Rare Insights on One of the World’s Most Powerful Men: Evan Osnos Profiles Xi Jinping in The New Yorker
By any measure, Chinese ‘commander in chief of everything’ Xi Jinping is one of the most powerful and consequential people on the planet. Less theatrical and publicly-exposed than Vladimir Putin, he exercises even more far-reaching control of an even more powerful country. Yet little is known outside China about Xi, particularly concerning the formative experiences, personality, relationships, and leadership traits that undoubtedly shape his vision and decision-making today. Award-winning journalist and author Evan Osnos helps close part of that gap with this must-read piece. He makes the most of available tea leaves to offer fresh insights in a most compelling form. One senses that Osnos has captured the essence of an exceptionally canny and confident leader, even as we are left wanting to know still more…
Evan Osnos, “Born Red,” The New Yorker, 6 April 2015.
How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao.
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 teen-ager, 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. When he received a guest, he stood still, long arms slack, hair pomaded, a portrait of take-it-or-leave-it composure that induced his visitor to cross the room in pursuit of a handshake. …
Xi is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first who was born after the revolution, in 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of eighty-seven million members of the Communist Party, an organization larger than the population of Germany. The Party no longer reaches into every corner of Chinese life, as it did in the nineteen-seventies, but Xi nevertheless presides over an economy that, by one measure, recently surpassed the American economy in size; he holds ultimate authority over every general, judge, editor, and state-company C.E.O. As Lenin ordained, in 1902, “For the center . . . to actually direct the orchestra, it needs to know who plays violin and where, who plays a false note and why.” …
