and putting the county on track to become a suburban getaway with historical and religious significance she even ensured that the area was a destination for prominent party leaders and figures in society including the famous self-taught mathematician hua lao gang thus jump-starting the growth of the county's reputation in beijing and

Elsewhere at the same time she ensured that it was the elites around him rather than himself who felt that they were the greatest beneficiaries of the changes that she had brought during xi's this is so clever respect dude this is really well done it's a machiavellian but like blah during she's time in the province local elites grew considerably richer and

Many of the benefits that she was personally entitled to were extended to them a valuable imported car that he donated for their use priority stasis with the breast doctors in the province and more in contrast she styled himself as a humble pragmatic local leader wearing army issued clothes with no outward sign of his high status and driving around in a

Busted up jeep from an era immediately after the civil war essentially she had made a bet act humbly and effectively in his local post while achieving genuinely excellent results and enriching those around him and they would advocate for she so enthusiastically that she wouldn't have to advocate for himself within just a couple of years that bet paid off and

In 1984 senior ccp officials spoke about xi jinping personally with the general secretary of china at the time hu yaobang highlighting him as a strategic thinker in local and regional politics during his time as a local leader in hebei she also enjoyed a short but memorable chapter in his life story when he visited the u.s state of iowa as part of an

Agricultural delegation on the two-week trip she's status as a high-ranking member of the ccp was kept secret instead he was described to americans as a local agricultural leader and sent to stay with a host couple in the town of muscatine in the childhood bedroom of a son who'd gone off to university to this day she still maintains a relationship with the

Couple he stayed with in iowa and he even came to visit the family in 2012 to visit the family in 2012 to visit the family in 2012 to visit the family in 2012 to visit the family in 2012 12. shortly before being elevated to lead china during that i had no idea during that visit she made headlines for his very obvious enthusiasm in getting behind the wheel of

A large agricultural tractor but during his visit in the 1980s she didn't make headlines at all instead he learned some lessons about corn farming happily accepted his accommodations in a bedroom plastered with star trek wallpaper good taste and by later accounts was impressed to the extent that he came off a bit dopey as his host couple told the world when

Interviewed again in 2012 no one in their right mind would ever think that guy who stayed in my house would become the president i don't care what country you're talking about in america this younger version of she might have been a practically nameless transient visitor from halfway across the world awestruck by the suburban lifestyle that his host family

Enjoyed but back in china this was a man whose time in hebei province had accelerated his rise through the party exactly as she had intended by 1985 it was time for xi to move upward again but the most obvious posting a senior level position in hebei province was off limits the same provincial leader who made him deputy leader in his local county was still

In charge and would have nothing to do with xi as long as he could help it instead he leveraged his party connections yet again and he was shifted to the city of xiamen in china's southeastern province of fujian posting in fujian back in those days came with a level of geopolitical sensitivity for one thing the province is the closest in proximity to taiwan

Making it a militarily important location where xi's connections in the defense world would prove to be very relevant for another the city where she was assigned xiamen oh is a worldly place that had only just been designated as one of four special economic zones along with the cities of shenzhen shantau and zhuhai the year before she arrived xiemen's

Special economic zone had been expanded in territory some 50 times over marking it as a target for infrastructural and economic investment at home and intense interest from abroad that made xiemen a place where flexible innovative thinkers were in high demand and where an enterprising young leader like xi in the role of vice mayor could have a major impact

Upon his arrival xi got to work building a strategic plan to develop and expand the city taking on a complicated portfolio that included xiamen airlines the first airline in chinese history to be jointly managed not just by the party but also by a coalition of local stakeholders she's focus was largely infrastructural expanding the local seaport building out

Road and rail connections removing toxins from local lake and building connections with western investors who came to visit again she brought with him the same leadership star that had served him so well in her bay head down focused on the tasks before him disinterested in claiming personal credit for his successes and consistent in his willingness to

Elevate those around him before elevating himself she was not the sort of leader who thrived because he was charismatic he wasn't charismatic instead he was the kind of lead who thrived because he could show that there was a massive difference in the fortunes of people who had his favor versus those who didn't.

Pitch him a good, actionable set of ideas, and those ideas would likely be funded, supported, and ultimately completed with the benefit of the resources that she had at his disposal. Manage to get his ear, and you'd be listened to, taken seriously, and provided you hadn't made a fool of yourself, you'd be given favor.

But fail to impress him, make it clear that you can't deliver what you promised, or that you're more interested in status than results, and you'd likely find yourself left in the dust.

Not necessarily punished, but deemed irrelevant for the future of the city that she was building. During his time in Xiemen, she was introduced to one Peng Li-Wan, a woman, 11 years his junior, who had gained national fame as a folk and opera singer.

By official accounts, she was painfully awkward during their courtship, too busy or too disinterested to know much about music or television, and lacking in much of the cultural knowledge that the rest of their generation shared.

But something about Xie must have made an impression on Peng regardless, and by Xie's accounts later in life, he was lovestruck, having decided that he would marry the woman before him by the end of their first hour together. They were married within a year, raising Xie's public profile across China and greatly improving his social standing.

No longer was he merely a shy, dull workaholic, divorced by the time he was 30.

Now he was the husband of a tremendously popular, beautiful young woman who already had the national spotlight. While their marriage doesn't seem to have been solely political, it was politically advantageous for both of them. Peng's national profile rose even further.

She, who is now at least tangentially a household name, and as she rose further in the party, Peng deftly shifted into the role of a more buttoned-up socialite.

When she eventually became relevant to the national conversation, even people who'd never heard of him before would at least know that he came with the deep endorsement of a woman who was probably one of their favorite performing artists. She and Peng have a single daughter, Xi Mingzi, born in 1992.

Xi's professional life moved along as quickly as is personal. After less than three years helping to establish the city of Xiemen, he was shifted north within the same province to become the secretary of a considerably worse-off city called Ningbi.

Xi would spend two years there helping to speed along local development projects and address widespread poverty, and again, he was successful.

Similar to what he'd done in the north, Xi helped to culturally reinvigorate the area and build it into a tourist attraction, this time kick-starting a return to fruit and tea agriculture while taking advantage of local folk arts, legends, and the history and culture of the local ethnic group, the Xi.

After that, it was onto the city of Fuzhou, where he would spend six years working as the party's secretary and thus the most powerful man in the most important city of Fujian province. Xi's time at the head of Fuzhou city would have to be managed delicately.

Although his father had long since been politically rehabilitated, he had made himself part of a political scandal during the late 1980s in the late 1980s. a saga that must have privately frustrated his ambitious son.

Now, if you recall, in 1984, Xi's extraordinary work in his first posting had been shared with a man that we mentioned called Hu Yaobang, then the Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, second only to the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping.

But fast forward by about three years, and Secretary General Hu had fallen out of favor with the leadership, called into a meeting where he was forced to resign his post.

Exactly one person stood up for Hu during that meeting, Xi Jinping's father, who resigned from his own role once it became clear that his defense of Hu had failed. This time, the elder Xi's fall from grace wasn't nearly so catastrophic as it had been before.

He was shifted into a couple of positions that basically consisted of bureaucratic nothingness and eventually retired at the age of 80.

But even still, the actions of Xi's father meant that once again, there was suspicion and trepidation around that troublesome Xi family dynasty.

Regardless of the decisions made by his father, though, Xi Jinping knew that he had built a winning political formula when it came to his own management of Chinese cities and thus his own political standing and elevation. Xi embarked on a series of rapid reforms, including one that's since become relatively famous in China, referred to as the 3820 Project.

The project involved the same type of economic and infrastructural overhaul that Xi had put into action before, but this time with modernization, urban planning, and global trade dimensions that were bigger than anything he had taken on before.

The project was grand in its ambitions, a complete rebirth of the city by 2010, so after 20 years of work, plus a grand vision for the city's next century of growth and development. Xi wanted to build Fuzhou into a tremendously important urban center positioned between the massive cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, as well as Taiwan just across the sea.

In fact, during his time at the head of Fuzhou, Xi reached out to Taiwan in a way that would be practically unthinkable for the Xi Jinping that we know today. Xi worked very hard to get Fuzhou cooperating with Taiwan on investment, trade, and more, even proposing a cross-strait high-speed rail link that would have connected Fuzhou and Taipei directly.

That rail link ultimately wouldn't be built, but it was a massive testament to Xi that he was even allowed to work on that sort of project so openly, let alone that he handled it with such geopolitical finesse.

Elsewhere during his time in Fuzhou, Xi led city-wide crackdowns against corruption, poured resources into protecting and rehabilitating the local environment, and made the city into a major international exporter. Baji is a testament to the success that he had achieved.

Fuzhou would end up being Xi's longest-term posting until that time, where he'd spent a total of six years before he was asked to move on.

Xi's plan to rehabilitate the city is still a guiding document to this day, and across China it's been held up as a shiny example of the prosperity and forward-thinking that Xi's leadership can bring.

Now, it's about this time that we should change course for just a moment and discuss an element of Xi Jinping's rise that's just as important, or perhaps even more so, than his experienced leader. city after city.

That would be Xi Jinping's intricate and fast-growing network of loyalists which would soon start to play a defining role in Xi's political elevation.

Now, we'll give a little bit of a spoiler here seeing as you, our dear audience, already know how this story ends. Xi's time in Fuzhou is the last chapter in his life before his rise to the top really starts to accelerate.

It's also the moment when Xi's carefully cultivated network of political allies and loyalists began to pay dividends for him as people who had already been familiar with Xi or worked with him in some capacity started rising toward high-profile provincial or bureaucratic positions of their own.

These were people who knew very well about Xi's style of leadership, his preference to keep his head down and elevate those around him rather than trying to be something he wasn't and claim grandiose power or influence before he had earned it.

These were people who had come to appreciate Xi's talents, his role as a leader, and his willingness to give back to those who supported him.

And even when they temporarily went separate ways, these were people who knew and remembered Xi Jinping's name and felt that he was a connection that was important to maintain, even when it might not have been convenient.

Perhaps the simplest way to give an idea of just how important these connections will be will be to explain where many of them ended up. The man who is today China's premier, Li Kuang, would become a close ally of Xi's after they met in his next posting, also a provincial government role.

China's vice premier, He Le Feng, met Xi years before this, when he was a mere municipal worker, and through association with Xi, he's been elevated to the level that he's now in charge of China's economy.

The third most powerful man in China today, Zhao Leji, didn't come up with Xi personally, but came from the same province as Xi's father, where the younger Xi had spent many years himself, and likely had his name fed to Xi as a potential ally through common political patronage networks.

Xi's current chief of staff, Kai Chi, has been following Xi since the 1990s and has arisen to his station without having to spend any meaningful time in relevant prior posts. Lu Hei was Xi's economic leader and vice premier until 2023, but he's known Xi since their time as princelings in Beijing together before the Cultural Revolution.

Men who spent time with Xi at university would hold posts as his finance minister, as the leader of his organization department, managing the party structure, and elsewhere. And these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Whether they're from Xi's time in Shanghai or Fuzhou, or as far back as local Hebei province, or even his childhood in Beijing, Xi's massive following of personal devotees have assumed roles all across the CCP.

Some among their number have fallen on hard times politically, or even been purged outright, but the majority remain in Xi's good graces and are known to be fiercely loyal to their benefactor. Although not all of those loyalists knew Xi during his tenure at Fuzhou, it was around that time that his power-based really started to take shape.

From there, his influence continued to swell.

He'd be named as an alternate in the critically important CCP Central Committee in 1997. He'd become vice governor of the entire province of Fujian in 1999, and in the year 2000, he'd rise to the role of governor.

He served in that role until 2002, ushering the region into a period of technological development, dealing with the repercussions of major political scandals, and advocating for the idea of the megalopolis, an official designation that Xi and some of his political allies wanted to give China's most powerful or prosperous regions in order to integrate their

Cities into larger industrial and infrastructural networks.

To give a sense of scale here, China's largest megalopolis, which is a hell of a word to say, guys, was approved by Xi in 2016, after it assumed control of the nation. That megalopolis, the Yangtze River Delta, is currently home to 240 million people, more than the populations of all but five nations on earth.

By the time that Xi had finished his time in Fujian province, 17 years after he had arrived in the port city of Xiamen, the province had transformed into an especially prosperous part of China.

Today it ranks second out of China's 23 provinces in GDP per capita, and is a leader in global trade and scientific research. It was that sort of prosperity that Xi Jinping could offer, and once his prowess became a known commodity, Xi Jinping was in demand. Now, Xi's time at the head of the Fujian province hadn't been spotless, not by a long shot.

Although Xi had cultivated and, to an extent, earned a reputation as a squeaky-clean opponent of corruption, Fujian had still been mired in corrupt intrigue during his time there.

In the late 90s, Chinese officials uncovered a massive scheme by the Huanhe Group, a syndicate that had smuggled many billions of dollars' worth of illegally imported oil, cigarettes, cars, western appliances and more into China through the ports of Fujian province. Often, the group seemed to operate deliberately in Xi's wake.

They took advantage of the special economic boom in Xiamen, where Xi had served a few years prior, and did massive business in the city of Fujio, benefiting from Xi's infrastructural and industrial reforms.

The group was known to have illicit connections with party elites and some of its highest officials, and it would have been all but impossible for Xi not to know of its power and influence during his time at the top.

That was just the largest in a series of corruption scandals that erupted elsewhere in Fujian during Xi's tenure, all showing that illicit enterprise seemed to flourish when Xi was in charge.

As for exactly why that was, the lack of independent investigations and later independent reporting in China made it difficult to see past the party line. But Xi was never personally implicated in any of those scandals, no matter how bad they got.

Perhaps he really was a shining example of anti-corruption leadership, and was the reason that such important invest- ever took place, instead of the problems being swept under the rug.

Perhaps the corruption was just a byproduct of a leader who innovated fast, brought reforms, and didn't spend enough time corruption-proofing what he had built. Perhaps she just ignored the illicit enterprises that could operate at that scale, or was blocked from taking action by people powerful and corrupt enough to get in his way.

Or perhaps she was on the take all along, and managed to insulate himself from the political repercussions after everything came tumbling down.

Now, regardless, the thing to understand was that when she finally emerged from his time in Fujian, it wasn't as a leader who had simply avoided the nastier parts of political leadership.

It was as a leader who had, at least in the public consciousness, stepped bravely into a place that was underdeveloped, at risk of failure, and had transformed into a den of thieves, only for she to go in, restore order, and bring prosperity at the same time.

His reputation wasn't just unsullied, it was enhanced by the fact that Fujian was so much less corrupt by the time he left than it had been when he arrived.

All the intricacies of what had happened in the intervening time, they just came out in the wash. As a rising star in the party, with a dual reputation for building prosperity and busting crooks within the elite, she was the perfect choice to take over the province next door, Zhejiang.

Like Fujian, Zhejiang was a coastal province, it was heavily industrialized to the point of over-dependence, and it was known for its own corruption problem.

Rebuilding Fujian had been immensely impressive for those who knew what they were watching, but the reform of Zhejiang province was a much better known problem across China, with a clear political upside for anybody who could solve it.

By the end of 2002, Xi was the party secretary for the province, making him the man in charge of a place with some serious potential if it could just be tweaked and reformed in the right ways.

He had also bid farewell to his father, Xi Zhongchung, who had died earlier that year, and been remembered as, quote, a great communist soldier in his official obituary.

As such, the elder Xi would die with no real inkling that his son was on the path to Communist Party greatness, let alone the path to become China's sole paramount leader. Xi's mother, by contrast, is believed to still be alive today at the age of 98, despite occasional rumors suggesting she's passed away.

If the death of Xi's father had an impact on the rising reformer, it didn't show in his work at the head of Zhejiang.

Xi went to work drawing down the role of heavy industry, promoting small businesses and other diversifying enterprises, while still taking advantage of the region's status as a major exporter. Xi Jiang modernized rapidly under Xi's watch, eventually boasting economic growth rates that spiked well into the double digits and stayed there each year.

Meanwhile, he took a hard but self-restrained tone against corruption across the province, targeting officials in high-profile investigations and trials, but declining to indulge in the hardline rhetoric that often accompanies those efforts around the world.

When Xi led crackdowns, it wasn't because these corrupt individuals represented some great evil against which Xi could joust ferociously until he was declared the winner. Instead, he was at the head of an effort to cut the rot out of China, because China could be better, and because Xi was the sort of leader that could make China better.

Xi's profile began to rise on the national stage, and when Chinese citizens took interest in the provincial leader who was working to reform Xie Jiang, Xi made sure there was something more for them to find.

Starting in 2003, Xi began publishing a series of dispatch-style essays from his position as provincial governor, emphasizing not just principles of economic reform and anti-graft efforts, but the value of discipline and morality in leadership.

He used the essays to start outlining his own governing philosophy, drawing attention from elsewhere across China's political spectrum, and making a case for himself as the leader of something more than what he had in Xie Jiang. In total, he'd published almost 200, with those essays later being compiled into a book that became available in 2007.

He was one of 200 Chinese leaders to be a full member of the 16th Central Committee, a high honor within the CCP, and he built Xie Jiang into a second socioeconomic showpiece alongside Fujian at a time when most provincial governors didn't even have a track record in one province that could compare.

Meanwhile, in private offices and backrooms, Xi was rapidly expanding his base of loyalists, introducing many of the critical names that fill out his national government today. But even despite his growing profile, Xi was careful never to overextend himself or give the impression that he was moving too far too fast to gain clout on the national stage.

It was highly uncommon for a provincial leader to be publishing regular essays, but he was writing about topics he'd earned the clout to speak on, and never implied that he would somehow do better than the people in charge. He was never brash in public, never outspoken, never issued challenges, or seemed to take pleasure in the use of his authority.

He was a responsible steward, doing the hard work of responsible stewardship, and occasionally taking the time to share the tools and principles that had made him so effective.

So when the Chinese Communist Party was in need of a responsible steward in neighboring Shanghai, the choice was obvious. In 2006, Shanghai's then-party secretary, Chen Liangyu, was implicated in a scandal in which the city's pension funds had been misused after a longer period of friction between Chen and the party leadership in Beijing.

Chen had been making what appeared to be a play for greater power.

He'd been embroiled in a major scandal, and he was no longer fit to rule, meaning that Xi Jinping, in the next province over, was everything that Chen wasn't. Within a few months, Xi had taken over in Shanghai, or he stepped into the role of party secretary with all the care and discipline that he was known for.

According to one official account of his time there, Xi refused to allow Shanghai bureaucrats to set up a special train for him to go back and forth between Shanghai and Zhejiang while the political transition was ongoing, despite the fact that it would have hardly raised eyebrows for someone of Xi's status. to take advantage he also refused the offer of a

Private villa announcing publicly that it should be converted into a retirement home for older ccp members in a more practical sense she proved himself adept at handling the fallout from his predecessor's scandal snuffing out corruption wherever he could find it but refraining from the garish displays of political retribution that many had expected despite

The fact that he was now in control of the most populous region in china and one of the most prosperous and politically relevant she refrained from immediately starting to expand his own power base like so many shanghai party secretaries had done before him nor did he fall back on his regular pattern of reforms as he'd done in the other cities that it

Administered shanghai was different and he showed both the situational awareness and the political flexibility to treat it differently after all he wasn't just some stubborn reformer who had learned how to reform one way and then decided that his way was the only right way to do anything he wasn't leading shanghai for himself he was leading shanghai for

Shanghai and for the party as it turned out that was exactly what china's leaders had hoped to see and when their suspicions about him were confirmed she was marked for the ultimate elevation in order to understand what came next we have to take a step back and understand what was happening elsewhere in chinese politics at a time when the city and the legacy

Of shanghai played a critical role after paramount leader deng shaoping stepped out from his role as the leader of china power passed into the hands of a man named jiang zemin followed by his successor hu jintao both jiang and hu had been the leaders of their own political factions the shanghai gang under jiang and the communist youth league under hu not

Literal communist youths of course but leaders who had all gotten their star through the communist youth league before surging toward power together the two factions had initially been quite hostile to each other but by the mid-2000s they'd been able to work out a decent power sharing arrangement and as of 2007 both groups had recognized that it was time to

Pick out a successor jiang had already finished his time as the head of the ccp and hu jintao would start his second of two terms in charge later that year before ultimately giving up his power five years later in 2012. the two men and their respective power bases had led china for a generation but when the careful balance of power broke down between them

There was potential for hell to break loose and potentially both of their necks were on the line depending on just how ugly an eventual political transition became so when those two factions watched xi jinping rise to the occasion in shanghai and basically do everything right they were able to confirm that this rising princeling was the answer to the problem

They faced for the communist youth league faction under hu jintao he was critically not a member of the shanghai gang despite the fact that he now led shanghai as an outsider he was also an upstanding technocratic leader in a similar vein to how that faction had sought to style themselves for the shanghai gang she was critically not a member of the shanghai

Gang – she was critically not a member of the shanghai gang the youth league faction and while he was an anti-corruption guy he didn't handle corruption issues as if they were a bull in a china shop instead he was restrained graceful and had a respect for his fellow party elites without any outwardly observable desire to turn the gun of chinese state power

Back against the people who gave it to him he was a technocrat for the technocrats but also the son of revolutionary lineage making appealing for ccp leaders no matter how they believe china's next leader should be chosen in a sense she was a compromise option but he was so much more than that he was an entirely competent exceptionally savvy operator one who

Seemed to be genuinely disinterested in grandstanding and had every intention of making china more prosperous for everybody's benefit he had been a responsible steward in every place that he had gone so far so why wouldn't he be a responsible steward for china itself in october of 2007 just barely half a year after it started his tenure in shanghai she was

Yanked out of his position and made a member of the politiburo standing committee then a body of nine members with its number of members rising and falling every so often the politiburo standing committee or psc is the supreme organ of power in modern china the general secretary and paramount leader of the party is a member of the psc and each of its members

Are immensely powerful making up the innermost circle of chinese governance they also form an order of succession not just in a sequence that would dictate who's in charge if their members were to die or be incapacitated but as a proving ground for the leaders who are believed to be capable of leading china after the current leader dies or steps down she was

Added to the psc at the same time as another rising star in the party lee keqiang who had been chosen by paramount leader hu jintao as a successor but when they were both nominated it was she who was placed ahead in the ranking of the psc's members indicating to the rest of the world that she had most likely won the ccp's internal power struggle and was hu

Jintao's successor that decision was confirmed a few months later when she was made china's vice president for the chinese public the reasoning behind xi's elevation seemed pretty obvious he was a mild-mannered provincial governor who had made a name for himself in national politics known for turning a couple of provinces around but he was hardly the sort of

Leader the people expected he was inherently weak the sort of candidate who was chosen because once he was in office he would step aside and shut up while his predecessor ruled from the sidelines how xi jinping at this time still lived in his wife's shadow let alone the shadow of his party elders he was a plain empty suit who could spout dogma and lower hu

Jintao's blood pressure but nothing more of course anyone who's familiar with the biography we published here on warfronts a couple of years ago on the life of russian president vladimir putin already knows the hidden dangers of taking a gray ordinary man and investing what the party or the public wishes to see in him but in china as succession talk around

Xi started to rumble he seemed as if he was about the least likely person in china to overturn limits purge the party of disloyalty and build himself into a new generation maozadong instead china's most responsible steward immediately began work in the precise areas where china would be most interested in a responsible steward overseeing the 2008 olympics

And assuming responsibility for the geopolitically sensitive affairs of hong kong when china was devastated by an earthquake two months after she became vice president killing nearly 90 000 people and displacing at least five million it was she who managed the international angle of the disaster relief effort coordinating with world governments and aid

Organizations at an exceptionally delicate time he traveled all across the world from asia to the middle east to latin america to the european union and finally to the united states where he not only met barack obama for the first time but returned to the state of iowa to see the family that had hosted him years ago there were occasional hiccups along the

Way but nothing nearly so disastrous that his ascension might be derailed and over time he began to make a real name for himself with the chinese public but xi's personal and professional trials weren't yet complete it was during this final stretch before his ascension that xi jinping was beset by something it somehow managed to avoid thus far a nemesis his

Name was beau xi lai and he was a few years older than xi and although he wasn't part of the politiburo standard committee he had made himself famous through his own work as provincial governor in substance there was quite a bit of overlap between what beau was doing in the province of chong ching and what she had done in fujian and zhejiang beau like she

Was able to achieve massive year-over-year economic growth advocate for communist cultural values and crack down against criminal elements they were also both the sons of men who had been purged from the party they had both gone to re-education camps and they had both surged back into chinese government as high-powered princelings both of them had even been

Divorced and got on to marry famous wives with xi lai marrying gu calai one of china's first lawyers to ever win a civil lawsuit in the united states but on a personal level the two couldn't have been less alike beau was brash he was loud he worked hard to cultivate his reputation proactively and he was an active power player within the communist party to

The point that even she praised his work publicly not long before the dude would face off for the position of general secretary where she was a careful and considered government steward beau was a loose cannon with little respect for the rule of law when it was inconvenient where she preached discipline and humility beau preached red-blooded revolutionary

Nationalism where she was best known in chinese households by his association to his wife beau was a relentless womanizer where she made up for a relative lack of charisma with a placid polite demeanor beau was as arrogant as he was charismatic and both in ample measure in the places where she had worked corruption tended to be cleaned out and responsible

Even-keeled people rose to power where beau had been in charge corruption seemed to constantly be infiltrating daily society and even cured bureaucrats had a tendency to resign have nervous breakdowns or even commit suicide under the pressures of his leadership she was a popular choice for succession in beijing as evidenced by the fact that by the early

2010s it already been chosen and publicly marked for the role but there was still a hunger for an alternative in some circles someone who could harness a populist even nationalist fervor amongst the masses that had been lacking over the last several decades but who could still manage china in the same way that she could beau shilai was in that sense an ideal

Alternative the results were just as good but the process and the personality couldn't have been more different while beau hadn't been made a member of the topmost leadership in 2007 he was expected to get a seat in 2012 and given his profile as a particularly famous provincial governor he had all the potential in the world to either be named as leader

Outright or to otherwise sabotage and undermine she before usurping him for the role unfortunately beau is also a man with some serious skeletons in his closet during the early 2010s he'd worked with a political fixer a british citizen named neil haywood who was an intermediary with the west and who had become close to beau and his wife in late 2011 however

Heywood began to blackmail the couple and was promptly killed poisoned by beau's wife as established in official proceedings the death was kept secret for a while until the police chief of the city of chong ching beau's power base traveled to the u.s consulate in a nearby city to share what he had learned the police chief had been aware of heywood's death

And he was bearing the brunt of a wiretapping scandal in which beau had been listening in on senior leaders calls not to mention that the police chief himself had been wiretapped too fearing that beau could have him assassinated the police chief apparently gave the americans everything and after being denied asylum he was quickly disappeared by the chinese

Police so whoops a daisy eventually though he'd actually resurface oh my i just assumed he'd been killed and be sentenced to over a decade in prison but before he disappeared he apparently was able to write an open letter which quickly disseminated around the chinese internet and decried beau status as quote the greatest gangster in china the degree to which

Xi jinping had a hand in beau's downfall if it all is practically unknown outside the innermost vaults of ccp secrets but notably the open letter against beau xi lai wasn't taken down by china's online censors beau attempted to defend himself in a press conference but high-level officials began to publicly turn against him as rumors turned into hard details

About what had happened and hard details eventually gave way to a much larger series of revelations in the ultimate twist of irony xi jinping gained victory over his political adversary and polar opposite by acting precisely as he always had an upstanding responsible leader entirely opposed to corruption who stood victorious as an emblem of national

Corruption was cut out of the communist party by the time that xi jinping rose to the status of general secretary and paramount leader of China, Bo was already gone.

Dismissed from his post, then suspended from his party positions and then expelled from all public posts and awaiting trial. When Bo was tried in the late summer of 2013, the result was a foregone conclusion, guilty on all counts and imprisoned for life.

But just as it had done with every other corrupt elite he had ever prosecuted, Xi Jinping held himself back from the temptation to celebrate or gloat as most of his contemporaries would have done.

Instead, he allowed his internal rivals in the CCP to come to the correct conclusion by themselves. Backing Bo Xilai had been a foolhardy decision. Xi Jinping did know better, and now he was going to take command.

Xi Jinping was anointed General Secretary of the Communist Party and Leader of All of China on November 15, 2012. The final sprint before his accession hadn't been straightforward.

She had disappeared and cancelled meetings with foreign leaders for a period of about two weeks in early September, for reasons that still haven't been fully explained, written off by Xi himself as a back injury.

According to some sources, the real story was a power play by Xi who had disappeared and threatened to upend his entire ascension unless his chosen loyalists were installed in key positions. According to others, he really did throw his back out, while any number of competing explanations are still in circulation today. Either way, the outcome was the same.

Xi would assume office without further incident, flanked by six close allies, largely political conservatives, who joined him in ushering outgoing leader Hu Jintao out of positions that ex-leaders sometimes cling to for years. The ascension of Xi and his government was read in several ways by Western leaders at the time.

A careful attempt to balance the ambitions of all seven members of the New Standard Committee, a rebuke against any talk of reform, or the international positioning of Xi's own successors around him to signal a long-term continuity of government for China.

Obviously, the color of each man's respective neckties was the subject of intense analysis and interpretation.

In hindsight, however, the ascension was classic Xi Jinping, signaling the transition of Chinese government into the hands of a new generation while highlighting a group of respected, level-headed, responsible stewards who could put their differences aside and manage China in the way that it was meant to be managed.

As Xi himself said in his address, quote, Inside the party, there are many problems that need to be addressed, especially the problems among party members and officials of corruption and taking bribes, being out of touch with the people, undue emphasis on formalities and bureaucracy and other issues.

At the time, Xi and his fellow leaders were facing intense calls both from within the Chinese elite and across the world to embark on a series of economic and political reforms that would open China up to the West.

But Xi's fellow ministers, including an anti-corruption head, a propaganda overseer, and two prominent economic stewards, among others, certainly didn't scream political reform. They also didn't scream loyalty to Xi Jinping personally.

Several of his fellow leaders were expected to retire after............... five years of service, and others were known loyalists of the political factions that we mentioned earlier, the Shanghai Gang. But they did all share Xi's workhorse approach to government.

None were inclined to steal the spotlight, or were inclined to get to work, and it took practically no time for them to do that.

The first major action that Xi took as China's leader really should not have been a surprise.

The most complete anti-corruption initiative to that point in modern Chinese history, targeting the officials who Xi deemed, quote, tigers and flies, the crackdowns would ultimately see thousands upon thousands of members of Chinese bureaucracy punished, not just within civil leadership, but within the military too.

According to sources who knew Xi at the time, and have spoken to the international press since, Xi had watched the slow commercialization of Chinese society with revulsion.

He took immense issue with all of it, not just the corruption, but the opulence, the ordinary crime, and what he saw as a slow degradation of Chinese society.

According to outside analysts, however, and validated by the long arc of history since these early days, the crackdowns also served a parallel purpose, to purge officials who were either suspected of disloyalty, or expected to become opponents or political obstacles in the future.

As they departed, Xi appeared to take an active interest in staffing their replacements, installing a highly recommended deputy we've mentioned earlier in this episode, Zhao Lijie, to oversee the organization that handles promotions within the CCP.

More so than Xi's fellow members of the Standing Committee, it was these lower-level officials that Xi really seemed to care about, elevating loyalists all up and down the party. The emphasis on elevating loyalists has turned into a defining characteristic of Xi Jinping's China, and over the years, it's conferred several benefits upon Xi all at once.

Perhaps most important, it's allowed Xi to assume near-complete control of China's bureaucracy, not just at the top, but all up and down the party structure.

That means that Xi is far stronger against internal coups, party revolts, or other internal upheaval than he otherwise would be. At the same time, the fact that his loyalists control the levers of true power in China means that Xi can take broader unilateral action, with practically zero concern that his underlings will push back.

Purges of disloyal, corrupt, or troublesome party officials are easier, since those purged ex-leaders aren't likely to gain support in internal revolts, and are easily replaced by people who can be trusted to do as Xi says.

Hiring and promotion decisions are made with Xi in mind, setting up a system in which high-position Xi loyalists find their own loyalist underlings, who find their own loyalist underlings, and so on and so forth.

And by stacking the party elite with those who are personally loyal to him, she also ensures that the people around him are likely to be receptive to the sorts of incentives that he relies upon to maintain loyalty.

She can't ever be sure that the combination of personal enrichment, growing power, and stability in their position will ensure that someone stays loyal.

But he's ensured that the people who hold power today are the same people who've... own that they do enjoy that special relationship finally because she has managed to cultivate multiple power bases from different geographical areas he's been able to pit these factions against each other while ensuring that he alone is the kingmaker to whom they must defer

In his early years as china's leader she was able to slowly remove power from the other members of the standing committee and concentrate their power within his own grip as that grip grew ever tighter and tighter and tighter while the anti-corruption reforms were radical much of his other work was gradual embarking on a series of economic changes that did

Open china's economy somewhat did contribute to growth and did improve the lives of most chinese citizens just not in the flashy way that most global leaders would have instead they were focused on addressing emerging vulnerabilities similar to what it done as a provincial governor quietly pushing chinese manufacturers toward electronic goods that typically

Had to be imported or loosening trade regulations that would allow for easier export in public she paid relatively little homage to his predecessors or the ideological legacy of mao zedong or dain xiaoping but his actions were mild enough and well considered enough to put the party elites of the modern day at ease about his intentions she made a point of

Continuing his typical shows of humility traveling around china in a large van with his deputies instead of using limousines and eating hotel buffet food rather than opulent meals both of which were symbols that the chinese press diligently picked up on an honorable diligent humble man had taken command in china and at least according to the official line he

Was changing the government instead of allowing the government to change him now it's about this time in our episode today that we've got to start being a bit selective because if we were to discuss every leadership decision she's ever made to transform china then we'd quite literally be here all day and this is said once already this video is already long

Enough instead we're going to give a brief overview of she's domestic leadership of china so that we can at least give an overall sense of how things were going in the background during each of the major incidents we talk about from this point forward we'll break that overview down into a few critical parts ideology the economy the military foreign policy

And chinese culture when it comes to ideology we can break xi's guiding principles down into two main categories xi jinping thought and the chinese dream xi jinping thought is essentially a political ideology meant to guide xi's leadership of china in the same way that mao's dong thought guided mao's leadership by the way the naming convention is no accident

She is the only chinese leader other than mao to have a thought ideology explicitly named after him like so many things that emerge from the bureaucracy of beijing xi jinping thought is dare we say a bit clunky it's got 10 affirmations 14 commitments 13 areas of achievement and six musts.

But to boil it down, Xi Jinping thought essentially holds that the CCP should maintain an active role in managing all areas of a slowly reforming China. As China reforms, it should do so with a focus on its people and on the public interest.

Under Xi Jinping thought, China should work to innovate, to develop itself while respecting the natural environment of Chinese land, and to eventually reunify itself fully with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Xi Jinping thought explicitly calls for discipline within the Communist Party, and on the international stage, it calls for China to build and systematically enact a vision for the entire world, while building an ever-stronger military for purposes of national defense.

It's an ideology that expressly intends to reform Chinese society, to raise its prosperity and global standing, but with the CCP still firmly at the center.

And if Xi Jinping thought is Xi's way to explain his own leadership, then the concept of the Chinese Dream is his way of explaining what the people of China really want. It's a phrase that's been around since Xi first assumed his role as General Secretary, although it's been refined over the years.

The Chinese Dream is based on an idea called the Two Centenaries, basically meaning two 100-year marks, one century after the foundation of the CCP, and one a century after the foundation of the People's Republic of China.

The first 100-year mark came in 2021, a century after the Communist Party was formed, by which time Xi had pushed for China to become a, quote, moderately well-off society. By Xi's own estimation, well, mission accomplished.

By the time of the second one-century anniversary in 2049, China is to have become a fully developed nation on par with places like the US, Japan, or Western Europe.

It's not an individual set of goals in the way that the American Dream is for the United States. Instead, the Chinese Dream is firmly a collective goal, and one that the people of China, especially young people, should feel patriotically motivated in order to make happen.

A person may have their own dreams after all, but even if they do, the realization of their dream should move their nation closer to the Chinese Dream.

Under Xi's rule, the Chinese Dream has become a mainstay of education in China's schools, and over time it's been linked to ideas of ecologically sustainable development, economic reform, the construction of a stronger military, or increasingly more often ethno-nationalism.

On economic matters, Xi has more than doubled China's GDP during his time in office, even despite having abandoned China's previous economic approach.

That old ideology had basically called for the CCP to basically chase economic growth at all costs, an initiative that was great for increasing China standing on the global stage, but not so great in its long-term impact on the nation's economic health.

Instead, Xi encouraged what he called, quote, high-quality growth, meaning growth in sectors that would be lucrative, self-sustaining, and increase prosperity with time rather than spending simply for spending's own sake.

Under Xi, Chinese high-tech industry has been... booming with a smart electronics industry an electric car industry and a military industrial complex that today are among the most formidable on earth from the start of xi's tenure until now the average income in chinese households has more than doubled and although china's official claim that it eradicated

Extreme poverty by 2020 is likely overstated many tens of millions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since xi first took office even during the lean times when china's economic growth has slipped below projections and issues like high youth unemployment and a shrinking property sector have become real obstacles to public well-being xi's

Economy overall has continued to strengthen to a stunning extent xi and his advisors have been able to completely retool china's economy not just by expanding critical industries but pushing hard for the adoption of that region-oriented structure of megalopolis economies that we mentioned earlier unifying several major cities in each zone to leverage their

Collective power simultaneously his administration has surged research funding into biotech artificial intelligence high-tech manufacturing and more while taking control of the global mineral supply chains required to support the transition on military matters she has presided over a rapid improvement of the air land and sea capabilities of the people's

Liberation army taking what have been a bloated incoherent and badly outdated military force at the time of his elevation and transformed it into a fighting force that matches up with china's status as an emerging superpower granted china's military and its equipment have yet to experience modern combat and until they do there will always be justified

Question marks around the military's actual fighting prowess but at least on paper the work of she and his allies has been quite extraordinary two new branches of the military a complete streamlining and overhaul of its bureaucracy a doubling of its official military budget and massive growth in both the size of its naval fleet and the quality of its air

Fleet she opened up china's first military base overseas put china on track to possess a thousand nuclear warheads by the end of this decade and used artificial islands to expand the nation's control over the south china sea advanced hardware has proliferated under his watch from the j20 and j35 stealth fighter jets to the indigenously built fujian aircraft

Carrier to all sorts of experimental technologies that have just recently been unveiled or intentionally leaked at the time of writing now endemic corruption within the force is still a major problem in an ironic achilles heel for a man who made anti-corruption a cornerstone of his personal reputation but even that situation has improved gradually over time

As bad as it is now it's certainly less bad than it used to be on the international stage she's work has been defined by an aggressive push toward elevating china's status working to take china from a nation once treated as a mere regional power in east asia to a defining great power of the 21st century known around the world as wolf warrior diplomacy she's

Approach to global affairs is at once confident and combative, fiercely arguing in favor of ideas of Chinese excellence and aspiration, while working to disparage, diminish, and at times punish criticism of the Chinese government.

Popular at home, the diplomatic strategy has led to increased friction between China and other nations across the globe.

But in a way, that is kind of the point, proving that China is now such an important player on the international stage that if it wants to be a bully, then nobody can stop it being a bully.

Under Xi, China has been quite overt in its desire to be seen as a global superpower, arguing in favor of a multipolar world order similar to the concept that Vladimir Putin has spent decades trying to advocate, in which multiple immensely powerful nations can exert their influence instead of just a single one in today's world, that being the United States.

With that, Xi has worked to create a specific appeal to other world nations, and one that really does resonate in some corners of the globe.

Work with China, according to Xi, and that relationship will be free of armed conflict, it will leave all parties richer and happier than they were when they began collaborating, and it won't come with all the troublesome human rights scrutiny that Europe and the U.S. have tried to shove down everybody's throats.

In practice, a few of China's foreign policy initiatives stand out above all the others. On the question of international alliances, China has been very happy to work with nation-states that have been dismissed by much of the world as priors.

Russia, North Korea, Iran, and more.

With those nations, and with controversial but less ostracized soft-prior states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the Emirates, China has taken full advantage of its ability to help skirt Western sanctions and offer relationships based on a different, more overtly self-serving set of rules than the global West tends to allow.

That's included China's de facto role at the helm of the BRICS Collective and a number of other international organizations, where China has pushed for a global currency alternative to the dollar or the euro, and has worked to bring other major players like Brazil and India into its orbit.

Then there's China's approach to international propaganda, especially as it relates to the Chinese diaspora abroad. In many Western nations, and especially the United States, China works overtime to assert control of Chinese people around the world, regardless of the governments that those people technically live under.

Those people, China works to bring into ideological alignment with the Communist Party, while sourcing their expertise, their Western education, and their influence in global politics, business, academia, and research.

Meanwhile, China has directed intense propaganda campaigns toward other nations as a matter of course, in an effort to, quoting Xi here, tell China's stories well.

Those online campaigns have become a hallmark of the way China interacts with global social media, to the extent that we expect you'll be able to see it in action in the comments section of this very video.

Finally, Xi and his allies have invested heavily into the Belt and Road Initiative, a global effort to increase economic and security collaboration with the rest of the world, and especially... developing nations across asia africa and latin america the belt and road initiative and other projects along the same lines are massive investment projects meant to

Build physical infrastructure from roads railways bridges and ports to mining operations that harvest critical minerals in practice the belt and road has been one part geopolitical charity and one part debt coercion with participating nations often ending up heavily indebted to beijing nonetheless the strategy has been effective with chinese nationals now on

The ground in dozens of nations overseeing highly lucrative resource extraction projects and finally there's the immense amount of work that she has done to change chinese culture sometimes in ways that are directly self-serving and sometimes not philosophically she has led an effort to reintroduce and rehabilitate ideas that have a deep history in chinese

Culture but had largely been pushed out in modern chinese life by the communist party confucianism legalism and other concepts pulled from deep in china's past like many ethno-nationalist movements xi's political leadership has emphasized a return to tradition rather than the institutionalized rejection of old traditions that had defined china through most

Of its communist history he abolished the notorious one trial policy in 2015 and eventually removed all restrictions on childbearing by 2021 instead pivoting state rhetoric to emphasize the role of the growing family at the same time he and his cultural propagandists have worked hard to fuse chinese traditional concepts with both modern ccp communism and

Classical marxism creating an ideological framework where each one of those concepts can reinforce the others she has worked to put the party front and center in chinese society making it a highly visible entity that's all but impossible to ignore and explicitly emphasizing that in china there's no political alternative to one party rule and finally there's

She's own cult of personality an effort to build an image of a leader who is both brilliant and beloved by his people with few exceptions traditional strongman rhetoric really doesn't play into it instead the objective is to frame she as a sort of captain of the grand chinese voyage his after all the man who emerged triumphant from the world's ultimate

Merit-based system and whose benevolent will toward china has brought the nation all the prosperity that it knows today she jingping's time at the helm of the people's republic of china has led to some genuinely remarkable improvement but it's also come with a hell of a dark side for every time that she has acted to improve the lot of his people there has

Been an equal and opposite price to pay as she and the sprawling state that he controls have engaged in some of the most thorough state repression of any government in world history if modern china is xi jinping's grand experiment then it's become clear that she has zero intention of allowing that experiment to be interrupted not by as in government, not by

His rivals around the world, and certainly not by the Chinese people.

At his disposal, Xi has perhaps the most extensive state architecture that has ever been devised. It's designed to position watching eyes and listening ears in every corner of society, and prepare nameless, faceless enforcers to impose Xi's chosen form of order in response to even the slightest infractions. First, there's the question of the professionals.

The writers, the academics, the lawyers, the philosophers, and all the other thinkers who might one day think, and then advocate, in a way that would place them at odds with Beijing. Since the early days of his tenure, Xi's government has imprisoned journalists at rates well above the international average, even for repressive nations.

Even before Xi's time at the top, freedom of the press in China was hardly more than an illusion.

But spin the clock forward until today, and even the illusion doesn't seem to be worth Beijing's time. Mainland Chinese press outlets have long learned to self-censor, towing the party line so completely that it's all but unthinkable that an upstart journalist would dare put themselves at risk by standing out.

China has intermittently expelled foreign journalists when it suited Beijing, and the press of Hong Kong wants relatively free.

It's nothing of the past. The situation is known better for human rights lawyers, who have come under intense pressure had frequently been disappeared. Academics risk reprisals if their work were to contradict a CCP ideal, principle of governance, or even a statistic reported officially by the nation's government sources.

Nor do those prohibitions only apply to those in Chinese society who are professionals in their chosen field.

The nation's intense censorship umbrella applies to every person in China, regulated online by a sprawling state apparatus that can constantly monitor online correspondence, track IP addresses, and scrub the self-enclosed Chinese internet of any information or views deemed not to align with the government's narrative.

Under Xi, the CCP has become far more adept at policing social media, monitoring every interaction as it happens, even in supposed private conversations between as few as two people.

That system is constantly innovating new ways to keep control, integrating artificial intelligence and biometric facial recognition, social credit tracking, along with what's suspected to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people employed as full-time censors.

Critically, China's focus in its online efforts isn't exactly about curtailing individual speech. After all, that's not a concept that even exists within Xi's understanding of his own nation.

Instead, it's a matter of information control, with China's government working to carefully manicure the information environment that its people are exposed to, while ruthlessly stamping out voices that would taint the environment with unwanted ideas. It hasn't always been this way, though.

Before Xi came to power, it was common to see Chinese officials openly encouraging citizens to think critically about Western political principles and learn from those principles in order to enhance China.

In Xi Jinping's world, however, that idea is tantamount to treason, and Chinese minds must be protected from the poisons of Western ideology.

As recently as just five years ago, it was still possible to see the occasional public figure in China make an attempt to speak out against Xi before inevitably being thrown out of Chinese society and typically going on to be disappeared.

But over the last several years, Chinese censors and secret police have become incredibly effective in sniffing out signs of dissent before that dissent is ever expressed to other members of the Chinese public.

There is no end to the number of small acts that could bring suspicion down on somebody, giving money to international humanitarian groups, discussing prohibited ideas or concepts in digitally recorded conversations, referring to the mere existence of past protests in China in a way that might be construed as sympathetic.

Those who are caught in China's massive internal dragnet are likely to get a visit from the secret police, and if they're lucky, they'll be given a stern reminder on just how important it is to maintain fealty to the party.

In order to understand just why China's internal repression is so intense, it's important to understand a concept that doesn't exist under the Chinese Communist Party and certainly not under Xi Jinping.

That idea is the concept of loyal opposition, that someone could be politically and ideologically loyal to the state, and yet could publicly speak out in dissent against the people and policies that guide the state. In private, there are obviously some select exceptions.

It's not as if Xi's most trusted advisors have never offered perspectives on a situation that doesn't line up absolutely with Xi's own stance.

But, for anyone other than that trusted inner circle to voice disagreement, let alone to do it publicly is seen as an inherently disloyal act within the Chinese government. It's bad enough when the culprit is a high ranking bureaucrat who should know their place, but for an ordinary citizen to get away with such an act, that'd be unthinkable.

Nor are all citizens in Xi Jinping's China created equal.

Under Xi, China has become notorious for the persecution of its Uyghur Muslim population in the province of Xinjiang, where China routinely denies allegations that it's engaged in acts of mass re-education, surveillance, forced labor, institutionalized torture, and forced sterilization that is tantamount to genocide.

Despite what China claims, however, the nation is widely understood to have been systematically re-educating its Uyghur population and erasing Uyghur culture and religion since 2014, while simultaneously resettling large numbers of Beijing loyalists in the remote provinces where Uyghurs once made up a local majority.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong and Macau, Xi and his inner circle masterminded the downfall of a governing principle called One China, Two Systems, in which the two special administrative regions were able to manage their own affairs autonomously, separate from the way things work on the Chinese mainland.

Instead, Macau, and especially Hong Kong, had been slowly subsumed into mainland China to the point that, for all practical purposes, the two were now practically indistinguishable. And in Taiwan, a semi-recognized nation that China Now, let's go right now.

For all black people like, on the left is the right to look right now. insists is nothing more than a rogue province fears are climbing rapidly that she will oversee an all-out invasion of taiwan sooner rather than later taking back the island and its people by force all the while and despite his ruthless crackdowns against disfavored elements within the

Chinese government she has overseen a vast array of semi-legal and illicit enterprise across the chinese diaspora not just at home but abroad in other nations chinese nationals routinely organize and operate massive scam centers while at times they themselves are trafficked into those centers to serve as forced laborers under harsh conditions forced labor is

Common on chinese territory as well often targeting north koreans members of the weaker minority or foreign laborers who have very little means of advocating for their basic rights once they come to china chinese nationals oversee illegal resource extraction and smuggling operations all across the globe with those resources and the resulting profits

Funneling back to more of the chinese state and of course there are the hackers operating in incredible numbers at incredible scale with incredible sophistication breaking into digital systems all across the globe on china's behalf despite beijing's fierce denials of every one of those claims they are state-sponsored and tightly organized operations and the

Responsibility for each of them ultimately lies with the man in charge today in the mid-2020s xi jinping is a political animal with no natural predators in 2023 she was awarded a third five-year term as general secretary and china's paramount leader making him the first chinese leader to serve a third term since mao zedong himself whatever machinations that

Move had required behind the scenes are a mystery because at least from the perspective of the outside world the transition was as perfectly manicured as any other inflection points in xi's public life he was approved by china's national party congress unanimously with 2952 votes in his favor his most faithful loyalists were elevated to premiership and vice

Presidency and other critical positions that grant xi's inner circle an immense degree of control over china as always she appeared to take full advantage of the changing of the guard in the ccp's lower ranks promoting loyalists who had served him well and ensuring that when aging or otherwise departing bureaucrats left their posts their successors were men

Of faith believers in xi jinping's grand vision and speed of loyalty xi's crackdowns have only continued over the past couple of years although now they focus as closely on the chinese military as they do on the nation's political leadership since the start of his third term xi has ousted nearly a fifth of the generals that he personally appointed since the

Start of his tenure in 2012 plus large numbers of generals who were holdovers from the days of hu jintao that purchase also taken out not one but two of xi's defense ministers and it's part of a much larger change in how she has sought to manage his government in the earlier part of his tenure his purges seemed to mostly focus on figures with conflicting

Loyalties those purges also cut down on corruption but partly because just about everybody was corrupt on some level today was she's purchase quite relentlessly targeting even his own loyalists it's clear that there's something else going on perhaps she really does believe he's made a massive dent in state corruption and can now weed out the tigers and flies

As he calls them from even the ranks he built himself or perhaps the purges represent budding internal rivalries new hidden factions within the ccp that may one day battle over a role as xi's successor or even seek to challenge xi himself on the global stage xi's foreign policy approach has become even more pointed than it already was now placing a heavy

Emphasis on china's position as a global superpower operating as a counterweight to the united states she has continued to closely associate with north korea and he's announced a no-limits partnership with russia and worked to prop up moscow's economy despite the ongoing invasion of ukraine the bricks collective the belt and road initiative the shanghai

Cooperation organization and other china led international blocs are now a fact of life wielding an influence that is impossible to ignore china has expanded its maritime power in the south china sea and it's completed many of the infrastructural and resource harvesting operations it spent years working to build china's military is now easily among the

Strongest in the world the nation is a global leader in high-tech innovation and manufacturing and when a nation is burned on the international stage by the us china now waits with open arms ready to forgive past transgressions and welcome its new allies into a growing hegemony china no longer describes itself as an opponent of the global west it describes

Itself as a leader of all human civilization and the messaging approach seems to be working on taiwan china is believed to be better prepared for an invasion today than it's ever been some international estimates place the anticipated date of invasion as soon as 2027 depending on whether china's internal military corruption problems can be addressed before

That time china's navy its coast guard its maritime militia and its dual-use civilian vessels are more than capable of operating in the waters between the taiwanese coast and the chinese mainland while china's air defenses its wealth of advanced fighter aircraft its crews and ballistic missiles and its major combat vessels may well be able to deny the most

Crucial parts of the south china sea even if the united states and its indo-pacific allies do rush to taiwan's defense in the event that taiwan is taken over it'll almost certainly be subjected to an assimilation process that she has now made into a science refined over time with lessons learned in hong kong xinjiang macau even tibet all the while she's

Nationalist message continues to grow stronger with the idea of a global chinese diaspora under beijing's control now becoming a reality that she's underlings are enforcing across the globe a patriotic education law signed into law by xi and implemented at the start of 2024 now mandates that the entire chinese diaspora including the people of taiwan and

Chinese citizens all across the world help to expose school-aged children to curated patriotic programs that beijing has designed of course xi has still faced his share of challenges in recent years starting with the tremendous impact and long-lasting fallout of his disastrous approach to the covet 19 pandemic for almost three years she subjected china to

His so-called zero coveted decree an initiative that saw china's transmission controlled through mass quarantines and unilateral lockdowns only for zero covered to be completely abandoned as a particularly far-spreading variant surged through the nation that wave of disease resulted in untold deaths across the nation prompting a national downturn that china

Is still trying to work its way out of it was a major black mark on xi's personal record representing a stunning and uncharacteristic mismanagement of the sort of problem that one would think she would have been the perfect sort of leader to handle and not only that but china's economy is clearly slowing down posting lower growth year over year than it's

Done in decades youth unemployment is especially high the birth rate is starting to drop quite rapidly government debt is high and rising and there are persistent signs across the economy that a nasty wave of deflation is about to hit in fact some western economists speculate that china is hitting its ultimate peak of economic potential before turning into a

Slow painful decline by their account that decline will be one that beijing earned by chronically overheating its economy pursuing growth at all costs for so many years and now trying to take on too many economic pivots at once it'll be on xi and his advisors to manage the country's delicate situation leaning on its international trade partnerships its

High-tech sector and its ability to fill the gaps for third nations as trade wars with the united states make those nations ever less reliant on washington there are also valid arguments that at least part of that change was by design with she and his inner circle trying to transform china into economy that can hit stable but comparatively modest growth

Benchmarks for decades on end instead of trying to grow as quickly as possible today at tomorrow's expense either way that argument will need to play out over time despite the challenges the china that she has built at the one quarter mark of the 21st century is undeniably one of the strongest nations on earth in its military power it's second only to the

United states as a nuclear power it's on track to catch up with the us and russia it boasts the second largest gdp on earth with its slowed down annual growth still many leagues ahead of what most nations could hope for xi's campaigns of internal repression have worked and built china albeit by force into the most ideologically uniform advanced nation on the

Planet xi's campaigns of assimilation appear to have worked in hong kong xinjiang and even the halls of the communist party itself despite ill-founded rumors of a palace coup in 2025 the vast majority of experts agree that xi's position at the head of the ccp secure and now on the global stage his position as the leader of a superpower seems to be secure as

Well so as we come to the conclusion of Xi Jinping story as we know it's worth taking a moment to turn our attention forward to the part of Xi Jinping story that's yet to be told at the time of writing she is 71 years old certainly not young by the standards of his own nation although a recent hot mic recording in conversation with Vladimir Putin would

Suggest that through a series of rather super villain-esque biological modifications she intends to live a life at least twice as long as he's already lived the constraints of human physiology as we know it would suggest that he doesn't have nearly so much time left though in fact by the standards of the CCP when Xi was first elevated to his role as leader

He would have been out of a job several years ago mandated to step down as the leader of a government where age limits are taken seriously and the constant rejuvenation of the party's leadership as a top priority as difficult as it might be for China or even Xi himself to imagine there will be a China after Xi Jinping although to be fair we're not ready to

Rule out the possibility that a complex artificial intelligence version of Xi will live on well after the point of his natural demise so I guess we got that to look forward to with that there are two key questions to answer what else will she accomplish before he either steps down is pushed out or dies in office and who will replace him when he does leave as

For what she probably hopes to accomplish there are a few items that should certainly be on the list by all outward indicators it's a high ambition of Xi's to one day reintegrate Taiwan with the People's Republic of China and that's a task that she could very well accomplished within the span of the next decade or so perhaps he'll do it through outright

Military conquest or perhaps he'll take Taiwan without much of a fight after building such immense military power that Taiwan's allies are forced to abandon it and Taiwan seeing the inevitable chooses to raise the white flag at home Xi clearly intends to continue building China into a global tech and innovation leader until China can stand head and shoulders

Above any global competitors ideologically Xi seems to have largely accomplished his goals shaping China into the nation he wished it could be when he first took power in 2012 and across the globe China is already on its way to rivaling or even eclipsing the influence of the United States all she has to do now is maintain current course avoid any major

Missteps and allow the remaining dominoes to fall as they've already been laid out the harder question to answer that's the question of a political heir unlike so many watercrafts who've come before him it's clear that Xi's answer to the question has little to do with his own family his own daughter is not known to be actively involved in party politics and

He has no other family members who even sniffed to the higher levels of CCP bureaucracy nor has she ever spoken publicly about a successor given any noticeable hints about who a replacement might ultimately be, or even provided the slightest idea of a timeline on when he might choose to step down.

In fact, most China analysts agree that as of now, the intent is for Xi to serve as president for life, barring some sort of health complication that would make it impossible for him to continue in the role.

In the event of a sudden health crisis, one of Xi's closest allies, Kai Chi, would probably take a leading role in choosing a replacement, as would Premier Li Qiang and the deputy leader of Chinese military, Zhang Yuxia.

As for who Xi's ultimate replacement would be, it's possible to narrow down a short list of loyalists who are young enough, dynamic enough, and have favorable enough reputations that they could serve.

Those include the current party secretaries of Beijing and Shanghai, head of the Chinese judicial system, the mayor of Beijing, and a handful of others.

But again, Xi has given no indication of his own preferences within that group, and any attempt to speculate within the handful of party elites is best left to the experts who've been studying China for decades. No matter what happens once Xi's time comes to an end, his legacy is already set in stone.

More than anything else, Xi has always been a survivor. But he's always been the sort of survivor who, after enough time to adjust to his difficult circumstances, can find a way to thrive. He found a way under Mao's cultural revolution.

He found a way out in the fields and the villages of rural China. He found a way to reverse the fortunes of a country, then a district, then a city, a city, a city, and finally a province, and another province after that.

He found a way to position himself in quite literally the perfect spot when China needed a responsible steward to guide it into the future.

And even more important than his timing, he had crafted himself into the perfect man for the job.

When he took hold of the Chinese Communist Party, he refused to let go and built himself into China's most pivotal leader since Mao Zedong, while building a legacy that was undoubtedly better for the people of China, or most people in China, than Mao Zedong's legacy ever was.

China that exists today is a China that has become an expression of Xi Jinping's will, his values, his vision.

In so many ways, Xi Jinping is modern China, and modern China is Xi Jinping. As for what that means for Xi Jinping's nation, and for the rest of the world, the answer will be etched into history forever.