Understand your future master: Xi, father and son

I happened to learn about Joseph Torigian’s book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, June 2025, 718 Pages). The book is rated 4.8/5 (from 10 ratings) on Goodreads. By the way, make sure you avoid visiting any such links: one, two, three.

Blurb:

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world—and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao’s death. He led the Party’s United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the Party’s crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.

The Party’s Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People’s Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one’s own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party’s demands. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping’s father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP—and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.

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From a review by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, historian and writer:

Xi [Zhongxun] committed his first revolutionary act at the age of only 14—he and a friend tried to poison one of their school’s administrators—and he remained a faithful Party member until his death at the age of 88 in 2002. Xi fought the Japanese and the Nationalists, served in numerous high-ranking government positions, was the right-hand man to both Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang, and managed relations with ethnic and religious minority groups in China. His purge came before the Cultural Revolution started and hinted at what was to come. Even if Xi Jinping were a nobody, Xi Zhongxun and his career would still more than warrant a close look as we continue to write the history of China and CCP politics in the 20th century.

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Initially, Xi’s political banishment sent him into detention at home, then to a secluded Beijing courtyard house, where he wrote self-criticisms and studied Marxist texts. In 1965, Mao ordered Xi removed from the capital; he was sent to a mining-tool factory in Henan Province, where he volunteered for work on the line and refused to accept other workers’ attempts to lighten his load. After the Cultural Revolution began, however, a group of Red Guards kidnapped Xi and subjected him to repeated public struggle sessions. Then, in 1967, the People’s Liberation Army took custody of Xi and imprisoned him while also enabling the struggle sessions to continue. Finally, in 1968, Zhou Enlai ordered that Xi be returned to Beijing, where he remained under investigation until 1975.

Xi Zhongxun’s purge fractured his family, affected his mental health, and kept him out of power until he received a position in Guangdong Province in 1978. All of his children suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and one daughter died by suicide. Yet these years did not diminish Xi Zhongxun’s belief in the Chinese Communist Party.

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Rather than hold a grudge against the CCP for the trials he endured, Xi saw in them a higher purpose and a way to demonstrate his continuing commitment to the Party.

Xi could be flexible and pragmatic, but ultimately always upheld the rule of the CCP.
From his early days working with Liu Zhidan in the Northwest, Xi absorbed “a ‘big-tent’ philosophy when it came to revolution” and learned that, as he wrote later in life, “The more friends the better.” Xi wasn’t necessarily a sophisticated political thinker—his formal education ended when he was a teenager, and unlike many early CCP leaders he didn’t spend time studying with other revolutionaries in France or the Soviet Union. Instead, his belief in Communism was based on his experiences of peasant society and seeing the struggles most common people in China faced. If they wanted to join the revolution, Xi welcomed them.

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He had a long friendship with the 10th Panchen Lama and for years wore a watch gifted to him by the Dalai Lama. Xi could be charming and amiable, which positioned him as a natural interlocutor for the foreign visitors who came to China during the 1980s.

Such expansiveness would cast a shadow on Xi during those times when hard-liners reigned in the CCP and anyone who had contacts outside the Party became vulnerable to accusations of being an “accommodationist.”

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Only after Xi Zhongxun’s passing in May 2002 did Xi Jinping get a major promotion, becoming Party Secretary of Zhejiang Province in November of that year and also securing election to the CCP Central Committee. Five years later, Xi Jinping ascended to the Politburo Standing Committee and locked in his status as heir apparent. Xi Zhongxun “did not live to see his son’s career take off,” Torigian writes, but Xi Jinping fulfilled the promise his father saw in him.

In 2001, Xi Zhongxun offered a concise assessment of his life: “I did justice for the party, did justice for the people, and did justice for myself; I did not make ‘leftist’ mistakes, I did not persecute people. My accomplishments have been ordinary. I feel no guilt.”

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From a review by Jonathon P Sine:

Xi Zhongxun was born into a fallen world. That, at least, is something the father and the son, whose youth was forged in the Cultural Revolution, have in common. But if we speak literally rather than metaphorically, the world of the elder Xi was not fallen, but falling apart. He was born in 1913, in the desolate northwest of China, as a scourge of European guns, germs, and steel was unleashing forces that would sweep the world’s great agrarian empires—Ottoman Turkey, Romanov Russia, and of course Qing China—into the dustbin of history. These same forces would pull Zhongxun, like so many young radicals of his time, into the dark vortex from which modernity would crawl. The birth of modernity in China was a bloody and terrifying upheaval. Anything, Mao quipped, but a dinner party.

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One could describe how famine stalked Zhongxun’s family, distending his belly and those of his orphaned siblings, claiming several of them. One could note that Zhongxun’s first wife was only eligible because her first husband had his head severed from his body by one of the various warlords and militias—and it was she, an eighteen year old girl, who had to find and bury the carcass.

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But Zhongxun and his revolutionary kin came to know suffering like a first language. It spawned in them a zeal for purpose and meaning; a drive to find something that could not only bring order to a chaotic present, but something that could redeem a fallen world, that could make sense of seemingly senseless suffering. Suffering shaped and inexorably drew people toward causes bigger than themselves. Toward things that, as Viktor Frankl would have understood, transformed the very meaning of suffering. For some, like Zhongxun, suffering became the crucible in which the meaning of their lives was forged.

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As Torigian reveals in his prodigious excavation of Zhongxun’s life, Xi would later recall that he knew nothing of communism when he first joined the cause. It was not the Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s Imperialism, or any other Marxist-Leninist tract that first kindled his passion. It was his own suffering, reflected back to him in the pages of a novel: The Young Wanderer. … Much as Stalin drew strength from Georgian heroic tales (from which he also took a nickname, Koba), Xi, too, found inspiration in literature. By chance and circumstance, his creed became the communist one, and his devotion was given to the Communist Party.

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Zhongxun, for his part, routinely and enthusiastically affirmed his commitment to Deng’s Four Cardinal Principles. The tension between the “Three” and the “Four”—as Torigian frames it, the economically reformist spirit of the 1978 3rd Plenum versus the enduring imperative of the Four Cardinal Principles to uphold the Party’s authoritarian core—runs through the Party as well as Xi.

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Despite his difficult youth, Zhongxun somehow sustained a gentler, more conciliatory side. It was further honed through years working in the United Front, where he often favored dialogue and co-optation of local power brokers over coercion in dealings with ethnic minorities, religious groups, and other non-Party actors. One striking example comes from policy in Xinjiang, where, as head of the Northwest Bureau, Xi intervened all the way to the top to overturn a hardline approach pushed by Deng Liqun and Wang Zhen, figures typically cast as staunch conservatives. In doing so, he was willing to bear the enmity of Deng and Wang (which would surface in due time) so as to forestall a more repressive campaign against religious believers and nomads there, favoring instead a more peaceful strategy of co-opting and courting local power brokers.

And yet, as the aptly named book reflects, when the Party’s interests were on the line, they always came first. If the Party needed someone eliminated, Zhongxun would—and did—comply. As he did in Xi’an in the early 1950s, fulfilling Mao’s mandated execution quotas, and earlier still during the Shaanxi base area purges of the 1940s, when Xi was county secretary of Suide. Zhongxun also remained conspicuously silent during the Tiananmen crisis, despite holding the prominent, and at the time very relevant, post of NPC Vice Chair—perhaps shrewdly foreseeing Deng’s violent verdict and not wanting, once more, to end up on the wrong side of Party history.

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Twice in his career, Xi Zhongxun served as a chief implementer to the regime’s chief implementers: first under Zhou Enlai in the State Council of the 1950s, and later under Hu Yaobang in the Secretariat of the 1980s. In both roles, Xi witnessed firsthand how precarious elite politics could be. In early 1958, Mao turned sharply against Zhou for trying to moderate the Great Leap Forward (“Oppose Rash Advance”), stripping the State Council of its economic authority, creating five new small groups to oversee government work, and handing control over the economy to Deng Xiaoping and the Secretariat (who then presided over the most unrestrained phase of the disastrous campaign). Decades later, as a member of the Secretariat, Xi again observed how the Secretariat and the State Council, now under Zhao Ziyang, vied for influence, and how Hu Yaobang—often described as the conscience of the Party—was ultimately purged by Deng. Ironically, as Torigian determines, Deng repeated a pattern he had twice suffered himself under Mao: purging a deputy not for disloyalty or policy differences, but simply because his confidence in him had mercurially wavered (pp. 472–3).

The much-touted “institutionalization” of Chinese politics under Deng Xiaoping is revealed as largely illusory. Torigian’s detailed reconstruction of events surrounding Deng’s autocratic and often arbitrary purges—of Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang (and, as an aside, nearly Jiang Zemin)—paints a far less orderly picture. Deng emerges, in the words of Li Rui, as “half a Mao”: a leader who deliberately preserved a two-line system that concentrated immense discretionary power in his own hands while leaving others to operate in a state of calculated uncertainty. When he did intervene, as in the decision to use force at Tiananmen, it was often abrupt, unconsultative, and final. In this light, elite politics under Xi Jinping appears less an aberration than return to form.

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This is not a book about Xi Jinping—though, if judging by much of the popular media coverage thus far, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. There are, to be sure, sections that probe deeply into the younger Xi, most notably Chapter 21, Princeling Politics, which unearths fascinating details about his early rise through the Party in the 1980s.

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Finally, beyond Xi Jinping, the book is not even best understood as a biography of Xi Zhongxun. Its deeper purpose is in using Zhongxun as a lens through which to examine the history and internal contradictions of the Chinese Communist Party itself. What the book delivers is not just a portrait of the man who fathered China’s current leader, but a window into the moral and political structure of the Party that shaped them both.

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Strictly about Xi Jinping, you can read Evan Osnos in The New Yorker: How Xi Jinping Took Control of China, from March 30, 2015. Excerpts.

In anticipation of New Year’s Eve, 2014, Xi Jinping, the President of China and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, permitted a camera crew to come into his office and record a message to the people. As a teenager, Xi had been sent to work on a farm; he was so delicate that other laborers rated him a six on a ten-point scale, “not even as high as the women,” he said later, with some embarrassment. Now, at sixty-one, Xi was five feet eleven, taller than any Chinese leader in nearly four decades, with a rich baritone and a confident heft.

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Xi is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first who was born after the revolution, in 1949.

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Xi’s New Year’s message was broadcast on state television and radio channels at 6:30 p.m., just before the evening news. A few hours later, the news veered sharply out of his control. In Shanghai, a large holiday crowd had gathered to celebrate on the Bund, the promenade beside the Huangpu River, with splendid views of the skyline. The crowd was growing faster than the space could handle. Around 11:30 p.m., the police sent hundreds of extra officers to keep order, but it was too late; a stairway was jammed, and people shouted and pushed. A stampede ensued. In all, thirty-six people suffocated or were trampled to death.

The disaster occurred in one of China’s most modern and prosperous places, and the public was appalled. In the days that followed, the Shanghai government held a memorial for the victims, and encouraged people to move on; Internet censors struck down discussion of who was responsible; police interrogated Web users who posted criticisms of the state. When relatives of the victims visited the site of the stampede, police watched them closely, and then erected metal barriers to render it unreachable. Caixin, an investigative media organization, revealed that, during the stampede, local officials in charge of the neighborhood were enjoying a banquet of sushi and sake, at the government’s expense, in a private room at the Empty Cicada, a luxury restaurant nearby. This was awkward news, because one of the President’s first diktats had been “Eight Rules” for public servants, to eliminate extravagance and corruption. Among other things, the campaign called on officials to confine themselves to “four dishes and one soup.” (Eventually, eleven officials were punished for misusing funds and for failing to prevent a risk to the public.)

A few weeks after the incident in Shanghai, I paid a call on a longtime editor in Beijing, whose job gives him a view into the workings of the Party. … “The central government issued an order absolutely forbidding them to dine out on public funds. And they did it anyway!” he said. … “There is a saying: ‘When a rule is imposed up high, there is a way to get around it below.’ ” The struggle between an emperor and his bureaucracy follows a classic pattern in Chinese politics, and it rarely ends well for the emperor. But the editor was betting on Xi. “He’s not afraid of Heaven or Earth. And he is, as we say, round on the outside and square on the inside; he looks flexible, but inside he is very hard.”

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After Mao, China encouraged the image of a “collective Presidency” over the importance of individual leaders. Xi has revised that approach, and his government, using old and new tools, has enlarged his image. In the spirit of Mao’s Little Red Book, publishers have produced eight volumes of Xi’s speeches and writings; the most recent, titled “The Remarks of Xi Jinping,” dissects his utterances, ranks his favorite phrases, and explains his cultural references. A study of the People’s Daily found that, by his second anniversary in office, Xi was appearing in the paper more than twice as often as his predecessor at the same point. He stars in a series of cartoons aimed at young people, beginning with “How to Make a Leader,” which describes him, despite his family pedigree, as a symbol of meritocracy—“one of the secrets of the China miracle.” The state news agency has taken the unprecedented step of adopting a nickname for the General Secretary: Xi Dada—roughly, Big Uncle Xi.

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To outsiders, Xi has been a fitful subject. Bookstores in Hong Kong, which are insulated from mainland control, offer portraits of varying quality—the most reliable include “The New Biography of Xi Jinping,” by Liang Jian, and “China’s Future,” by Wu Ming—but most are written at a remove, under pseudonyms. The clearest account of Xi’s life and influences comes from his own words and decisions, scattered throughout a long climb to power.

Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, a Mandarin speaker who has talked with Xi at length over the years, told me, “What he says is what he thinks. My experience of him is that there’s not a lot of artifice.”

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Xi describes his essential project as a rescue: he must save the People’s Republic and the Communist Party before they are swamped by corruption; environmental pollution; unrest in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other regions; and the pressures imposed by an economy that is growing more slowly than at any time since 1990 (though still at about seven per cent, the fastest pace of any major country). “The tasks our Party faces in reform, development, and stability are more onerous than ever, and the conflicts, dangers, and challenges are more numerous than ever,” Xi told the Politburo, in October. In 2014, the government arrested nearly a thousand members of civil society, more than in any year since the mid-nineteen-nineties, following the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group.

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In 1962, his father was accused of supporting a novel that Mao opposed, and was sent to work in a factory; his mother, Qi Xin, was assigned to hard labor on a farm. In January, 1967, after Mao encouraged students to target “class enemies,” a group of young people dragged Xi Zhongxun before a crowd. Among other charges, he was accused of having gazed at West Berlin through binoculars during a visit to East Germany years earlier. He was detained in a military garrison, where he passed the years by walking in circles, he said later—ten thousand laps, and then ten thousand walking backward. The son was too young to be an official Red Guard, and his father’s status made him undesirable. … Later, Xi described that period as a dystopian collapse of control. He was detained “three or four times” by groups of Red Guards, and forced to denounce his father.

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In December, 1968, in a bid to regain control, Mao ordered the Red Guards and other students to the countryside, to be “reeducated by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” Élite families sent their children to regions that had allies or family, and Xi went to his father’s old stronghold in Shaanxi. He was assigned to Liangjiahe, a village flanked by yellow cliffs. “The intensity of the labor shocked me,” Xi recalled in a 2004 television interview. To avoid work, he took up smoking—nobody bothered a man smoking—and lingered in the bathroom. After three months, he fled to Beijing, but he was arrested and returned to the village. In what later became the centerpiece of his official narrative, Xi was reborn. A recent state-news-service article offers the mythology: “Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads.” It leaves out some brutal details. At one point, he received a letter informing him that his older half-sister Xi Heping had died.

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Xi Jinping’s pedigree had exposed him to a brutal politics—purges, retribution, rehabilitation—and he drew blunt lessons from it. In a 2000 interview with the journalist Chen Peng, of the Beijing-based Chinese Times, Xi said, “People who have little experience with power, those who have been far away from it, tend to regard these things as mysterious and novel. But I look past the superficial things: the power and the flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.” … Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, told me, “The bottom line in any understanding of who Xi Jinping is must begin with his dedication to the Party as an institution—despite the fact that through his personal life, and his political life, he has experienced the best of the Party and the worst of the Party.”

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In 1985, he spent two weeks in Iowa as part of an agricultural delegation. In the town of Muscatine, he stayed with Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. “The boys had gone off to college, so there were some spare bedrooms,” Eleanor told me. Xi slept in a room with football-themed wallpaper and “Star Trek” action figures. “He was looking out the window, and it seemed like he was saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ and I thought, What’s so unusual? It’s just a split-level,” she said. Xi did not introduce himself as a Communist Party secretary; his business card identified him as the head of the Shijiazhuang Feed Association. In 2012, on a trip to the U.S. before becoming top leader, he returned to Muscatine, to see Dvorchak and others, trailed by the world press. She said, “No one in their right mind would ever think that that guy who stayed in my house would become the President. I don’t care what country you’re talking about.”

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The following year, when Xi was thirty-three, a friend introduced him to Peng Liyuan, who, at twenty-four, was already one of China’s most famous opera and folk singers. Xi told her that he didn’t watch television, she recalled in a 2007 interview. “What kind of songs do you sing?” he asked. Peng thought that he looked “uncultured and much older than his age,” but he asked her questions about singing technique, which she took as a sign of intelligence. Xi later said that he decided within forty minutes to ask her to marry him.

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Xi was tested by a pageant of dysfunction that erupted in the run-up to his début as General Secretary, in 2012. In February, Wang Lijun, a former police chief, tried to defect to the U.S. and accused the family of his former patron, Bo Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing, of murder and embezzlement. Party leaders feared that Bo might protect himself with the security services at his command, disrupt the transition of power, and tear the Party apart. In September, Ling Jihua, the chief of staff of the outgoing President, was abruptly demoted, and he was later accused of trying to cover up the death of his son, who had crashed a black Ferrari while accompanied by two women.

Beset by crises, Xi suddenly disappeared. On September 4, 2012, he cancelled a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and visits with other dignitaries. As the days passed, lurid rumors emerged, ranging from a grave illness to an assassination attempt. When he reappeared, on September 19th, he told American officials that he had injured his back. Analysts of Chinese politics still raise the subject of Xi’s disappearance in the belief that a fuller explanation of why he vanished might illuminate the depth, or fragility, of his support. In dozens of conversations this winter, scholars, officials, journalists, and executives told me that they suspect he did have a health problem, and also reasons to exploit it. They speculate that Xi, in effect, went on strike; he wanted to install key allies, and remove opponents, before taking power, but Party elders ordered him to wait. A former intelligence official told me, “Xi basically says, ‘O.K., fuck you, let’s see you find someone else for this job. I’m going to disappear for two weeks and miss the Secretary of State.’ And that’s what he did. It caused a stir, and they went running and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ ” The handoff went ahead as planned. On November 15, 2012, Xi became General Secretary.

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The first step to a solution was to reestablish control. The “collective Presidency,” which spread power across the Standing Committee, had constrained Hu Jintao so thoroughly that he was nicknamed the Woman with Bound Feet. Xi surrounded himself with a shadow cabinet that was defined less by a single ideology than by school ties and political reliability. Members included Liu He, a childhood playmate who had become a reform-minded economist, and Liu Yuan, a hawkish general and the son of former President Liu Shaoqi. The most important was Wang Qishan, a friend for decades, who was placed in charge of the Central Commission on Discipline and Inspection, the agency that launched the vast anticorruption campaign.

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By the end of 2014, the Party had announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on corruption charges. Many foreign observers asked if Xi’s crusade was truly intended to stamp out corruption or if it was a tool to attack his enemies. It was not simply one or the other: corruption had become so threatening to the Party’s legitimacy that only the most isolated leader could have avoided forcing it back to a more manageable level, but railing against corruption was also a proven instrument for political consolidation, and at the highest levels Xi has deployed it largely against his opponents.

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Shortly after taking over, Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” and declared, “It’s a profound lesson for us.” Chinese scholars had studied that puzzle from dozens of angles, but Xi wanted more. “In 2009, he commissioned a long study of the Soviet Union from somebody who works in the policy-research office,” the diplomat in Beijing told me. “It concluded that the rot started under Brezhnev. In the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezhnev brings his mother to Moscow. He proudly shows her the state apartments at the Kremlin, his Zil limousine, and the life of luxury he now lives. ‘Well, what do you think, Mama,’ says Brezhnev. ‘You’ll never have to worry about a thing, ever again.’ ‘I’m so proud of you, Leonid Ilyich,’ says Mama, ‘but what happens if the Communists find out?’ Xi loved the story.” Xi reserved special scorn for Gorbachev, for failing to defend the Party against its opponents, and told his colleagues, “Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

The year after Xi took office, cadres were required to watch a six-part documentary on the Soviet Union’s collapse, which showed violent scenes of unrest and described an American conspiracy to topple Communism through “peaceful evolution”: the steady infiltration of subversive Western political ideas. Ever since the early aughts, when “color revolutions” erupted in the former Soviet bloc, Chinese Communists have cited the risk of contagion as a reason to constrict political life. That fear was heightened by a surge of unrest in Tibet in 2008, in Xinjiang in 2009, and across the Arab world in 2011.

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Although Vladimir Putin has suffocated Russian civil society and neutered the press, Moscow stores still carry books that are critical of him, and a few long-suffering blogs still find ways to attack him. Xi is less tolerant. In February, 2014, Yiu Mantin, a seventy-nine-year-old editor at Hong Kong’s Morning Bell Press, who had planned to release a biography critical of Xi, by the exiled writer Yu Jie, was arrested during a visit to the mainland. He had received a phone call warning him not to proceed with publication. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, on charges of smuggling seven cans of paint.

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Sealing China off from Western ideas poses some practical problems. The Party has announced “rule of law” reforms intended to strengthen top-down control over the legal system and shield courts from local interference. The professor said, “Many colleagues working on civil law and that sort of thing have a large portion of their lectures about German law or French law. So, if you want to stop Western values from spreading in Chinese universities, one thing you’d have to do is close down the law schools and make sure they never exist again.” Xi, for his part, sees no contradiction, because preservation of the Party comes before preservation of the law. In January, he said that China must “nurture a legal corps loyal to the Party, loyal to the country, loyal to the people, and loyal to the law.” Echoing Mao, he added, “Insure that the handle of the knife is firmly in the hand of the Party and the people.”

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As for a broad diplomatic vision, Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have adhered to a principle known as “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Xi has effectively replaced that concept with declarations of China’s arrival. In Paris last year, he invoked Napoleon’s remark that China was “a sleeping lion,” and said that the lion “has already awakened, but this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” He told the Politburo in December that he intends to “make China’s voice heard, and inject more Chinese elements into international rules.” As alternatives to the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Xi’s government has established the New Development Bank, the Silk Road infrastructure fund, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which, together, intend to amass two hundred and forty billion dollars in capital. Xi has been far bolder than his predecessors in asserting Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into contested waters, and erecting buildings, helipads, and other facilities on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations. He has also taken advantage of Putin’s growing economic isolation; Xi has met with Putin more than with any other foreign leader, and, last May, as Russia faced new sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Xi and Putin agreed on a four-hundred-billion-dollar deal to supply gas to China at rates that favor Beijing. According to the prominent editor, Xi has told people that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea—“He got a large piece of land and resources and boosted his poll numbers at home.” But, as war in Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become less complimentary of Putin.

That was back in 2014-2015. Now, in 2025, Xi Jinping still struggles with corruption and with lavish dinners had by civil servants. Oh, and I’m not sure that books critical of Putin can still be purchased in Russia. Yiu Mantin has been released from jail after serving his sentence. The war in Ukraine is no longer that of 2014, but this new one started in 2022. The future is still opaque.