A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (46 page)

Upon his return from Beijing, villagers noticed that Xi had changed. He was determined to do well. “I ate a lot more bitterness than most people,” he recalled in a recent media interview. “I picked up smoking because a smoker was allowed to take a break from the harsh labor every now and then to puff on their cigarettes,” he said. “I
would sometimes take longer toilet breaks so I could take a rest.” In the first few years, his elder sister in Inner Mongolia would frequently save money from her stipend to subsidize Xi’s food rations.

He began to thrive in the harsh conditions and joined the Communist Party, despite the rejection of his early attempts because of his father. He was appointed a village chief, the lowest in the party’s hierarchy, and taught his fellow villagers how to produce methane from compost for cooking and heating. Villagers remembered him as a quiet, humble person who hated political bickering. “When people had a conflict with each other, they would go to him, and he’d say, ‘Come back in two days,’” a peasant from Xi’s former village told the
New York Times
. “By then, the problem had usually resolved itself.”

His break came in December 1975 when Chinese universities, after lying vacant at the height of the Cultural Revolution, decided to recruit students who were workers, peasants, and soldiers. Recruitment standards would be based on the recommendations of local authorities, rather than academic merit. Through his family ties, Xi entered Qinghua University, China’s equivalent in educational standards and merit to MIT in the US. The morning before he left, villagers waited quietly outside his cave so they could say farewell. Many dropped work and accompanied him on the four-mile walk to the bus station. Xi said the scene made him cry, something he had not done for seven years.

“When I came to the land of the yellow hills at the age of fifteen, I was lost and confused,” he later told the Chinese media. “When I left seven years later, I had a clear goal in life and I was full of confidence. The experience has etched in my blood, instilling in me a firm belief, what I do for people has to be practical.”

Xi obtained an undergraduate degree in chemistry. Later he returned to Qinghua to pursue a doctorate in Marxist theory and ideological education, making him one of the few Chinese leaders educated in the arts rather than engineering during the Hu Jintao era.

While Xi was studying at Qinghua, Mao died and two years later, Xi’s father was released, all charges against him were dropped, and he returned to Beijing. In the spring of 1979, Xi’s father was made governor of the southern province of Guangdong. On May 6 that year, more than 100,000 residents of Guangdong swarmed to the border with the
then British colony of Hong Kong on rumors that the Hong Kong government would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants on the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II and that the Hong Kong border would be open for three days to allow Guangdong residents to enter.

There were scuffles at border checkpoints as border police tried to hold them back, telling them the rumor was untrue. Crowds broke through several entry points and by the end of the day, more than one hundred people were dead, either shot during the riots or drowned while trying to swim across to Hong Kong. There is no estimate of how many made it to Hong Kong to lead what they believed would be better lives. When Xi’s father learned about the tragedy, he was said to be shocked, but very sympathetic. Peasants in Guangdong eyed Hong Kong because farmers who had managed to get there earned a hundred times more than they did in the paddy fields. The incident reportedly motivated Xi’s father to spearhead a campaign to create China’s first special economic zones, first in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, and then the whole Guangdong province, offering special concessions to foreign investors to open factories and help build China.

Xi was profoundly affected by his father’s liberal views and his reform initiatives, many of Xi Jinping’s supporters said. After graduation in 1979, he worked as a low-level official at the State Council and then as an officer in active service in the General Office of the Central Military Commission. During this time, he married the daughter of China’s former ambassador to Britain. In 1982, his wife wanted them to migrate to the UK, but Xi refused to leave China, and the pair divorced. In the same year, Xi and another princeling, Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi, decided to leave Beijing and launch their political careers at the grassroots level.

Considering he had just spent seven years in one of the poorest regions in China, many of Xi’s friends failed to understand his decision. Power was in Beijing, and his father was at the pinnacle of his career—elected to the Politburo in 1982 and asked to head the Central Party Committee Secretariat. There was every reason for him to stay and take advantage of his father’s rising political clout. Xi’s friends said he wanted to escape his father’s shadow and create a path for himself, a move his father supported. Xi Jinping took up the post of deputy party
chief in Zhengding County in nearby Hebei province, while Liu Yuan went to the central province of Henan. Bo Xilai followed their example two years later when he settled in Jin County near the city of Dalian.

Xi Jinping encountered much the same obstacles as Bo because of prejudiced local provincial leaders who were wary of his true motives. They believed that Xi was merely there to gain some political capital before moving to bigger things. Xi persisted and his achievement during that period included a project to help the local tourism industry by persuading a movie director to shoot a TV period drama in his county. Xi kept the sets constructed for the TV series as a tourist attraction after the movie, which was seen throughout the country, was over. He also won the hearts of local retired officials when he initiated programs to improve their living conditions.

With his own political savvy and his family connection, Xi rose quickly from this first government post and was quickly identified as one of the prospective leaders. In 1985, on his thirty-second birthday, Xi took the first of several posts in the coastal province of Fujian, adjacent to Guangdong. Due to Fujian’s close proximity to Taiwan, Xi supported the region’s free-market transformation and approved preferential policies to attract investment from Taiwan and actively promoted direct air and sea transportation between the two regions, which had ceased in 1949. Direct contact with Taiwan, which China claims to be part of its sovereign territory—a claim rejected by many in Taiwan as well as its main ally, the US—remains a problem tangled in diplomatic posturing and punctuated by sporadic military saber-rattling. The US keeps an aircraft carrier battle group based out of Japan in the event of military escalation.

In 1987, Xi Jinping met one of China’s most popular army folk singers, Peng Liyuan, whose smooth melodious rendition of a pro-party folk song “In the Field of Hope” at a New Year concert on state television made her a household name. The two were married after a few dates. Their wedding was simple—a meal with the attendance of a few colleagues. Friends say fans would mob Xi’s wife when they were out together and Xi would always stand aside quietly, even though he was already high up in the government. After Xi’s coronation, many commented on Weibo that China finally had the most
glamorous-looking and popular first lady since Madame Mao and Wang Guangmei, the wife of Liu Shaoqi, who was president of China from 1959 to 1969.

Xi became the party chief of Ningde, a relatively poor region in Fujian province, in 1988. State media reported his first task there was to tackle widespread corruption. He was considered an amicable person, but lost his temper in public when he learned that several thousand local officials had seized public land to build private houses for themselves. He ordered an extensive investigation and ended up firing or demoting several hundred officials who were found to have violated land occupation rules. He was also said to have returned 600,000 yuan worth of “gifts” in the late 1980s, when he was Ningde’s district party chief. The revelation won Xi much praise.

In October 2002, Xi was transferred to China’s southeastern province of Zhejiang, home to the country’s most successful private enterprises, which have supplanted state-owned enterprises and generate 65 percent of Zhejiang’s GDP.

Unlike Bo Xilai, who painted Chongqing red in a dramatic display of his radical approach to the region’s social and economic problems, Xi’s steps were more steady and incremental. One of Xi’s most notable accomplishments in Zhejiang was related to his efforts to change the region’s economic structure from the rapid and rough labor-intensive expansion to a higher level of development, emphasizing concern for efficiency and the environment. Xi came up with a slogan: “Green mountains and clean rivers are more valuable than gold and silver.” Under his leadership, the provincial government invested billions of yuan on information technology, environmental, and infrastructural projects. Xi actively cultivated relations with private entrepreneurs, allowing them to participate in the decision-making process by appointing them to the local legislature. The central government under Hu Jintao had provided preferential financial policies toward state-run corporations and suppressed the growth of private enterprises. Xi’s experience in Zhejiang suggests that the balance can be expected to tilt toward private enterprises. Xi won praise from governors in other provinces by urging the prosperous entrepreneurs to invest in poorer provinces inland.

If there was one program that grabbed national attention, it was Xi’s clean-government initiative that encouraged the public to supervise the work of government officials, setting up a hotline for complaints and protecting the media’s investigative work on government corruption.

In 2008, a corruption scandal struck the heart of one of China’s largest cities, Shanghai. The city’s party chief was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for accepting bribes and abusing power. Under normal circumstances, the party chief of Shanghai has a guaranteed seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. There was wide speculation that President Hu Jintao would bring one of his allies as replacement, but he unexpectedly picked Xi to appease his critics. Xi’s modest approach and his nonfactional reputation made him an acceptable candidate for all sides, and he governed a province that was in close proximity to Shanghai and understood the city’s particular needs as a gateway to China.

Seven months before the 17th Party Congress, when a “crown prince” would be designated, Xi was appointed party chief of Shanghai. President Hu planned to select his protégé, Li Keqiang, a fellow youth leaguer. However, on October 22, at the routine new leadership press conference, the public was surprised to see the shy-looking Xi Jinping—still better known as the husband of one of China’s most popular singers—ranked ahead of Li Keqiang. The ranking indicated that Xi would be head of the party and president, and Li the future prime minister. Xi’s heir-apparent status was sealed in 2010 when he was appointed vice president and vice chair of the party’s Central Military Commission, overseeing China’s vast standing army—whose main activities are road and bridge building, local engineering projects, and emergency natural disaster relief, such as filling sandbags to shore up the banks of flooding rivers.

Xi’s meteoric rise intrigued many analysts. In subsequent months, insiders revealed that former president Jiang Zemin and his friends had subverted Hu’s planned succession strategy and installed Xi to stem the influence of Hu and his youth leaguers. In addition, Xi also enjoyed broad support from the Politburo and many of the party’s old guard, who were friends of Xi’s father. Before the selection process
started, President Hu Jintao conducted several straw polls and Xi’s name ranked at the top every time.

After his elevation, Xi was put in charge of the overall preparation work for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, which became the target of protests by human rights activists and pro-Tibetan independence groups overseas as the Olympic torch was carried around the world from Greece to China. A devastating earthquake had struck China’s southwestern province of Sichuan three months before, and that placed considerable demand on the country’s attention and resources, both physical and material. As it was, the Olympics proceeded smoothly and drew accolades for its organization and facilities, and the dazzling opening ceremony and China’s impressive medal count did much to boost its international image and strengthened Xi’s credentials as head of a state.

As presumptive successor to President Hu, Xi made numerous foreign trips. His tour took him across the US, Europe, Latin America, and Australia.

Western leaders who have met and worked with Xi speak highly of him. US vice president Joe Biden, who befriended Xi during his trip to China, said Xi was “absolutely straightforward” and “open.” Occasionally, he could be too straightforward. On a visit to Mexico in 2009, he castigated countries critical of China’s new economic power by saying:

       
Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us. China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?

His remarks made many observers skittish about the tenor of his future foreign policies. Those around him point out that in no way is Xi an extreme ideologue or a nationalist. He can be expected to be flexible and practical on foreign policy, and identify more with the democratic values than his processor, who spent the better part of his life within the party network, while Xi spent his with the people. When it comes to Western pressure over the issue of trade and human rights, Xi can be expected to use tough rhetoric for local consumption, but on
the world stage will display more flexibility and a willingness to make concessions.

After he was made heir apparent in 2008, Xi avoided the media and seldom granted interviews—it was a political necessity in China for a leader in waiting to tread carefully without running afoul of the current party chief. Therefore, details of his personal and family life are scarce. Public optimism was largely built on what has been written about Xi’s family and his own personal experiences.