When Xi Jinping was 13 years old, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary before a frenzied crowd in Beijing. Among his accusers was his own mother, forced to join in the taunting.
China’s future leader was targeted mostly because his father, a top Communist cadre, was purged by Chairman Mao Zedong. His fall dragged the family down too; Xi’s half-sister died, reportedly after intense abuse.
Half a century later, the teenage boy publicly humiliated in the capital has become China’s most powerful ruler since Mao, and perhaps – given his singular control of a superpower – the most powerful man in the world.
His rise was not predestined. He fought his way to the top over decades, but with such discretion that when he took over in 2012, almost no one knew what type of leader he would be.
His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been a respected party elder and a former vice-premier known for a relatively liberal outlook. For years, reformers inside and outside China hoped his son might have inherited his politics along with a strong physical resemblance.
Instead, the younger Xi has bolstered the party and its networks of surveillance and control over individuals and business. He swept away norms of collective rule instituted after Mao died to concentrate power in his own hands, and fostered a personality cult to bolster his strongman approach.
He is all but certain to end this week confirmed as national leader for a historic third term, and with his approach, which combines repression and surveillance at home with aggression abroad, cemented in place for at least five more years.
A ‘red princeling’ shaped by Maoist indoctrination
Xi was born a “red princeling”, a child of the Communist party elite, in 1953, four years after Mao declared the establishment of the new People’s Republic.
His earliest years were a gilded, gated existence as a child of a senior party leader. He was educated in the elite August 1st School, a cradle of future leaders. The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966 as part of an internal power struggle, shattered that world permanently. But there had been earlier warnings of horrors to come.
In 1962, when Xi was nine, his father had a spectacular fall from grace. Accused of leading an “anti-party clique” – in the obscure world of elite Chinese politics part of the case against him was support for an obliquely critical novel – the elder Xi was sent into internal exile, managing a tractor factory hundreds of miles away.
Then came the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when violent gangs of ideologically crazed teenage “red guards” held all of China ransom. At its peak, the elder Xi was beaten, publicly interrogated and paraded through the streets. He spent most of the following decade in prison.
His downfall meant the next generation of his family became targets too. Xi Jinping’s half-sister is thought to have killed herself after intense persecution.
At one point the future national leader was in a small group ambushed by club-wielding red guards at school and had to literally run for his life.
The atmosphere was so volatile that when Xi once fled detention and ran home, his mother promptly reported him to authorities to avoid being accused of shielding him and bringing further trouble to the family, according to an account by Yang Ping, a friend of his father.
“I had a stubborn streak in me and I couldn’t stand being bullied,” Xi recalled in an essay published in 2002. “I antagonised the radicals [red guards], and they blamed me for everything that went wrong.”
In 1968, as part of Mao’s campaign to send young people to the countryside to be “re-educated” by peasants, Xi was sent to live in a tiny village in China’s north-west, to help with back-breaking rural labour.
In the official narrative, Xi’s endurance of hardship in this period toughened him; Liangjiahe has now been turned into a pilgrimage site.
“When I went to the countryside as a 15-year-old, I was perplexed and lost. By the time I left at the age of 22, I had a clear life goal and was filled with confidence,” he wrote in the 2002 essay.
Xi returned to Beijing when universities reopened seven years later, and he was accepted as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student at Tsinghua University on a programme that enrolled students not on academic merit but class background.
These years left him with a sense of threat and insecurity that would last his entire life, and manifest in his policies once he achieved ultimate power, analysts say.
“He was influenced by the environment in which he grew up and the indoctrination he imbibed in his teenage years,” said Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. “In his youth, he was always in an insecure position … He was psychologically vulnerable.”
A former victim of political struggles, the elder Xi had lobbied for a law to protect the freedom to express political opinions. But the younger Xi was shaped by Maoist propaganda and brutal party politics, analysts say.
“His father was a liberal, but he went to jail. To avoid his father’s fate, Xi learned to do things in an opposite fashion,” said Willy Lam, a veteran China watcher.
Protecting the party and consolidating power
The turmoil of that time traumatised everyone who lived through it. After Mao’s death, China’s leaders concluded that power should never again be concentrated in the hands of a single man. They set up a system of collective leadership that lasted until Xi’s rule.
Xi Jinping appears to have drawn almost the opposite conclusion and reverted to Mao’s ruling style. Both in his image and rhetoric, he emulates the late Great Leader. He has accumulated power, shored up the authority of the Communist party and cultivated a personality cult, as if personal strength and the system that once tormented him were China’s only bulwark against another descent into chaos.
Under his decade-long rule, authorities have vastly expanded censorship and party controls on the economy, created a sprawling network of internment camps in western Xinjiang and have been accused of genocide for abuses including mass detentions and forced sterilisation.
Across China they carried out the harshest crackdown on civil society since the bloody destruction of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.
Human rights lawyers have been detained, jailed or disqualified, non-governmental organisations have been closed or forced to disband, media censorship tightened and outspoken journalists and activists jailed or silenced.
“The lesson that Xi had learned was that by being a good and obedient communist, you could survive and even thrive, even if that meant forgetting the party’s treatment of his father,” said Prof Michel Bonnin, an expert on the Cultural Revolution at the Paris-based École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. “It was better to be a good child of Chairman Mao than a rebel.”
He never turned on the organisation that had presided over his early misery and loss, applying for party membership seven times. He was only granted it after his father’s political status had been downgraded from its Cultural Revolution extremes. Instead, after university he set out on an initially uneventful career as a young cadre, his path smoothed by his parents – who reportedly put in calls to his first boss in central China and then pulled strings to have him moved to coastal Fujian province.
He spent the best part of two decades there, rising slowly but steadily through party ranks, from a peripheral district to provincial party chief, while commuting to Beijing to spend time with his glamorous second wife, the singer Peng Liyuan.
Peng, whose elegant image helps boost China’s soft power abroad, once performed for the troops who cleared democracy protesters from Tiananmen Square.
Xi was in Fujian when one of the biggest corruption scandals of recent decades came to light. Authorities raided the “red mansion”, where a wealthy businessman treated officials to food, drink and sex workers, in order to curry favour for his projects.
Yet somehow he emerged personally unscathed. Instead, he may have taken away a heightened sense of how corruption was eroding public faith in the party, and how anti-corruption drives could be used to target political rivals. Purges have been a key instrument in his consolidation of power over the last decade, reaching to the very top of the party.
When he was not yet 40, another traumatic upheaval sharpened Xi’s instinct for autocracy – this time a geopolitical collapse, rather than a national or personal crisis. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991, after Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, has haunted China’s Communist party.
To Xi, the implosion of the party and system that inspired China’s own communists was a warning that political liberalisation and a lapse in ideological control would lead to disaster. He saw a political vulnerability that matched his personal insecurities.
Soon after he came to power in late 2012 he told party cadres that they must study the collapse of their neighbour, and return to Leninist discipline.
“In the end, just one blithe word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist party, and a great party was gone,” Xi reportedly said. “In the end, there was no real man who came out to resist.” It was a failure Xi was determined not to repeat.
Yet while Xi has deftly consolidated power and removed obstacles to his rule, critics say he lacks intellectual grounding for leadership, even if “Xi Jinping Thought”, his contribution to the Chinese Communist canon, has been enshrined into the state constitution and is studied across China.
He earned his PhD in Marxist theory and ideological and political education from Tsinghua University at a time when he was also governor of Fujian province, which is unlikely to have left much time to study, according to Cai Xia, a former professor at the party school who now lives in exile.
“Why, unlike his predecessors, is Xi so resistant to others’ advice?” she wrote in a recent article for Foreign Affairs. “Part of the reason I suspect is that he suffers from an inferiority complex, knowing that he is poorly educated in comparison with other top CCP leaders.”
His insecurities may have fuelled both paranoia and an aggression that makes it harder for him to reverse course on bad policy; his concentration of power has stifled dissent in the party that once helped thrash out ideas.
A quest for total control
Xi’s fear of the disintegration of the party and collapse of its rule translates into a quest for total control over everything, from the personal lives of individuals to China’s giant multinational firms, say analysts.
“What strikes me most about Xi Jinping is his Stalinist way of governance, using his apparatus to purge the party, [emphasising] the party’s unified leadership and going back to the real party dictatorship,” said Jean-Philippe Béja, a research emeritus professor at Sciences Po in Paris. “No one is beyond the reach of the party.”
Businesses that fuelled China’s extraordinary three decades of growth, from tech giants to tutoring companies, have in recent years found the party demanding either a stake or more oversight, installing officials and demanding party cells be set up.
During Xi’s rule, the party has reached into the private sector and family lives in ways not seen since the start of the “reform and opening” era under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, meddling in details such as how much time young people can spend playing video games.
The CCP’s love of control, and growing ability to monitor digital communication, has been thrown into relief by its handling of the Covid outbreak.
The pandemic provided excuse and motivation to bring in an all-encompassing tracking of citizens’ lives and movements that analysts say is reminiscent of Mao-era totalitarian controls, but turbo-charged by modern technology.
Xi this week said he remains committed to the zero-Covid policy of total elimination, even as the rest of the world opens up and learns to live with the virus.
Like Stalin, Xi believes in party control by party institutions, making him “a more orthodox Marxist-Leninist leader than Mao”, said Bonnin. “The obvious problem is that the country might choke under such tight and rigid control.”
He has upended foreign policy too, after decades of following Deng Xiaoping’s exhortation to keep a low profile – or “hide your light and bide your time”.
Under Xi, China has seen rapid military expansion in the South China Sea, effectively taken control of Hong Kong, and ramped up threats against Taiwan. A cohort of aggressive “wolf warrior” foreign envoys, meanwhile, have cast aside diplomatic conventions.
And in his third term there is no expectation that Xi’s ideology or principles will shift, even though he faces increasing headwinds.
In Xi’s speech at the opening of the party congress on Sunday, he urged cadres to “dare to struggle” – using the word douzheng (“struggle”) that was widely used in the Mao era – and extolled “a fighting spirit” to defend national dignity and national interests amid a “turbulent” international situation.
The economy is ailing amid greater state meddling and the fallout from Covid, there is domestic discontent over the handling of the pandemic, and tensions with the west have been rising for years over issues from trade to the treatment of Uyghurs.
But if anything, political triumph is likely to cement Xi’s hardline instincts to protect a system that many “red princelings” like him see as both inheritance and mission.
“In their eyes, the nation was fought for and won by their father’s generation,” said Song Yongyi, a US-based historian of the Cultural Revolution. “It belongs to them and their families.”
