What to read to understand Xi Jinping

Mint

09-05-2025

(The original article was published in September 2022) Few world leaders are as shrouded in mystery as Xi Jinping. That is no accident. Mr Xi, plausibly the most powerful man in the world, rarely gives interviews or makes public statements. Those closest to him are sworn to secrecy. China's censors vigilantly scrub from the Chinese internet any information about him that deviates from the state's propaganda. While there are official accounts of his thinking, and of his time as a provincial official, plenty of questions remain unanswered. In October he is expected to secure a third term as chief of the Communist Party, cementing his position as the most influential Chinese leader since Mao. For the past nine months The Economist has been charting Mr Xi's rise. You can listen to the fruits of that research in 'The Prince", our new narrative podcast. Here are some of the books that helped us figure out what makes Mr Xi tick.
Son of Yellow Earth. By Xi Jinping. Published in the National New Bibliography Magazine
Mr Xi was born into a life of privilege in Beijing in 1953. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a party elder and revolutionary hero who had fought alongside Mao in China's civil war. But his comfortable life was torn apart in the years before the Cultural Revolution, as his father was purged and the younger Xi was ostracised at school. His half-sister committed suicide and his own mother denounced him. All this is recalled in 'Son of Yellow Earth", a biographical essay by Mr Xi that was published in a Chinese journal in 2002. At the age of 15, after his father's fall from grace, Mr Xi was sent to work in rural Shaanxi, where he lived in a cave for seven years. He later conceded that had he stayed in Beijing, he 'might not have survived". But his time in the cave was gruelling. 'I had never seen a flea when I lived in the city," he writes, but soon after arriving in the village his 'whole body became swollen from scratching the flea bites". This is Mr Xi's creation myth. Despite starting life with a silver spoon in his mouth, he claims to have first-hand knowledge of the suffering of common people. As he writes in his illuminating essay, 'the knife is sharpened on a grinding stone."
Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018. By Alfred Chan. Oxford University Press; 680 pages; $49.95 and £32.99
How did Mr Xi make it from the cave to the top of the Communist Party? The answer, according to Alfred Chan, a professor of political science at Western University in Canada, was a long, hard slog through the provinces. In this meticulous account, Mr Xi is presented as a savvy apparatchik who sticks firmly to the party line. He managed to emerge unscathed from a huge corruption scandal that exploded when he was in charge of Fujian province. In 2007 he was made party secretary of Shanghai, a prestigious post. There he cleaned up another corruption scandal, accelerating his ascent to the Communist Party leadership. Was it cunning politics that helped Mr Xi beat the competition? Mr Chan argues no: he was just in the right place at the right time. In 2008, when Mr Xi was announced as the presumed successor to Hu Jintao as China's leader, the party was in a crisis, not least because of various corruption scandals. Mr Xi seemed like a capable pair of hands.
Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China. By Desmond Shum. Scribner; 320 pages; $18.99. Simon & Schuster, £20
Desmond Shum was a high roller. With his now ex-wife, Whitney Duan, he cultivated ties with some of China's most important politicians. Through insider deals on the stockmarket and valuable property deals, the pair became multi-millionaires (they deny they broke any laws). But when Mr Xi came to power in 2012, vowing to stamp out corruption, their empire came crashing down. In 2017 Ms Duan, who had divorced from Mr Shum earlier, was snatched in Beijing and disappeared into the maw of the government's anti-corruption campaign.
Mr Shum had already left for Britain. He didn't hear from Ms Duan for years—until she called him days before the release of his tell-all book (which we first reviewed here) about his brush with the upper echelons of Chinese power. Don't publish, she told him. She is still in China, closely monitored by the authorities. Luckily for readers interested in Chinese politics, he ignored her entreaties. His gripping book describes some of the manoeuvres that Mr Xi made to defeat his rivals, many of whom were ensnared by the anti-corruption campaign (certain 'red aristocrats" were spared). According to Mr Shum, Mr Xi was always more interested in power than money. Once, over dinner, Mr Shum tried to take the measure of the future leader of China. Mr Xi sat opposite him, impassive, saying nothing. He wasn't interested in what Mr Shum had to offer.
Deadly Quiet City. By Murong Xuecun.The New Press; 320 pages; $27.99
In 2019, while at home in Beijing, Hao Qun received a knock on the door. Police officers carted him off to the station to reprimand him for tweets he had sent years earlier, which included cartoons of Mr Xi. From that moment he was considered to be a 'sensitive person". After he published 'Deadly Quiet City", under the pen name Murong Xuecun, he feared the authorities enough to leave China. His account of the covid-19 lockdown in Wuhan put a black mark against his name.
Mr Hao's book contains harrowing details of the pandemic's early days. He revealed the anger of people in Wuhan: about the initial cover-up of the novel disease and about the silencing of whistleblowers such as Li Wenliang, the doctor who had raised the alarm before dying of the virus himself. Mr Xi has repeatedly asserted that China's supposed victory over the virus is because of his 'zero-covid" policy. He has staked his political legitimacy on the success of that approach. But Mr Hao's penetrating account is a reminder of the anger and frustration that bubble beneath China's lockdowns.
The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping's China. By Kevin Rudd. PublicAffairs; 432 pages; $32 and £25
Kevin Rudd, Australia's former prime minister, has met Mr Xi several times. Nonetheless, Mr Rudd felt that he should get to know China's leader a bit better. So in 2017 he made the unusual decision to pursue a PhD on 'Xi Jinping Thought", Mr Xi's official worldview, at the University of Oxford. This book is the product of that academic journey. It is also a plea for dialogue as policymakers in Beijing and Washington move farther apart. Mr Rudd notes that while Mr Xi's musings can feel like ideological gobbledegook, it is possible to piece together a coherent worldview. Mr Xi sees politics as a zero-sum game, having as a child felt the cost of his father losing power. On the international stage, he has no interest in backing down. Instead he talks of the international system experiencing 'great changes unseen in a century".