President of China and head of the Communist Party. Born in 1953; he is 72 years old. His mother, Qi Xin, is 98. Became general secretary of the party in 2012. Has an engineering degree; many high-ranking Chinese officials do.
Xi is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary who rose to the top echelon of the Communist Party before being purged by Mao Zedong in 1962. Xi grew up deferentially: every lunar new year he would perform the traditional kowtow before his father, who would beat him if his technique was off. He washed in his father's bathwater and ate food his father had already chewed.
Xi's daughter went to Harvard in 2010.
During the Cultural Revolution, the teenage Xi was branded a "capitalist roader" because of his father's disgrace. He was subjected to public humiliation, forced to wear a heavy steel cap while a crowd—including his own mother—jeered and shouted "Down with Xi Jinping." He was thrown in prison, where he slept on an icy floor covered in lice. When he once escaped and begged his mother for food, she refused and reported him to the authorities. In 1969, aged 15, he was "sent down" to the countryside with millions of other young people, living in a cave in a desolate region where girls were sold into marriage by weight. "Even if you do not understand, you are forced to understand," he later recalled. "It forces you to mature earlier."
Xi has said he endured these sufferings by imagining himself as Rakhmetov, a character in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel "What Is to Be Done?" who sleeps on a bed of nails to strengthen his will. He has remained loyal to both family and party despite their treatment of him. "If I were born in the United States, I would not join the Communist Party of the United States. I would join the Democratic Party or Republican Party," he once told Japan's prime minister Abe Shinzo—leading Abe to conclude that Xi joined the party not out of ideology but as a way to gain power.
Xi sees himself as a man of destiny with a duty to generations past and future, and often speaks of himself as a protector of Chinese civilisation. "Whoever throws away those things left behind by our ancestors is a traitor," he told Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of Taiwan. His father was put in charge of unification with Taiwan towards the end of his career but died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled. Xi has made it plain he wants to fulfil it: "The territory left by the ancestors must not shrink," he said in 2012.
During the pro-democracy protests of 1989, Xi was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian. The PLA's crushing of the Tiananmen Square unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991—leading to the Soviet Union's collapse—clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from those events: the PLA must remain the party's army and must be kept under control. This conviction helps explain his relentless "anti-corruption" drives among the high command.
Xi's campaign to drive out corruption and enforce loyalty in the top ranks of the party has generated turbulence, particularly within the armed forces. At a recent party plenum, 37 of the Central Committee's 205 full-time members were absent—the lowest attendance since the Cultural Revolution; state television broadcast the empty rows, dead-centre. At least 22 generals have been expelled since Xi came to power, including nine in a single month in late 2025; his three immediate predecessors—Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping—failed to remove a single one. Three of seven seats on the Central Military Commission are now vacant. The People's Liberation Army Daily accused the latest batch of "extraordinarily large sums of money" and of having "undermined the principle of the party commanding the gun". According to Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a party paper now in exile, the wording suggests that their gravest sin was factionalism: cultivating their own patronage networks. Many of the purged officers were previously involved in the same military formation, the former 31st Group Army. The Pentagon's 2024 annual report on China's armed forces noted that some dismissals may have been linked to fraud in the construction of underground silos for ballistic missiles, though it also noted that graft investigations had probably led the PLA to fix the silos, boosting operational readiness. The purges started in the Rocket Force, which operates China's conventional and nuclear missiles, but have since encompassed the equipment-development and political departments, as well as state-run defence manufacturers. On September 3rd 2025 Xi presided over China's first military parade in six years—his third since taking power—delivering a speech from the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square. The ritual exchange of "Greetings, comrades!" and "Greetings, leader!" served to reaffirm that the PLA owes allegiance to one person alone.
Xi's anti-corruption drive has also spawned a thriving class of "political scammers"—con artists who pretend to be well-connected in order to make money, often promising gullible officials that they can secure promotions in exchange for gifts, favours or cash. Xi first mentioned political swindlers publicly in 2023, demanding a "severe strike" against them; the party's anti-graft agency called the scammers "rampant" and described them as "parasites on the chain of corruption". Cases surge when the party conducts its five-yearly leadership shake-ups, which involve hundreds of thousands of jobs being shuffled at every level. The next such period begins in the build-up to the party's 21st congress, likely to be held in the autumn of 2027. In 2023 the party introduced a rule threatening punishment not just of the scammers but of the officials they hoodwink—the logic being that one cannot be conned unless one has been trying to gain benefits by underhand means. Fu Zhenghua, a former justice minister, was among those who fell foul; some scammers end up so well connected that they come to wield genuine political clout.
The Communist Party's anti-graft watchdog punished 983,000 individuals in 2025, an annual record, and investigated over 1m people for corruption and political indiscipline—at least 15% more than in 2024 and 60% more than in 2023. In 2014 only about 30% of cases led to hard punishments such as prison or party expulsion; by 2025 more than 70% do. A monthly average of 7,271 people were punished for accepting or giving bribes between April and September 2025, compared with 586 in the same period a decade earlier. The number of suspects held without charge climbed by 46% in 2024; at least five prominent entrepreneurs died by suicide after being detained between April and July. Promotion-buying remains pervasive: in the military, according to the Wall Street Journal, Zhang Youxia allegedly helped promote former defence minister Li Shangfu in exchange for large bribes. Anti-graft police disciplined more than 60,000 people in the pharmaceutical industry in 2024 alone. Xi has framed corruption as an existential threat to the party, often citing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a cautionary tale. In a speech published in November 2025 he rebuked party members who said the campaign was "damaging the party's image", insisting that "scraping the bone to remove poison will not only not damage the party's image and prestige, but will actually enhance them."
On January 24th 2026 the defence ministry said it was investigating Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, two high-level military officials. Zhang was one of Xi's most trusted military advisors and is the most senior general to be targeted during his anti-graft campaign. The armed forces' newspaper listed five offences; most strikingly, the two generals had "seriously trampled" on the chairmanship system which gives Xi ultimate authority over the PLA, implying they had sought to undermine him. K. Tristan Tang of the Jamestown Foundation concluded from analysis of officials' speeches that Zhang was not living up to Xi's reported demand that the PLA be ready to invade Taiwan as soon as next year. The purge has revived "Pekingology"—cold-war-era scrutiny of visual cues and wording—as a method for divining elite Chinese politics, which has grown more opaque under Xi. Neil Thomas of the Asia Society, a think-tank in New York, noted that analysts can discern Xi's policy priorities but struggle to judge how or why decisions are made.
Xi's purges have also extended to the foreign-policy establishment. Liu Jianchao, head of the Communist Party's International Department and widely tipped as the next foreign minister, was reported detained in August 2025, following the unexplained removal of foreign minister Qin Gang in 2023.
Xi has growled that the young should be less "pampered". Chinese scholars ascribe Xi-era priorities to ideas from the 1950s: an absolute focus on collective success and national strength, with less emphasis on fostering individual dreams or aspirations. The Communist Party's reluctance to allow a greater proportion of national wealth to flow to households reflects a belief that there is a trade-off between innovation and raising living standards. To fight corruption and enforce political discipline, Xi has revived ideological tools from the 1950s, idealising that era as a simpler, purer age when selfless party cadres fanned out across a vast country to serve the masses.
Xi has promoted "grid management"—a system first piloted in 2004, dividing the country into more than 1m grids of roughly 1,000 residents each—as a way to extend party control all the way down to individual street corners. He has instructed that "small problems shouldn't leave the village and big problems shouldn't leave the town."
Officials have described the domestic picture—economic consequences of the trade war and turmoil at the top of the party—as more important to Xi than relations with America and the world.
In 2013, a year after taking the party's helm, Xi's central organisation department—sometimes described as the world's most powerful HR outfit—mandated an end to using GDP as the primary metric for evaluating cadres, an incentive structure that had encouraged wasteful spending and rampant pollution. In 2026 the party launched a campaign to "establish and implement the correct view of political performance", specifying that officials must deliver "high-quality development". The shift means China now basically hits its GDP target each year without exceeding it, since officials do not want to over-deliver on the economy. Environmental goals, however, do not have the same hold: in the party's recently completed five-year plan, China aimed to reduce the carbon intensity of growth by 18% but achieved only about 12%, with no evidence of careers being derailed. As Ran Ran of Renmin University has put it, local cadres have learned how to game statistical methods to hit their environmental goals.
After taking office Xi wielded power through a host of party commissions—nearly a dozen of his own creation—that permitted him to sidestep the state bureaucracy and other vested interests. The most important, on economic reform, met 38 times in its first five years; since 2022 it has held only six meetings, and none has been publicly announced since August 2024. Its communiqués have grown shorter, suggesting fewer decisions. Other commissions led by Xi have similarly fallen off.
In June 2025 the Politburo created (unpublished) regulations clarifying for the first time the responsibilities of party commissions. They must "co-ordinate without overstepping and ensure implementation without overreaching". Xi has been delegating stewardship of some commissions to trusted lieutenants: Cai Qi, in effect his chief of staff; Li Qiang, the prime minister; and Ding Xuexiang, the deputy prime minister. Each was given a commission to lead in early 2023. All sit on the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee; Xi broke convention in 2022 by promoting them. They have strong ties to the leader but weak links with each other.
In April 2025 two members of the Politburo swapped jobs without explanation. The result is that one of Li Qiang's old colleagues now oversees party personnel decisions ahead of the 2027 party congress.
Delegating functions to loyalists while failing to identify a successor may be signs of a leader preparing to rule into old age. There are no indications that he will step aside when his third five-year term ends in 2027. In their twilight years, both Mao and Deng Xiaoping fragmented authority to ensure that subordinates served as counterweights.
Xi holds three official positions: party chief, military leader and head of state. Only the last of these—the presidency—had a term limit, and it has always been the least important of the three. In early 2018 he abolished presidential term limits, allowing him to remain in office for a third five-year term and potentially beyond. Jiang Zemin had already shown that a leader could retain the military chairmanship after giving up his other roles, meaning Xi inherited not rigid rules but weak norms. "Xi Jinping Thought" has been written into the constitution. Many analysts expect Xi to seek a fourth term as party boss at the next party congress in 2027.
Normally all members of the Central Military Commission, except the commander-in-chief, are in uniform. When a second civilian is appointed, that person is clearly being teed up as the future supreme leader: Xi joined as vice-chairman in 2010, two years before becoming ruler. That he remains the only non-uniformed member is a clear sign he does not plan to step down. No woman has ever made it to the Politburo Standing Committee. The youngest of its seven members is 63; the median age of the full Politburo is 66, the highest this century. Important national and provincial committees are also getting older, with ages clustering in the mid-to-late 50s, as Gavekal Dragonomics, a research group, has noted. According to CSIS, a think-tank in Washington, 37 of the 44 officers appointed to the 376-member Central Committee at the 20th congress in 2022 have been expelled, gone missing or are under investigation. Jonathan Czin, a former CIA analyst, argues in China Leadership Monitor that Xi's next five-year term is likely to involve "increasingly tumultuous internal politicking".
An analysis by The Economist of more than 14,000 of Xi's speeches, writings and other communications since 2013—amounting to over 20m characters in the People's Daily database (the Bible in Chinese has fewer than 1m)—reveals a leader who has grown more assured and imperious. The phrase that has increased most in frequency is "high quality", appearing in 40% of his speeches in 2025, up from 3% in 2013, reflecting his desire for growth to come from technological innovation. China is now a "strong country" (up from 7% to 23%) standing at the brink of "changes unseen in a hundred years" (0% to 10%), a phrase he repeats to foreign leaders. "Artificial intelligence" has cropped up in 13% of speeches this year; "digital" rose from 1% to 14% and "technology" from 17% to 27%. Mentions of Taiwan have increased from 4% to 7%.
His tone has shifted markedly. The word that has declined most is "hope", down to 24% from 47% in 2013. He now prefers to "govern" things (11% to 29%) and "point out" (46% to 69%) rather than "understand" (24% to 5%). There are fewer "discussions" (16% to 6%) and he is less keen on "opinions" (25% to 10%). "I would like to hear your opinions and communicate with you," he told business leaders at the Boao Forum in 2013; in 2025 he has exchanged views mainly with other heads of state. "Self-criticism", never prominent (1% in 2013), has disappeared from his lexicon for the first time. He "cares" less than before (19% to 9%) but feels more of a desire to "defend" (2% to 17%) and "protect" (35% to 49%). He sees fewer "problems" (52% to 36%) and greater "order" (4% to 17%).
Every five years China names hundreds of people as "national model workers". At the latest ceremony, in April 2025 at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Xi urged them to "struggle, struggle, struggle to the end". He told the gathering that the country needed people who were "knowledgeable, skilled and innovative" and that among Chinese "the spirit of hard work, unity and relentless striving will never change". The speech came amid a trade war that could threaten millions of jobs, and was widely read as an exhortation to blame any pain on America. The rhetoric sits uneasily with a growing online counter-culture known as tangping ("lying flat"), in which young Chinese push back against the "996" work ethic—9am to 9pm, six days a week. In July 2024 the ruling Politburo denounced business approaches that led to neijuan, the idea of spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere.
Xi is personally involved in shaping China's 15th five-year plan (2026-30), which will be discussed at a party plenum of about 370 top officials at the Jingxi hotel in Beijing. He remains enthusiastic about "new-quality productive forces" but has warned local governments not to champion exactly the same industries so as to avoid duplicative investment. He has long been sceptical of generous welfare spending: in 2021 he warned that overly generous governments create "lazy people" and "inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems".
In 2021 Xi set a goal to make China attract global talent by 2030 and be the top destination for the brightest by 2035. "Talent" has become as important a core goal of central planning to Beijing as "workers" were under Mao, according to MERICS, a European think-tank.
Xi has publicly championed the nongchaoer—those who "ride the tide" of great economic changes—meeting a group of young tech entrepreneurs just before the 2026 lunar holiday. He told them that "sci-tech self-reliance is the key to building China into a great modern socialist country." He has urged tech workers to "cultivate feelings of devotion towards serving the country." Officials prefer the brightest and best to be in the strategic industries China needs to compete with America. After Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, made a speech in 2020 attacking regulators for stifling innovation with "outdated supervision", Ma disappeared from public view for several months and officials blocked the planned initial public offering of one of his companies. China has since squeezed its tech sector, with regulators targeting everything from cryptocurrency exchanges to video-game developers.
At an April 2025 Politburo study session on AI—only its second, after the first in 2018—Xi told his lieutenants to focus on practical, everyday applications of the technology rather than pursuing superhuman models. He acknowledged China's shortcomings in "basic theory and key core technologies", saying "we must face up to the gap". The approach reflects a broader strategic bet: that the value AI generates will accrue to those who apply it, not to the model-makers, and that China can outlast America by deploying AI faster and more cheaply across industry and consumer services.
Xi's "Governance of China" series is now up to its fifth volume. In 2021 he chaired a Politburo study session that mulled building a "credible, lovable and respectable" image of China, contributing to a retreat from the aggressive "wolf-warrior" diplomatic style that had prevailed since 2019. He has accelerated a long-standing pursuit of technological self-reliance, a strategy that got going in the 1980s. China is now reaping some of the dividends: from electric vehicles to biotech, Chinese companies have emerged as world leaders.
In 2022 Xi put his chief ideologue, Wang Huning—the party's fourth-highest-ranking leader—in overall charge of united-front operations, and gave a seat in the Politburo to the new head of the party's United Front Work Department. Xi said that year that united-front work had become even more important as a result of "profound changes" globally: a veiled reference to tensions with America. He has set a goal of "national rejuvenation" by 2049, the centenary of Communist rule, and often links that to Taiwan's unification with the mainland.
In April 2026 Xi met Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of the Kuomintang, in Beijing—the first meeting between China's leader and a KMT chief in a decade. He stressed the importance of the 1992 consensus for maintaining peace and urged the KMT to strive for "national reunification and rejuvenation". He described both goals as being in line with the wishes of Sun Yat-sen, the KMT's founder. Xi hopes the KMT will win Taiwan's 2028 presidential election so he can revive cross-strait exchanges and pursue peaceful unification, if not within his own lifetime, then by his 2049 deadline.
Xi has said China must have a "powerful" currency.
Xi frames China as a peace-loving giant whose foreign engagement is purely commercial. In 2023 he addressed trade partners gathered for the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, declaring that Chinese travellers along the ancient Silk Road "are remembered as friendly emissaries leading camel caravans and sailing ships loaded with goods". In 2016 he told the Arab League: "Turmoil in the Middle East stems from the lack of development, and the ultimate solution will depend on development." The use of force, he added, had brought disaster to the region; China could offer trade, technology and infrastructure to help Arab governments pursue reforms without jeopardising stability.
In 2020 Xi called for China to create asymmetric dependencies, ridding its own supply chains of foreign inputs while "tightening international production chains' dependence on China". At a meeting in April of that year he explained to a Communist Party body that such dependencies are "a powerful countermeasure and deterrent capability against foreigners who would artificially cut off supply [to China]". The strategy was put into practice during the 2025 trade war: China implemented an export-licensing scheme covering more than 700 products, many of which are relied upon by Western armed forces, including advanced manufacturing machines, battery inputs, biotechnology, sensors and critical minerals. The legislation includes long-arm jurisdiction, giving officials the power to mandate that goods manufactured in third countries using Chinese-made inputs cannot be sold to specific end users. China's use of economic sanctions of all sorts reached an all-time high in 2025, according to research by Viking Bohman of Tufts University. Xi told foreign bosses in March 2025 that "attempting to decouple and disrupt supply chains will only harm others and not benefit oneself".
Xi first attended Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow in 2015, after Russia's annexation of Crimea and its first incursion into Ukraine. He returned on May 9th 2025, standing shoulder to shoulder with Vladimir Putin as Russian and Chinese soldiers marched across Red Square to mark the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat. He praised their "everlasting" friendship. The display was meant to show that Donald Trump's idea of splitting Russia from China is futile—though its futility owes less to a strong alliance than to Russia's utter dependence on China.
During America's tariff confrontation in 2025, Xi promoted "multilateralism and international trade rules" and toured South-East Asia to support "regional economic integration", urging Latin American leaders to "champion true multilateralism and uphold international fairness and justice". China warned countries it would retaliate if they buckled to American pressure to impose tariffs on China. Japan's prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, was reported in April 2025 to have sent Xi a letter aimed at maintaining stable trade links.
Xi has repeated his blunt judgment that "the East is rising and the West is declining." He has said that "the modernisation of Western countries is full of bloody crimes such as war, slave trade, colonisation and plunder" and that China is among the developing countries that suffered. He said in 2024 that no matter how rich China grows, it "will always belong to the developing world". The Academy of Xi Jinping Thought at Renmin University describes development as a permanent "political identity" for China.
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