Xi Jinping’s mind, veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan says, is “very, very old”; at first blush a rather reductive portrayal of the Confucian mindset predominating in Chinese politics. But there is an astuteness to it. And the mind has been a long time in the making, forged initially by the tribulations Xi’s family suffered during the Cultural Revolution, when his father Xi Zhongxun, a People’s Liberation Army war hero, was jailed as a rightist.
Xi’s early experience of being sent down to Shaanxi at that time, and his father’s ordeal and subsequent rehabilitation, have no doubt made him a master of the Machiavellian arts, resulting in his rise to power in 2012.
Sheridan’s book is a boisterous, no-holds-barred look at a life that has had the air of a picaresque about it, even if it has rarely been acknowledged by Xi. Sheridan culls much of the more salacious detail from the accounts of exiled dissidents and the publications of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, which earned its owners abduction and rendition to China in 2015. While there is not much that will be new to China watchers, the fact Sheridan is not beholden to maintaining access to China, like some other recent authors of books on Xi, makes this a fairly comprehensive account for the general reader.
We see how Xi has cultivated the strangest of personality cults — effectively that of a much-feared middle manager, who forces his turgid ghostwritten books on an entire country, gussied up as “Xi Jinping Thought” — while attempting to mount a long-delayed new Chinese assertiveness on the international stage. Xi is presented as a hard-drinking womaniser with more than a few former friends in low places from his mafioso-like ascent up the Communist Party ladder.
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Xi’s redoubtable political skills have not been matched by competence in governance, as he has lurched from one crisis to another, and even grabbed defeat from the hands of victory in his mishandling of China’s Covid-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, Sheridan sees the Red Emperor’s position as unassailable and reckons China is probably saddled with him until he dies. The sole thing that might prevent this from happening is Xi’s instinct for self-preservation being exceeded by that of a greater entity, the Communist Party itself, should his mismanagement continue.
