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Also Known As Xi
Xi Jinping is a Chinese politician who has served as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and thus as the paramount leader of China, since 2012. Xi has also served as the president of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013.
The son of Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution. He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi province, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary. After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces. Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and served as first secretary of the Central Secretariat in October 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader; to that end, Xi was appointed vice president of the PRC and vice chairman of the CMC. He officially received the title of leadership core from the CCP in 2016.
Xi is the first CCP general secretary born after the establishment of the PRC. Since assuming power, Xi has introduced far-ranging measures to enforce party discipline and to impose internal unity. His anti-corruption campaign led to the downfall of prominent incumbent and retired CCP officials, including Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the PSC. He has also enacted or promoted a more aggressive foreign policy, particularly with regard to China's relations with the U.S., the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border dispute, and the political status of Taiwan. He has sought to expand China's African and Eurasian influence through the Belt and Road Initiative. Xi has expanded support for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), advanced military-civil fusion, overseen targeted poverty alleviation programs, and has attempted to reform the property sector. He has also promoted "common prosperity", a series of policies designed with stated goal to increase equality, and used the term to justify a broad crackdown and major slew of regulations against the tech and tutoring sectors in 2021.
Xi met with Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou in 2015, the first time PRC and Republic of China leaders met, though relations deteriorated after Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the presidential elections in 2016. He responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China with a zero-COVID approach until December 2022, afterwards shifting towards a mitigation strategy. Xi also oversaw the passage of a national security law in Hong Kong, clamping down on political opposition in the city, especially pro-democracy activists.
Often described as an authoritarian leader by political and academic observers, Xi's tenure has included an increase of censorship and mass surveillance, deterioration in human rights, including the internment of one million Uyghurs in Xinjiang (which some observers have described as part of a genocide), a cult of personality developing around Xi, and the removal of term limits for the presidency in 2018. Xi's political ideas and principles, known as Xi Jinping Thought, have been incorporated into the party and national constitutions, and he has emphasized the importance of national security and the need for CCP leadership over the country. As the central figure of the fifth generation of leadership of the PRC, Xi has centralized institutional power by taking on multiple positions, including chairing the National Security Commission and new steering committees on economic and social reforms, military restructuring and modernization, and the Internet. He and the CCP Central Committee passed a "historical resolution" in November 2021, the third such resolution after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. In October 2022, Xi secured a third term as CCP General Secretary, the second leader of the CCP to do so (the other being Mao).
Xi Jinping was born in Beijing on 15 June 1953, the second son of Xi Zhongxun and his wife Qi Xin. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, Xi's father held a series of posts, including Party propaganda chief, vice-premier, and vice chairperson of the National People's Congress. Xi had two older sisters, Qiaoqiao, born in 1949 and An'an born in 1952. Xi's father was from Fuping County, Shaanxi, and Xi could further trace his patrilineal descent from Xiying in Dengzhou, Henan.
Xi went to the Beijing No. 25 School, and then Beijing Bayi School, in the 1960s. He became friends with Liu He, who attended Beijing No. 101 School in the same district, who later became China's vice-premier and a close advisor to Xi after he became China's paramount leader. In 1963, when he was aged 10, his father was purged from the CCP and sent to work in a factory in Luoyang, Henan. In May 1966, the Cultural Revolution cut short Xi's secondary education when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticize and fight their teachers. Student militants ransacked the Xi family home and one of Xi's sisters, Xi Heping, committed suicide from the pressure.
Later, his mother was forced to publicly denounce his father, as he was paraded before a crowd as an enemy of the revolution. His father was later imprisoned in 1968 when Xi was aged 15. Without the protection of his father, Xi was sent to work in Liangjiahe Village, Wen'anyi, Yanchuan County, Yan'an, Shaanxi, in 1969 in Mao Zedong's Down to the Countryside Movement. He worked as the party secretary of Liangjiahe, where he lived in a cave house. According to people who knew him, this experience led him to feel affinity with the rural poor. After a few months, unable to stand rural life, he ran away to Beijing. He was arrested during a crackdown on deserters from the countryside and sent to a work camp to dig ditches, but later returned to the village, spending a total of seven years there.
The misfortunes and suffering of his family in his early years hardened Xi's view of politics. During an interview in 2000, he said, "People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level." The "bullpens" was a reference to Red Guards' detention houses during the Cultural Revolution.
After being rejected seven times, Xi joined the Communist Youth League of China in 1971 by befriending a local official. He reunited with his father in 1972, because of a family reunion ordered by premier Zhou Enlai. From 1973, he applied to join the CCP ten times and was finally accepted on his tenth attempt in 1974. From 1975 to 1979, Xi studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student in Beijing. The engineering majors there spent about 15 percent of their time studying Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought and 5 percent of their time doing farm work and "learning from the People's Liberation Army"
Xi's first marriage was to Ke Lingling, the daughter of Ke Hua, China's ambassador to the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. They divorced within a few years. The two were said to fight "almost every day", and after the divorce Ke moved to England. In 1987, Xi married the prominent Chinese folk singer Peng Liyuan. Xi and Peng were introduced by friends as many Chinese couples were in the 1980s. Xi was reputedly academic during their courtship, inquiring about singing techniques. Peng Liyuan, a household name in China, was better known to the public than Xi until his political elevation. The couple frequently lived apart due largely to their separate professional lives. Peng has played a much more visible role as China's "first lady" compared to her predecessors; for example, Peng hosted U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama on her high-profile visit to China in March 2014.
Xi and Peng have a daughter named Xi Mingze, who graduated from Harvard University in the spring of 2015. While at Harvard, she used a pseudonym and studied Psychology and English. Xi's family has a home in Jade Spring Hill, a garden and residential area in north-western Beijing run by the CMC.
Relatives of highly placed Chinese officials, including seven current and former senior leaders of the Politburo of the CCP, have been named in the Panama Papers, including Deng Jigui, Xi's brother-in-law. Deng had two shell companies in the British Virgin Islands while Xi was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, but they were dormant by the time Xi became general secretary of the CCP in November 2012.
