Who Is Xi Jinping?

If you want to know the possibilities of a nuclear war on the island of Taiwan, you need to know what is going on in the mind of the president of China, Xi Jinping, we need to better understand what his instincts are, what does he want with his legacy? The problem is that it is surprisingly difficult to know that the presidency does not give extensive interviews or use social media and what we know about him is strictly controlled by the Communist Party. His life story is hidden behind brutal propaganda and censorship machinery, so what really happened in the past of the presidency to make him the man he is today saw terrible things his own family suffered terrible things and what could tell us this about your ambitions for China and its place in the world this is the image Xi Jinping wants you to show Let's look at the Helmsman to use a title that state media sometimes gives him guiding the nation forward.

He has an extremely sophisticated and well-crafted image in the state media and that is the only media that people in China can see that they are very good at showing him as This kind of cross between a man of the people and a kind of benevolent role model along with the parades military, he is also often seen exchanging anecdotes with the faithful image of the party cured abroad, since in each man he could not be further from the truth in which the presidency was born. Communist Party royalty, his father was a revolutionary pioneer and high-ranking member of the party, and C was part of the generation known as the little princes.

He grew up in immense privilege. He went to a top boarding school with orchards, a swimming pool and really high quality. food at a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese lived in absolute poverty foreign school and these are our classrooms Linan Yang was one of C's contemporaries, a classmate of the elite, her father knew C's father and, like him, he grew up in an elite school because I was in primary school which was a boarding school most of my classmates, parents came from the same Ministry of the Ministry of my father, so we played very well together, but this childhood golden did not last when Xi Jinping and Lee Nan Yang were both.

At only nine years old, his parents were purged in the political struggles caused by Mao Zedong because he did not trust his own elites at certain key moments. Chairman Mao decided to basically blow up his own system that he felt protected him from his own enemies within China. The ruling establishment had, you know, heavy weapons being used in some cities. He had cases of cannibalism in which people attacked their own enemies in a kind of bloodlust. Both Nanyang and C's parents were imprisoned during the purges and Nanyang can sympathize with what the sea must have gone through.

My father's position was lower than Xinji's father, so I could imagine that the work from the top level to the bottom level must be even more tremendous towards the GDP. I mean, suddenly people become very strange and stay away from you and even from some. the adults show their hatred towards you, something you couldn't understand, as a nine year old boy must have had an impact on the young sea and helped shape his view of power. He has given extraordinary interviews before becoming the top leader he talks about. You know, some people see the kind of parades and flowers when they think of power, but he can still remember what he calls bullpens, these kinds of makeshift prisons where people who were purged in the Maori for the extreme brutality of His own youth taught him the lesson that China may seem stable but chaos is always a possibility if you do not have absolute discipline and if you do not focus on National Security if you want to know more about how Japanese childhood shaped his vision. for China, you should watch The Prince.

It's the economist's first full-length podcast series and I'm very excited to bring it out for listening. Click the link as C opens up about the horror of his childhood and the lessons he taught her. He presents a much more optimistic view of his adolescence when he was 15 he was sent to the countryside to do hard manual labor as part of the mazedong cultural revolution many special trains leave carrying students to the countryside the idea was that urban youth should learn from the peasantry to strengthen their revolutionary spirit for millions of Chinese of their generation that was a disaster where they lost all their education many of them never regained the opportunity to have a good education or a good university education many of them feel that those were years completely lost , but sending the presidency to the countryside was, he says, a character-building experience that would make him the leader he is today and it is this experience working the land and living in a humble cave that he draws on when he presents. himself as a man from the foreign village, but at first it was not so simple, he hated hard work and in fact ran away, he says that he did not know how to work in the field in the way that was required of him and he took Quit because it was an acceptable way for him to take a break.

After only three months, he flees and returns to the city, where he is later sentenced to a hard labor gang and has to lay sewer pipes. One might expect that these experiences in his youth would have led him to hate the Communist Party, but it appears to have had the opposite effect. Nanyang says it's easy to see why in My Generation the only job was to be a revolutionary, otherwise you become a counter-revolutionary, there's no other way the cgp would do it. He did not lose his devotion and in fact decided that the party was the only game in town and perhaps a lesson that Xi Jinping learned from now and from his own childhood was that no one is safe unless they are at the top of the Party Communist. foreigner was to rise up the party ladder as a local official, we don't have much information about what Xi Jinping was doing in the provinces, but Xi Jinping adopted a hide-and-bite strategy, so he wanted to keep a very low profile while he was rising. in the ranks of the Communist Party in rarely seen footage from the time when he appears to be a devoted family man and is almost overshadowed by his young daughter, Ming Zoo, when this clip was filmed, was working as a local civil servant in Fujin Province , The official story.

During his time the economy was growing and pollution was decreasing, but in reality the biggest corruption scandal in Chinese history was unfolding. The man in the center was Lai Chang Singh. He ran a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring of goods, including cars and oil. In the port of Fujan province, where Xi Jinping was a senior party official and later governor, what is really interesting is that hundreds of government officials ended their careers because of this scandal, but not Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping not only escaped unscathed, but was actually promoted to an equal position. better job within the Communist Party if C was aware of the smuggling ring in which some of his closest colleagues were involved, but there is no evidence that he was involved.

He would continue his quiet rise until the party Congress in 2007, when it became clear that his time in the provinces was over. He paid off and C was in line for the top job. The first time the outside world knew for sure that Xi Jinping was going to be the top leader of the Communist Party was when people looked at the order in which they came on stage and saw that Xi Jinping was facing a man named Lika Chang, who was the other possible leader and that level of secrecy is like something out of a history book, it's like something from Stalin's Soviet Union and this is where China is headed in 2022.

So what would Xi Jinping want for China after surviving to the chaos of the cultural revolution? Security and stability were front and center. There is a new approach, a truly dramatic approach to national security, there needs to be constant surveillance, discipline, order, security, suspicion of outsiders to achieve this. C wasted no time in eliminating the opposition through a widespread crackdown on corruption that was even dramatized in this hit television show. One of the notable things is that 10 years into his rule we don't really see any open challenges to him, well, there is a faction, Xi. The Jinping faction and the one he is in charge of have maintained control by drastically increasing the level of surveillance.

More than half of the world's CCTV cameras are now in China and it has tracked its citizens online. Eric Lou has seen this from the inside where he used to work. hours a day censoring content on weiwa the Chinese equivalent of Twitter um Rick says that after the siege he took over censorship around the leader's image increased dramatically um and years ago the dancers worked alongside Eric on weibo now he says that the companies technology companies have tens of thousands editing online content in near real time is essentially a bet that previous attempts at a kind of absolute police state failed not because it's impossible but because it couldn't be done with some sort of file cabinets and types listed by phone, but if you have AI, if you have enough computing power to make it work for the first time in human history, we have a police state that believes it has the technology to have complete knowledge of what an entire population is doing, sees that strict population control can continue for decades in In 2018, the two term limits for the president and vice president were eliminated so that speed can effectively govern for life.

The argument is that it takes a man who has the trust of all the Chinese people, the helmsman to steer China's ship through this kind of epochal storm so given his focus on National Security, what could this mean for the rest of the world? C has proven capable of fearsome shows of force like in Hong Kong and his willingness to adopt more aggressive rhetoric under Xi Jinping, China's tone has become much sharper. going on television in the outside world and saying surprisingly aggressive things, that kind of directive coming from Xi Jinping, the question of the moment is what this could mean for the island of Taiwan.

You might feel like you have unfinished business there if Xi Jinping could successfully invade and take Taiwan, then he would be the final victor of the Chinese Civil War that ended in 1949, he would be greater than Mao Zedong who won but did not end it, so which would make him an immortal in Chinese history or has invested. too much into making China strong and prosperous to risk everything in a war that could spark another nuclear superpower, regardless of his decision, Xi Jinping's actions will continue to shape China and all of our lives for years to come.

I'm still at Wong I. I'm the host of the Economists' first long-running podcast series. It's about Xi Jinping and it's called The Prince. To listen, click the link. Thank you very much for watching and don't forget to subscribe.