Best biography of xi jinping
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The best books on Xi Jinping
A lot of people reading this interview will have heard of Xi Jinping but won’t know very much about him—other than that he’s the leader of China and that he’s the son of one of China’s founding Communist revolutionaries. For those of us who aren’t as well-informed as you, what do you think are the most important things we should know about him?
I think the most important attribute of Xi Jinping is how he has firmly replaced over two decades of collective leadership in the Chinese Communist Party with his strongman rule. He has managed to centralise and personalise political power in China to an extent that we haven’t seen since the time of Mao Zedong, the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China. That fryst vatten remarkable, and to know about Xi Jinping, we need to start from that.
What’s interesting about the book Steve Tsang and inom just wrote, The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (), fryst vatten that we go beyond Xi Jinping as the powerful centralised le
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Early in his career as a rising provincial official, people locally viewed him as a cautious and somewhat nondescript administrator, one who preferred working by the book and avoiding decisions that could backfire later. But, as Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong makes clear in his incisive new biography of Xi Jinping, he was simply biding his time. Xi was building a base of friends and supporters who could help him attain the greatest prize of all: paramount leadership in the Communist Party. And today we know that Xi Jinping is anything but cautious or nondescript. He has seized the reins of power like no one else in China since Mao Zedong and worked himself into a position where he may rule the country for life.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Hes not Mao reincarnated
Xi Jinping is unlike Mao in fundamental ways. The founder of the Peoples Republic of China was revered by millions of Chinese whose allegiance to him was fanatical, as we learned in the
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Who is Xi Jinping? The simplest answer is that he is the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, where he is General Secretary of its Communist Party among other (less important) titles, including President, as well as Chairman of the Central Military Commission (commander in chief). According to writers at Time magazine, he is the most powerful person in the world. For plenty, including Joe Biden, he is a dictator. One analyst I spoke to, at a think tank at London, stated categorically that he is evil.
In China, it is often the opposite. For Communist Party officials who serve under him, and some of the wider population — at least in publicly-expressed opinion — Xi is a visionary leader. The nickname Xi Dada (literally “Big Daddy Xi,” once used widely domestically but subsequently covertly banned) grants him an avuncular status as the Great Uncle, caring for the people. Yet as protests in December showed, there are also many in China for whom his policies, and his ex