China's next in line Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping via flickr


Xi Jinping  (credit Wikipedia)
(pronounced [ɕɨ̌ t͡ɕînpʰǐŋ]; simplified Chinese: 习近平; traditional Chinese: 習近平; pinyin: Xí Jìnpíng; born 1 June 1953) is a senior leader of the People's Republic of China. He currently serves as the top-ranking member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China, the country's Vice President, Vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Principal of the Central Party School and the 6th ranked member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's de facto top power organ.

Son of Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping served mostly in Fujian province in his early career, and was later appointed party chief of the neighboring Zhejiang province, and then was appointed as Shanghai's party chief following the dismissal of Chen Liangyu. Known for his liberal policies, tough stance on corruption, and a frank openness about political and market economy reforms, Xi's combination of positions makes him the presumptive heir to current General Secretary and President Hu Jintao and the emerging leader of the Communist Party of China's fifth generation of leadership.

Link to Wikileaks cable PORTRAIT OF VICE PRESIDENT XI JINPING.
Link to China Vitae Xi Jinping.

This article came from the Gazette, but I got it off of China Digital Times;

"Until now, Mr Xi has remained a deeply mysterious figure. Chinese censors have been careful to delete almost all of his biographical detail from the record, even hushing up his former classmates and professors. No one can even be sure of his political allies within the Communist Party.

However, a detailed portrait of Mr Xi has now emerged which shows him to be “exceptionally ambitious” and to have had “his eye on the prize” of becoming China’s leader from “early adulthood”.

One disclosure suppressed from the official record book until now was that Mr Xi has been married twice.

His first wife was Ke Xiaoming, the daughter of a former Chinese ambassador to Britain, while his second is Peng Liyuan, a famous singer, with whom he has a daughter.

Hopes for greater reform of China’s political system in the next five years are quashed by descriptions of Mr Xi as a true “elitist” who believes that “dedicated and committed Communist Party leadership is the key to enduring social stability and national strength [in China]“.

Recent NY Times interview with Richard McGregor, who spent much of the last decade in China as a correspondent for The Financial Times and is recently became the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief. His recent book, “The Party,” tries to do what few if any other English-language books have done before: profile China’s ruling body, the Communist Party.

Q. Hu Jintao’s presumed successor as president, Xi Jinping, remains a largely mysterious figure to the West. What do you make of him? And do you expect the next administration — scheduled to take power in 2012 — to be different in any significant ways from the current one?

A. Mr. McGregor: When people ask me if Xi Jinping will be any different from his predecessors, I usually reply that I wouldn’t have a clue. Some China expert! But let me explain.

Xi Jinping is a largely mysterious figure, perhaps a little less so than Hu Jintao, but little known nonetheless. Xi is not bloodless in the way that Hu is. He is more gregarious and has had much greater contact with the west than Hu ever did before ascending to the leadership of the Communist Party. Unlike Hu, he comes from party aristocracy — his father was a revolutionary veteran, but he has worked his own way through the ranks, in various provinces, to get where he is. Much like Chinese politics generally, he is one part aristocracy and one part meritocracy.

Xi is married to a famous (in China) singer, Peng Liyuan, who performs with the People’s Liberation Army. He also has a daughter at Harvard, according to Newsweek. There is no gossip about any personal corruption, a topic that often dogs Chinese leaders. But we know little enough about Xi that when it was reported in a diplomatic cable through WikiLeaks that he had told the U.S. ambassador that he liked the moral clarity of Hollywood movies, it cut through as a rare personal tidbit.

The fact that we know so little about the person who is about to take over the leadership of a country of the stature and importance is both reassuring and scary. The scary bit is obvious. To precisely gauge China’s direction, to be able to engage productively with its leadership, it is nice to know something about them. The way the party system works these days, however, is that top leaders become more conformist and less human as they rise through the ranks. There are exceptions, but by and large, the party towers over its individual leaders these days.

That, in a funny way, is the reassuring bit too. China is far from the days of strongman rule, when leaders like Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who both had revolutionary and military credentials, ruled the roost. The job of governing is far too complex for such a system these days. China couldn’t cope with a dictator, and nor could the rest of the world.

Like Hu, Xi will be a kind of first-amongst-equals in the Politburo. He will be increasingly nationalistic, which is to be expected. Which successful country or leader isn’t? He will struggle in the early years of his rule to put his own stamp on policy, because all of Hu’s people will still be in place. He will have to find ways to keep the economy growing quickly, before China’s demographic crunch in 2020 takes the wind out of the sails. And he will also struggle with China’s biggest challenge — to articulate to the world China’s real story and challenges, something that Hu singularly failed to do in the U.S. this week, as he repeated the same blandishments which the leadership has presented for years.

As you can see this all becomes highly repetitive. Surely there are some "China hands" out there with unofficial insight or hearsay! I would be most grateful for any further discernment.

[This blog is only for personal interests and has no political affiliations.]