From a cave to the Great Hall: The rise of Xi Jinping

China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) is currently holding its 20th National Congress and its undisputed star is Xi Jinping, who once lived in a cave in the 1960s when his father was expelled from the party and the family exiled to a rural area as a punishment.

But now, in an interesting turn of life events, Xi is highly anticipated to receive a third term as the general secretary of the very party which punished his father for falling short on the CCP’s loyalty standards. 

Back in the day, his family house was torched by Maoist partisans. One of his sisters killed herself during the turbulent times as family members were forced to publicly denounce the demised father. 

Despite all this, his father Xi Zhongxun, a prominent Chinese revolutionary and a deputy prime minister prior to his expulsion from the party, advised his son to stay loyal to the CCP under any circumstances. 

The son followed the father’s advice, reaching the top post in 2012 as the country’s paramount leader, an informal description of China's most powerful man, who leads not only the CCP but also the government as well as the army. He got a second term in 2017. 

If -- as it’s expected -- Xi enters the Great Hall of the People in Beijing alongside the CCP’s newly-elected or re-elected leaders at the end of the party’s congress this week, it will put Xi alongside Mao Zedong, the country’s communist revolutionary leader and one of the comrades of Xi’s father. 

The Great Hall of the People, a significant location close to Tiananmen Square used for both legislative and ceremonial purposes, is also the meeting place of the CCP’s National Congress, which happens once every five-year. The ceremonial entrance of the CCP’s newly-elected leaders to the Great Hall shows who will lead the country for the next five years. 

The father’s legacy 

When it comes to Xi’s life, Western media usually prefers to focus on a particular part in his story, which is the expulsion of Xi’s father from the CCP as an evidence of the communist party’s suppressive nature. But the father’s story, which pretty much shaped Xi’s worldview and his attitude later, was not stuck there. 

Despite his expulsion, which included jail time and exile in a rural area to learn from peasants, Xi Zhongxun – who was known for his political moderation and reconciliation efforts with various communities from Uighurs to Tibetans during and after the revolutionary struggle – was able to stay as a respected figure across powerful Communist Party circles.

Some strong evidence emerging from the father’s different life episodes show he was both a genuine figure, who did not betray his friends for the sake of strict party rules and interests, and an able and reformist local leader, who worked hard to improve people’s quality of life, fighting corruption to a great extent. 

His purge was also related to both his political moderation and his loyalty to friendships, having an unorthodox approach that the party’s long-term interests should be based on a pragmatic understanding of politics as much as keeping reconciliation efforts alive to address political disputes. 

Xi’s father was rehabilitated in the party at the end of the controversial Cultural Revolution in 1976 after Mao’s death, and was part of the CCP Central Committee and Politburo, the two powerful leading institutions of the party, in the1980s. He was also one of the first promoters and pioneers of the free market economy in communist China. 

In many ways, Xi’s leadership embodies his father’s politically pragmatic and moderate mindset, empowering the father’s successful local political practices into a national level and combining free market realities of the global community with collective understanding of Chinese people. 

He coined this synthesis in ideological terms as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or 21st century Marxism, which is also called Xi Jinping Thought. Now many in China consider Xi Thought as an equally powerful ideological framework as Mao Thought, which was used as a political instrument to bring Xi’s father down back in the day. 

Xi Thought is a testimony to the Chinese leader’s faith in “common prosperity” and social equality, the two pillars of Marxist ideology, prioritising improvement of ordinary people’s life standards over economic growth, something which is a missing part in many Western societies. To some, Xi Thought also explains why Chinese growth has recently slowed down. 

“Xi Jinping wants to show that he isn’t just a party leader but also almost a spiritual seer for China — a bold, visionary statesman,” says Feng Chongyi, an expert on China and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. 

Xi Thought aims to realise the Chinese Dream, a collective social project, placing itself as a counter-political approach to the American Dream, an understanding based on individualism and political liberalism. 

"This dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation. And for the military, it is a dream of a strong military," said Xi, whose only daughter is a graduate of Harvard University, indicating that Beijing is bidding with the US for the super power leadership. Xi is said to love American movies like Saving Private Ryan, The Departed and The Godfather. 

In the international context, the sovereign rights of states should not be sacrificed for the sake of individualism and personal liberties which the West-led international rules aim to protect, according to Xi. 

However,  Western states as well as rights groups accuse Xi’s China of various violations such as curbing freedom of speech, suppressing individual liberties and putting the country under a vast surveillance system to monitor every move of its citizens.

How Xi became China’s top leader

During his father’s exile, Xi lived in a cave in Liangjiahe village in central China, which is now a tourist attraction. Both his father’s political experience and his village life, which has continued as many as seven years, left some indelible marks on Xi’s life. 

"People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause,” he said in 2000, remembering those old days. 

“I see the bullpens and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level," he added, referring to shifting alliances and the fragile nature of politics. Bullpens are a reference to Maoist Red Guards’ detention centres, where his father faced the possibility of execution at some point. 

That tough understanding of political life, joined with some good fortune and the father’s past credentials, paved the way for Xi’s rise. But that was slow and difficult at almost every step. 

In the early 1970s, he applied for membership of the Communist Youth League of China many times, facing rejections seven times due to his father’s political status. But in his eighth attempt, he made it. His application to join the CCP also did not go through easily. After nine failed attempts, he finally made it in his tenth attempt joining the CCP in 1974. 

Following his father’s rehabilitation to Chinese politics in the late 1970s, his path appeared to get easier. From 1979 to 1982, he served as a secretary to Geng Biao, one of the most powerful men of the CCP at the time, who was one of his father’s subordinates from the old days. Geng served as both vice premier and secretary-general of the Central Military Commission, the country’s top military structure. 

In 1982, he became a local party official and for the next two decades served in various capacities in different Chinese provinces, making a name for himself as a fierce anti-corruption fighter like his father. In 2002, he was able to become a full member of the CCP’s Central Committee, which marked his rise to a national stature. 

Since then, his political position inside the CCP has been incrementally solidified, becoming the most powerful candidate in the party’s Standing Committee to take over the country’s top post in 2007. Five years later, he was elected to the general-secretary of the CCP, becoming the country’s most powerful politician.