Of all the relationships Donald Trump will have to manage as US president, none may be more consequential than that with Xi Jinping. As prep, the next occupant of the White House could do worse than read two incisive new books on the man who wants to make China great again.
During his election campaign, Trump — who is set to be inaugurated on January 20 — had a fair amount to say about Xi. He boasted that Xi respects him because “I’m fucking crazy”. After he was shot at an election rally in July, he said that Xi “wrote me a beautiful note”. On a separate occasion, he called Xi “fierce” and “very smart”.
There is, however, a lot more to be learned about Xi, the only world leader whose power could be said to rival that of the US president. The impression that emerges from these two deeply researched books is of a surprisingly complex, multi-layered personality. Xi is a strongman who nevertheless suffered deep childhood trauma. He is a pragmatist who yet retains respect for ideology. Both he and his father were cruelly persecuted by communist authorities but he remains a party loyalist.
The early part of The Red Emperor by Michael Sheridan has even a reader unschooled in psychoanalysis wondering about the sort of life-long imprint that trauma can inflict. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a teenage Xi went through more than a dozen “struggle sessions”, which were violent public humiliations of people held to be “class enemies”. At some points he was also incarcerated, hungry and infested with fleas.
“One night a desperate Xi [escaped],” Sheridan writes. “He ran through the rainswept alleys of Beijing to his home. He banged on the door, hoping to get food and dry clothes. But his mother was so terrified for her own safety — and that of Jinping’s siblings — that she not only turned him away but reported his flight to the authorities.”
His mother did not act out of callousness, Sheridan explains. “These were the actions of an insider. Knowing that her house was watched, she also knew that punishment for helping her son would be certain. He fled into the rain, crying.”
This episode is one of several ordeals recounted in Sheridan’s excellent work, the most vivid and compelling biography of Xi published to date. A veteran journalist with extensive experience in Hong Kong and China, Sheridan acknowledges his debt to Howard Zhang, a former head of the BBC News Chinese Service, who acted as lead researcher on Chinese sources for the book.
While Sheridan’s book recounts the seminal chapters in Xi’s life and career, Kevin Rudd traces the transformation in China’s ideological worldview since he came to power in 2012. These shifts have turned much of Chinese politics, economics and foreign policy on its head, says Rudd in On Xi Jinping.
In a nutshell, Xi’s ideological beliefs could be described as “Marxist Nationalism”, argues Rudd, a former Australian prime minister, the current Australian ambassador to the US and a long-standing China expert.
In detail this means three big things. Xi has taken Chinese politics to the “Leninist left” by stressing centralisation in decision making. He has taken economics to the “Marxist left”, emphasising the role of state-owned enterprises and regulation. Lastly, foreign policy under Xi has moved to the “nationalist right”, making Beijing more confrontational and assertive.
But what experiences have moulded Xi’s cast of mind? Sheridan devotes attention to his father, Xi Zhongxun. The elder Xi had been an associate of Chairman Mao Zedong and rose to the rank of vice-premier before he was purged in 1962. He was jailed, forced to perform self-criticism and assigned work in a tractor factory. All told, he spent 16 years in the political wilderness.
Following his father’s ostracism, Xi found himself banished to an impoverished village in the countryside for seven years of hard labour alongside peasant farmers.
This meant that by the time he reached the age of 21, Xi had known great privilege as the “princeling” son of a senior official. He had also tasted public humiliation, persecution and years of poverty in rural exile, estranged from parental love. When his father finally won political rehabilitation in 1978, Xi was re-embraced by the party that had shunned him.
Sheridan wisely avoids the diagnoses of cod psychology. But the rest of The Red Emperor leaves no doubt that Xi is a leader obsessed by both the capricious nature of power and the insurance it affords those who control it.
The most dramatic chapter concerns Xi’s purge in 2014 of Zhou Yongkang, the highest ranking official to be brought down by a corruption case since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. As the man in charge of China’s sprawling security agency, Zhou was a member of the politburo, the pinnacle of Chinese power.
After his downfall, an official newspaper described Zhou, at the age of 71, as a “crazy erotomaniac” with a string of mistresses who once had sex in an underground parking lot with an “exceptionally beautiful” TV presenter. But such prurience deflected from more systemic questions: how could the Chinese Communist party harbour a man at its highest echelon who was so grotesquely corrupt?
When Zhou was sentenced to life in prison, details of his affairs emerged. Assets worth more than $10bn were seized from his estate, including 300 apartments and houses, 60 cars, hoards of gold, vintage alcohol, silver, jewellery, antiques, paintings and wads of cash in foreign currency. Zhou’s case stunned China and showed that Xi was not a leader to be underestimated.
Rudd’s book adds a wealth of context to what animates Xi’s grim determination. The former Australian PM is one of the few westerners to have met him on a number of occasions. A fluent Chinese speaker who worked at Australia’s embassy in Beijing, Rudd completed a DPhil on Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview in 2022 at the University of Oxford.
According to his analysis, one of Xi’s formative experiences was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a historical moment that resounded through the corridors of power in Beijing as a tragedy (a view incidentally shared by Vladimir Putin). To Xi’s mind, the reasons why China’s huge communist neighbour foundered had a lot to do with lapses in the respect it accorded Marxist ideology.
“An important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely negating the history of the Soviet Union, negating the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, negating Lenin, negating Stalin, creating historical nihilism and confused thinking,” according to official Chinese documents attributed to Xi.
“This is a cautionary tale!” Xi adds.
Thus, a mini vogue among Sinologists in recent years to characterise Xi as a transactional pragmatist with few (if any) ideological convictions is erroneous, Rudd’s book makes clear. This should be a useful insight for the new US administration to bear in mind.
“Marxist nationalism”, as Rudd styles it, is set to be the animating philosophy of Xi’s remaining time in office. But what is this likely to mean, in practical terms?
The answer is that Xi sees himself as on a historical mission to create a “new era” of Chinese pre-eminence. He will use his all-powerful Leninist party to reinforce his purpose. If he encounters resistance at home or abroad, “relentless struggle” will be deployed to overcome it. Trump’s new team has been warned.
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd, OUP £26.99/ $34.99, 624 pages
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan, Headline Press £25, 368 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
