Xi Jinping’s life, like the lives of all China’s top leaders, is hidden behind a wall of secrecy. Xi has been in power for twelve years, but we know little about him beyond what we can glean from official media releases, reports on encounters with foreign leaders, official biographies and his speeches. The facade around Xi’s personal life is strictly maintained, his public appearances are stage-managed and within China rumours and criticism are quickly suppressed
Official biographies paint an idealised picture of Xi, describing him as ‘a son of the yellow earth’, a reference to the cave dug into the yellow clay in Liangjiahe village, where he spent seven years in the Cultural Revolution. These accounts describe Xi as a brotherly leader who ‘had holes and patches in his pants like the rest of us’. ‘When it rained, we gathered together and Xi told us stories’, one villager recalls.
In The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and his new China, Michael Sheridan lifts the veil of secrecy, painting a far more realistic picture of how Xi rose to power. Sheridan has had a long career as a journalist, including stints for Reuters, ITN and The Independent, with postings in Rome, Beirut and Jerusalem. He first reported from Hong Kong and China in 1989 and served as The Sunday Times Far East correspondent for 20 years.
In the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy, Xi is considered a princeling of the highest rank. His father, Xi Zhongxun, although purged in the Cultural Revolution, was one of Mao Zedong’s ‘eight immortals’, his closest advisers. When Xi returned to Beijing from Liangjiahe in 1976, the year of Mao’s death, his privileged background gave him a boost, and he easily secured a place reserved for worker-peasant-soldiers at the prestigious Tsinghua University.
After graduation, Xi’s well-connected mother arranged for him to work as a private secretary to Geng Biao, a vice premier and minister of national defence. This put Xi’s career in the fast lane and laid the foundation for his close relationship with the armed forces.
Xi joined the party at 21, apparently setting aside any bitterness he might have felt over the ousting of his father. A friend concludes that Xi ‘chose to become redder than red’ and that his ambition was driven by a need for restoration. The young Xi and his princeling colleagues had a strong sense of entitlement, referring to politicians from less privileged backgrounds as ‘sons of shopkeepers’. Xi’s elitism has not diminished. Once in power, he marginalised the Communist Youth League, the main vehicle of advancement for his non-princeling rivals.
Sheridan details Xi’s rise through assignments in the affluent coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, followed by a brief stint as party secretary of Shanghai. A power struggle in 2007 saw Xi appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee a notch ahead of his rival Li Keqiang, effectively earmarking him for the top job.
The real watershed came in 2012. The first half of the year was marked by the ouster of Xi’s flamboyant rival Bo Xilai, whose wife Gu Kailai was convicted for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. Bo was jailed for life on corruption charges. Sheridan sees Heywood’s murder as part of a high-level political plot to discredit and oust Bo. He puts the onus of responsibility on the local police chief and reminds us that Gu had no motive for the crime.
Once the path had been cleared, in November Xi was appointed party secretary with a Politburo Standing Committee manned mainly by princelings. To consolidate his position, he mounted an anti-corruption campaign that lasted several years, with the jailing of hundreds of thousands of cadres and officials, numerous executions and suicides and the occasional ‘convenient heart attack’.
Sheridan makes a valiant effort to pry open the door on how Xi Jinping thinks but struggles to find depth behind his official pronouncements. Sheridan places Xi and Mao Zedong, a prolific reader and writer, on entirely different intellectual planes. In his speeches to foreign leaders, Xi likes to quote the host countries’ classics, which he claims to have read, a practice that Sheridan dismisses as ‘diplomatic piffle’. People close to Xi say that he prefers to relax with light reading materials.
Sheridan debunks several myths. Much is made of China’s growing friendship with Russia, but Sheridan points out that Xi’s three years of accompanying defence minister Geng to negotiations taught him to be coldly realistic about Moscow’s intentions. When Bloomberg published an expose of the hidden wealth of Xi Jinping’s relatives, propaganda sources suggested that an irate Xi had ordered his siblings to divest their assets. According to Sheridan, they simply hid their wealth more efficiently.
Sheridan combines information from a wide range of Chinese and international sources to produce a narrative that is rich in political and personal detail. Thoroughly researched and eminently readable, The Red Emperor provides a fresh perspective on the world’s second most powerful leader.
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