by Sasha Gong
I am left with the impression that Americans still do not understand who Xi Jinping really is.
Xi Jinping spent two days in the United States. There were red carpets, a state dinner, military honors, and meetings at the White House. President Donald Trump showed him Marine One. Television cameras followed him almost everywhere.
Yet after two days, I am left with the impression that Americans still do not understand who Xi Jinping really is.
In public, Xi rarely says a word that is not scripted. He smiles, shakes hands, and nods at precisely the right moments. It is almost impossible to tell from his face whether he is pleased, angry, nervous, or suspicious. Americans are accustomed to judging politicians by spontaneous answers, jokes, facial expressions, and even gaffes. With Xi, that method can be misleading.
Hiding himself has been one of the keys to his political survival.
Communist regimes have produced a curious pattern. Their founders often possess enormous personalities and enormous capacity for brutality. Lenin did. Mao Zedong did. But in later generations, a strong personality can become a political liability. Standing out creates enemies. Independent ideas can look like challenges to the leader. Even appearing too clever can be dangerous.
Nikita Khrushchev had a distinctive personality and his own political agenda. His comrades eventually removed him. By the Brezhnev era, the Soviet system increasingly rewarded a different type: cautious, unthreatening, and bureaucratic. Brezhnev’s successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, looked more like products of a vast party machine than charismatic political leaders.
There is, of course, a more frightening possibility: a man who learns to conceal himself until he acquires supreme power. Stalin was such a man.
Xi grew up with unusually intimate knowledge of this political world.
His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a Communist revolutionary—and repeatedly a prisoner of his own party. During a purge in northwest China in 1935, he was arrested by fellow Communists and narrowly escaped death. Beginning in 1962, he was purged again and spent 16 years under investigation, in detention, and under political supervision.
In 1978, after his rehabilitation, Xi Zhongxun was sent to Guangdong to lead the province.
That is where I met him.
I was living in Guangdong. A group of friends and I had been branded counterrevolutionaries after describing Maoist rule as a “feudal-fascist dictatorship.” Soon after Xi Zhongxun arrived, our cases were overturned.
Before our formal rehabilitation, he summoned us for a meeting.
We told him how we had been arrested, imprisoned, and persecuted. I still remember where he sat, diagonally across from me. When he stood up, I noticed his extraordinarily broad shoulders—the build of a northern Chinese man, uncommon in Guangdong.
After listening to us, he sighed.
“I spent 16 years in Communist prisons,” he said. “For five of those years, I wore shackles.”
We young people fell silent.
Here was one of the men who had helped build the Communist regime, telling us that he had also been its prisoner.
Xi Jinping grew up inside that contradiction.
Born in 1953, he spent his early childhood among Beijing’s privileged Communist elite. Then, when he was nine, his father fell from power. During the Cultural Revolution, the family was torn apart. His father was denounced, detained, and sent away. His sister Xi Heping died amid the persecution. Xi himself was publicly humiliated because of his father.
His mother, Qi Xin, remained a loyal Communist Party member. Accounts of Xi’s youth describe her as participating, under the extraordinary political pressures of the era, in the public denunciation of her own son.
Imagine the world the young Xi saw around him. He lived among China’s most privileged political families, while his own father was being persecuted by the same party that had given the family its privileged position.
In 1969, at 15, Xi was sent to the desperately poor village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi province. He initially fled back to Beijing but was caught. According to later recollections attributed to a family friend, during one period of detention he escaped at night and went home, hoping his mother would give him something to eat. She reportedly went out in the rain to alert the authorities. He was taken back into custody and eventually returned to the countryside.
Whatever one makes of such recollections, Xi learned very young how merciless Communist politics could be.
Yet he did not reject the system. He struggled to join it.
After repeated applications, Xi was admitted to the Communist Party. He was selected to attend Tsinghua University and entered the party bureaucracy, rising through Hebei, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai before reaching the summit in Beijing.
That trajectory may tell us more about Xi than his speeches do.
He had seen what happens when a powerful man loses power. Yesterday’s comrades become today’s accusers. Friends disappear. Even family members may be compelled—or choose—to stand on the other side.
Xi’s great political skill was that for many years he did not appear threatening.
Consider Bo Xilai, another son of a Communist revolutionary and, incidentally, my classmate in the history department at Peking University. Bo was flamboyant, theatrical, and openly ambitious. Xi was almost his opposite. Both approached the pinnacle of Chinese politics. One became China’s supreme leader. The other received a life sentence and remains in prison.
Before Xi became general secretary in 2012, many party elders regarded him as honest, steady, and unassuming. That mattered enormously.
Their generation had survived Mao. Many had been imprisoned. Others had been publicly humiliated. Families had been destroyed. Xi’s own family had suffered all three.
After Mao’s death, these survivors tried to make sure China would never again be dominated by a single leader for life. They did not create democracy, but they gradually created rules governing retirement, succession, and the transfer of power. Jiang Zemin eventually stepped down. Hu Jintao did the same. For the first time in Communist China, supreme power appeared to have an expiration date.
The arrangements were imperfect, but they addressed one of the Communist world’s oldest problems: How do you prevent another all-powerful ruler?
Xi concealed himself remarkably well.
Only after he reached the top did the answer begin to emerge.
Power flowed steadily toward him. The party, government, military, and security apparatus came increasingly under his personal control. His anti-corruption campaigns removed large numbers of senior officials. Collective leadership receded. In 2018, China abolished the constitutional two-term limit on the presidency. In 2022, Xi began a third term as general secretary of the Communist Party.
The old revolutionaries who had suffered under Mao thought they were choosing a safe, unassuming man who would never subject them or their families to another strongman’s arbitrary power.
History played a remarkable trick on them.
Xi’s father had been imprisoned by the Communist Party, nearly killed in one purge and deprived of freedom for 16 years in another. His sister died amid the Cultural Revolution. Xi himself experienced humiliation, exile to the countryside, and detention.
Such experiences might teach a man why power must be limited.
They can also teach him a very different lesson:
Never be the man who loses it.
Sasha Gong
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/29/the-curious-case-of-xi-jinping/
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