China’s leader is deliberately secretive, but five books offer clues about his back story
leaders are as shrouded in mystery as Xi Jinping. That is no accident. Mr Xi, plausibly theman 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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