Xi Jinping: the making of a dictator
The story behind the world’s most powerful man
Oct 19th 2022
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By Sue-Lin Wong
Xi Jinping was 13 when he was dragged into a courtyard and forced to don a dunce’s cap. The iron cone, so heavy that he had to prop it up with both hands, was covered in Chinese characters that revealed his crime: Xi was a counter-revolutionary. The crowd shouted “down with Xi Jinping”. By the stage sat Xi Jinping’s mother, pumping her fist in the air and chanting along with the hordes.
That was 1966 and the Cultural Revolution was just getting going. Xi ended up in a detention centre for the children of purged government officials. Sometime after his mother was forced to denounce him, Xi escaped through a window and ran home in the pouring rain: “Mum, I’m hungry,” he said, his teeth chattering. But his mother tossed him back out into the night in his sodden clothes, stomach still rumbling. Then she reported him – two of her other children were at home and hadn’t yet been denounced. These were years of isolation and terror. Aged 16, Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants, along with millions of other young, urban Chinese. The first time he came across meat there he was so hungry he ate it raw.
More than half a century on, that frightened runaway now sits at the helm of the party that once threatened to crush his entire family. When he was anointed leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, some hoped that this victim of its brutal machinery might gradually reform it. Instead, Xi Jinping’s China is the world’s most surveilled state, defined by control and his own personal command.
After the madness unleashed by Mao, his successors vowed never to let a single person hold such sway again: responsibilities would be shared by leaders; decisions would be made by consensus. Xi has ripped up that rule book, consolidating power in himself and scrapping a convention that leaders are limited to two five-year terms. The future of China’s 1.4bn people, and so many more people beyond, hinges on the mind of one man. Yet so tightly controlled is the flow of information about him, that only through excavating his past can we glean clues about what makes him tick.
Xi had once been expected to hand over power at this year’s party congress in Beijing. Instead, the 2,300 members of the Communist Party present – and all of China – will be required to applaud Xi as he embarks on a third term of office, unprecedented since Mao. The boy who once withstood humiliation and starvation at the hands of his peers will show that no one, now, can defy him.
Xi Jinping wasn’t the only member of his family to be cast down. By the time he experienced his own humiliation, his father, Xi Zhongxun, had already been purged as a close adviser to Mao. During the decade-long Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong tried to oust his critics by unleashing mobs loyal to him, called Red Guards, who beat, tortured and killed anyone they saw as an enemy. The Xi family remember their patriarch sitting at home silently, alone and in darkness. He was subjected to “self-criticism” sessions and repeatedly hounded by Red Guards. On one occasion they “blinded him with a spotlight and screamed in his ears through a megaphone,” according to Xi Jinping’s sister. Xi Zhongxun was sent away, first to a distant factory, then to a labour camp: Xi Jinping didn’t see his father for seven years.
There were other sorrows, too. The family home was ransacked. Xi was repeatedly locked up and forced to do hard labour. At one point, Red Guards threatened to kill him: “They said I deserved to be shot 100 times,” Xi Jinping said in an interview published in 2000. “I thought being shot once is no different from being shot 100 times so what’s there to be afraid of?” The rebels gave him five minutes to repent.
Worse was to come. One of his sisters, also persecuted by Red Guards, committed suicide. (In public, Xi Jinping has talked of only four events in his life that made him cry. Her death is one of them.)
In many ways Xi Jinping’s experience of China in the 1960s was far from unique. It was his response to the bitterness that made him unusual. When the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, many rehabilitated “princelings” – children of revolutionary families such as Xi’s – drank and dated, lapped up Western movies and books. Others concluded that the system was irrevocably broken and left China.
The Little Princeling “The Little Red Book” was required reading in Mao’s China (top). During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards beat, tortured and killed anyone they saw as an enemy (middle). Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a close adviser to Mao (bottom)
Xi did something different. He “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red” as one insider put it. Rather than turn away from the ideals of the revolution, he decided to dedicate himself to it. The problem during the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the party itself, he concluded. It was that the party had lost control.
He likes football, claims to swim 1,000 metres a day and is a fan of “Sleepless in Seattle”, “The Godfather” and “Saving Private Ryan”. These are among the short, carefully choreographed list of details we know about the world’s most powerful man. Beyond a veneer of openness – he carries his own umbrella, shuns suits for anoraks, pays for his own meal at a dumpling shop – he is an enigma. Leaders of the world’s most influential countries go on tv to debate their rivals and are interrogated in interviews about the minutiae of their policy statements; the comings and goings of their ministers are documented by a gleeful media. Yet even Xi’s speeches are often released only months or years after the event. His advisers are just as remote; sometimes we don’t even know their names.
We have far more detail on his official backstory – the hardships he suffered when, along with millions of other urban Chinese, he spent years toiling in the countryside in a remote village in the 1960s. These fables tell us how Xi wants to be seen: a man who withstood great pain before rising to his rightful place in the highest office.
Xi has recounted to state media how, when he first arrived in the village of Liangjiahe in north-western China, he fed a lump of stale bread to stray dogs and horrified villagers with his extravagance. He would avoid chatting to them, and took up smoking as an excuse to take breaks. A family friend recounts that, when Xi’s brother went to visit him they both became covered in flea bites; Xi begged him not to tell their mother about the conditions he lived in. (These days the village of Liangjiahe is a Communist Party Disneyland full of tourists in Red Army uniforms.)
The approved narrative of Xi’s early years, parroted in articles, books and television shows produced by China’s propaganda machinery, is part of what gives Xi credibility in China. Though it downplays the trauma that Mao inflicted on millions of people during this period, the story of suffering resonates throughout the country, giving people a sense that Xi is somehow like them. Chinese state television documentaries with titles such as “The Scholar in the Cave”, tell how Xi came to see the errors of his entitled ways: after just a few months in the countryside, he fled back to Beijing but was arrested and made to join a hard-labour gang laying sewer pipes. About a year later, he returned to Liangjiahe, determined to make a better go of things and, in the official account at least, became a resilient, hard-working man of the people who lived in a cave, “worked 365 days a year”, learned to sew and quilt, and got to know the villagers he lived among.
It is useful for Xi to circulate such anecdotes partly because he was not, in fact, like other Chinese. His father had fought alongside Mao to forge the communist revolution, and became one of the chairman’s right-hand men. His mother, too, was a dedicated revolutionary who met his father in the 1940s when both were fighting against the Nationalists in the civil war (the Nationalists later fled to Taiwan). When the couple married in 1944 they were given daily essentials that were hard to come by on the battlefield: toothbrushes and toothpaste.
After Mao took power, the Xi family held a privileged position as a “red family”, part of the Communist Party founding royalty. He grew up in a gated compound reserved for the party elite and peopled with nannies, security guards and housekeepers at a time when most of the country eked out an existence. His father had three children from his first marriage and four from his second – Xi was the second-youngest. All of them attended the country’s top schools.
Life wasn’t entirely luxurious. To keep the frugality and discipline of the revolution alive, Xi Zhongxun forced his son to wear hand-me-downs. “I had one older brother but four older sisters so it wasn’t great,” Xi once remembered. “Floral clothes, floral shoes, there was no way I’d ever want to wear any of this stuff but I had no option.”
Forbidding kingdom Many members of the party elite, including Xi Jinping’s father, were publicly denounced in the Cultural Revolution (top). Students relied on public notices to find out which leaders were no longer in favour (middle). Like many educated youths, Xi was sent to the countryside in the 1960s (bottom)
His father was also a brutal disciplinarian. Xi had to remain standing until his father sat down. He’d be smacked if he didn’t kowtow to his father properly at Chinese new year, according to a family friend, who remembers Xi Zhongxun saying, “People who don’t respect their parents at home will be disasters once they enter the real world.” The children were sent away to boarding school; when they came home for holidays, his father “would make us line up against the wall to lecture us”, said Xi.
Most of all, Xi and his siblings were raised to believe they were the inheritors of Mao’s great cause. “He would tell us that we too would be revolutionaries,” said Xi in an interview in 2003. “He would explain what revolution was. We heard so much about this that our ears became callused.” “The children of this revolutionary elite were told that they too would someday take their rightful place in the Chinese leadership,” read one American diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks in 2009.
They didn’t all follow the red-brick road. Xi Jinping’s younger brother, Yuanping (the one who visited him in the countryside), became “both obese and very wealthy…sporting expensive jewellery and designer clothing” in Hong Kong, where he moved while it was still under British rule, according to the diplomatic cable. His sister An’an left China for Canada. Like most things relating to Xi, other details of what happened to his siblings are vague and almost impossible to confirm.
Xi, meanwhile, was working the family name. With Mao gone, Xi’s father was back in government, an eager supporter of the new Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was opening up China’s economy. With the help of his father, in 1979 Xi got a cushy job as a private secretary to a top general, Geng Biao, who had been asked to modernise and strengthen the People’s Liberation Army after China suffered unexpected losses in a brief war with Vietnam.
The next year, Xi married Ke Lingling, the daughter of the then-Chinese ambassador to Britain. The couple reportedly fought a lot, and three years into the marriage, Xi’s wife wanted to return to London. Xi had different ideas. If he was to make a success of the family business, he needed to prove his worth to the party with a tour of duty in the provinces. He left his army position for a low-level job as the number-two official in a rural county in Hebei province. “A lot of people didn’t understand my decision,” he would later recall in an interview. Xi Jinping and his wife split up: Xi knew his future was in China.
In the spring of 1989 huge pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Beijing. The protests exacerbated existing splits in the party and the hardliners won: on June 4th, Deng Xiaoping ordered troops to clear Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrators were killed in the surrounding area.
This infamous scene wasn’t the only site of turmoil. In the mountainous province of Fujian on China’s southern coast, as in cities across China, students also took to the streets. The protesters in Fujian were angry not just at the lack of accountability and democracy, but also the corruption that had taken hold.
By then, Xi was the top official in Ningde, one of Fujian’s biggest towns. Some provincial leaders were watching rival factions battle in Beijing and awaiting the outcome. But even before the carnage in the capital, Xi stopped a convoy of students entering Ningde to join the protests. He behaved exactly as the party hardliners wanted. Then he gave a speech invoking the traumas of the Cultural Revolution: “Can these days be repeated? Without stability and unity, nothing is possible.” His new wife Peng Liyuan, a singer famous across China for her patriotic hits, even sang to the troops in Beijing after the massacre. (A photo of that performance, like everything else about that dark period, is now heavily censored in China.)
Xi had come a long way since his first provincial job in Hebei province, when some local cadres complained that he was so young he didn’t even have facial hair – and therefore couldn’t be trusted to handle important business. He was meticulous in that job. Most party officials would take a car to inspect their local area, but Xi rode his bicycle and visited almost every township in the county, according to the memoir of one official.
Xi’s the man In the 1980s Xi was seen as a diligent party official (top). Deng Xiaoping’s visit to America in 1979 helped improve international relations (middle). In 1985 Xi spent two weeks in America with a Chinese delegation (bottom)
From outside China, the massacre in Beijing was a seminal incident in the history of the Communist Party. Closer to home, Xi was watching the party lose control in other, more fundamental ways. His father’s connections had helped him move to Fujian, where he rose through the ranks. The 1990s and early 2000s were wild years in China. After Deng Xiaoping unleashed economic reforms, opportunities proliferated to get rich quick. Party officials were the ones in control of the economic resources, and in a system that often rewarded connections over talent and hard work, corruption came to blight every industry.
One of the many places to see these new forces in action was a seven-storey building in Fujian known as the Red Mansion. Inside the pleasure palace was a restaurant on the second floor, staffed with top Hong Kong chefs and stocked with fine wine and cognac. On the third floor was a spa. The karaoke rooms and dance floors were on floor four; on five and six were the private rooms with prostitutes.
Lai Changxing, a charismatic, semi-literate man from the countryside, was in charge of the Red Mansion. He kept an office on the top floor. Lai had a varied portfolio, but his core business was acting as an intermediary between would-be entrepreneurs, party officials and policemen who enforced the rules in Fujian. Sometimes this involved relationship-building, sometimes outright bribery. His small company evolved into a conglomerate with interests all over the province. By the late 1990s, Lai was a household name. At one point, his company was importing one-sixth of China’s oil.
Eventually, the corruption became too egregious to ignore. In 1999, China’s prime minister dispatched investigators to Fujian and convicted hundreds of people for their ties to Lai Changxing. Several were sentenced to life imprisonment including party and government officials who worked in security, customs, the armed forces, tax and finance. Lai, tipped off, fled to Canada.
There is no evidence that Xi ever went to the Red Mansion during the nearly 15 years he’d spent in Fujian by then. Xi had just been appointed governor of Fujian when Lai’s crimes were revealed and was summoned to Beijing to explain how they could have happened on his watch. Xi pledged to clean up. “We will remove corrupt elements without mercy,” he said in a report to the provincial assembly, “no matter what level or who is involved.”
This was the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the People’s Republic – and Xi Jinping somehow came out of it looking like the only clean official in Fujian. How did he escape? Perhaps he could afford to be incorruptible, at least as far as money was concerned. Or maybe he was saved by his father’s name, or cut a deal. We may never know.
Similar corruption cases were emerging all over the country as China’s economy roared and officials and businessmen sought to make a quick buck. The anger that had fuelled the demonstrations in 1989 continued to rumble and grow. Over the next decade, hundreds of thousands of protests broke out against corruption, environmental pollution and labour abuses. As officials manoeuvred for a share of the spoils, the government was hamstrung by infighting.
For Xi personally the 1990s were a period of steady ascent. After 17 years in Fujian, he was promoted to lead a wealthy province nearby, then parachuted into Shanghai to clean up a corruption scandal involving the city’s recently ousted leader. In 2007, he was anointed heir-apparent. But just as Xi was finally reaching the top of the party, an uneasy feeling began to spread that its grip on power might be wavering.
In 1985, Xi had spent two weeks in America with a delegation of five other Chinese officials. They visited turkey farms and corn fields. After his hosts found out Xi had read Mark Twain, they took a boat out on the Mississippi. Xi went to a potluck dinner and tried popcorn for the first time.
When Xi assumed power in 2012, so little was known about him that some observers were cautiously optimistic that his brief experience with American culture pointed to a more cordial future between the two powers. Perhaps more importantly, his father, Xi Zhongxun, had played a key role in opening China’s economy. (The elder Xi had also visited America and had his photo taken with Mickey Mouse.) Even Xi’s wife, the singer Peng Liyuan, looked like the model of an American First Lady compared with her less glamorous forebears. The couple had sent their daughter to Harvard University. The cold war was over. Hadn’t America won?
Waking the red Xi Jinping spent 17 years in Fujian province rising through the ranks (top). On June 4th 1989 People’s Liberation Army troops opened fire on protesters in Beijing (middle). Xi is more powerful than any Chinese leader since Mao (bottom)
Yet Xi Jinping had drawn a very different conclusion from the end of the cold war. The intensity of his feelings didn’t become clear until a speech he gave much later, in 2012, in which he attributed the fall of the Soviet Union to ordinary people losing faith in a corrupt party with a hollow ideology. “Why must we stand firm on the party’s leadership over the military?” Xi said. “Because that’s the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union.” The Soviet leadership was so weak that it lost control. And when Gorbachev allowed the breakup to happen, Xi said, “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”
Xi clearly thought that he was man enough. After his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, and nearly two decades navigating the corruption, crime and extraordinary changes in Fujian, Xi knew how power worked. “Even if you don’t understand, you are forced to understand,” he told the Washington Post in 1992. “It makes you mature earlier.” He had also experienced first-hand the zero-sum game of losing power. “People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see it as mysterious and novel,” Xi Jinping once said. “But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the jails…and the hypocrisy of the world.”
In appointing Xi as the country’s leader, the Communist Party elders had chosen a true believer, someone for whom the party was an inheritance to be protected. For Xi, ensuring that China does not follow the fate of the Soviet Union means ensuring the party never loses its way again – the chaos of the Cultural Revolution or the pro-democracy protests of 1989 cannot be repeated. As far as Xi is concerned, only he is qualified to navigate the passage. But even the elders may have underestimated just how far Xi Jinping was prepared to take this belief – and what it might mean for China and the rest of the world.
In early January 2020, eight doctors were accused of “rumour-mongering” by the government of Wuhan province in central China. In private chat groups, the doctors had been discussing a new illness in the city that was causing a mysterious pneumonia. A few weeks later, Xi met the head of the World Health Organisation in Beijing. “I’m personally giving the orders,” he said. “I’m personally making the plans.” One week later, Li Wenliang, one of the eight doctors punished for talking about the virus, died from the new coronavirus.
Seven years into his rule, Xi Jinping had already consolidated power, launched a brutal crackdown on corruption that ensnared 4m people, including some at the highest level of the party, and set up his own parallel system of governing to bypass the established machinery of state. Party ideology infused everything from tv dramas to the school curriculum and office life. He had used artificial intelligence to construct a police state that censors and surveils, repressing ngos, religious groups and civil-rights lawyers. A once free and open Hong Kong was becoming a police state. In the far-western region of Xinjiang, as many as 1m Muslims had been detained – their main crime, apparently, was to believe in a higher authority than the Communist Party. Control was still the guiding principle of the day.
But what of the new disease? Xi Jinping deployed the mastery of his political machine: he silenced Li Wenliang and others who spoke up, locked people into their homes and enacted an unprecedented surveillance system to monitor the contagion. Today, nearly three years into the pandemic, Xi continues to back draconian restrictions to contain outbreaks and insists on using home-grown vaccines rather than more effective imported ones. And many people across the country welcome the state’s extraordinary power of surveillance and monitoring for “protecting” them from a disease that has killed millions around the world.
When Xi Jinping walks on stage after the Chinese Communist Party congress to mark the official beginning of his third term in office, there will be no drama, no pumping fists. No one, now, is allowed to shout “down with Xi Jinping”. He embodies his ambition to be the true inheritor of the party. And without an anointed successor, he can rule for as long as he wants. But the experience of the teenage Xi continues to resonate: the line between chaos and control is always razor thin.■
Sue-Lin Wong is China correspondent for The Economist and is the host of an eight-part podcast on Xi Jinping called “The Prince”
