Xi Jinping

General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the People’s Republic of China since 2012 — the first Chinese leader since Mao Zedong to preside over a sustained personality cult, and, on historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s reading, a leader defined more by his preference for order and control than by any single ideology.

Xi combines strong cultural and political nationalism with a rehabilitation of Confucius alongside Mao as compatible sources of Chinese greatness — a synthesis that glosses over how far apart the two traditions actually stand, since Confucian hierarchy and Marxist class struggle point in opposite directions. Where Mao prized disorder, mass mobilisation, and unpredictability, Xi is, in Wasserstrom’s account, ‘very orderly’ and visibly uncomfortable with anything he cannot control; his inheritance from Mao is selective, claiming the nation-strengthening legacy (invoking Mao’s 1953 Korean War standoff) while rejecting the Mao who stirred street mobilisation. Journalist James Palmer’s caution, which Wasserstrom endorses, is that outside observers should not overstate how much is actually knowable about elite politics under Xi: the older sense of mappable ideological or personal factions within the leadership has largely disappeared. What can be inferred includes a discomfort with internal difference — narrowing space for Hong Kong’s distinctiveness, for Mongolian-language education in Inner Mongolia, and for feminist movements — and, from a leaked internal speech, the view that the Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected a leadership that was not forceful enough to hold the country together.

Economist Keyu Jin and MIT’s Yasheng Huang supply complementary, non-partisan structural readings from outside the political-history frame: Jin frames the central government under Xi as politically consolidated but economically decentralised, running local officials on shifting performance yardsticks (GDP, then environmental compliance, then technological innovation); Huang argues succession has been stable at the system level since 1949 but has grown catastrophically unstable for individual successors, since Xi — unlike Mao or Deng Xiaoping — lacks their outsized founding-era charisma and relies instead on accumulated formal titles.

In the wiki

• Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Modern China, the CCP, and Hong Kong — Xi’s personality cult, Confucian-nationalist synthesis, the ‘black box’ of elite CCP politics, and mainlandisation of Hong Kong under his rule
• Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State — Xi’s succession-instability problem relative to Mao and Deng Xiaoping
• Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other — the CCP’s studied avoidance, under Xi, of Gorbachev-style liberalisation
• Keyu Jin on China's Economy, Industrial Policy, and State Capitalism — the mayor-economy incentive structure Xi’s government runs local officials on
• One Country, Two Systems — the Hong Kong arrangement whose erosion accelerated sharply under Xi

See also

• Mao Zedong — the predecessor whose personality cult and selective legacy Xi draws on