Xi Jinping knows how quickly power can slip away. As a child, he saw his father, Xi Zhongxun, then vice-premier of China, purged from the senior ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over his support for a historical novel. During the Cultural Revolution, when Xi was a teenager, his father was beaten and jailed as Mao Zedong urged the country’s youth to “bombard the headquarters” and root out the enemies of his revolution. Xi himself was denounced by his classmates and sent to work in the fields to be reformed through manual labour. His older half-sister killed herself during the decade-long campaign after apparently being “persecuted to death”.
The geopolitical environment that shaped the future Chinese leader was equally unforgiving. As a mid-ranking official in 1989, Xi saw the Berlin Wall torn down and the once mighty Soviet Union disintegrate. Where pro-democracy protests in China during this period were violently suppressed, Xi has blamed the Soviet leadership for allowing the neighbouring colossus to collapse without more of a fight. “Their ideals and convictions wavered,” Xi told party officials in 2012, shortly after becoming general secretary. “In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.” He was determined not to make the same mistake.
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