Life and Polvitical Vision of a Leader: Challenging Western Pre-eminence in Global Affairs

Despite being at the helm of affairs in China for more than 12 years now, Xi Jinping is still somewhat of an enigma for the world and may be even for a large number of people within China. Xi became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in late 2012 and then China’s President and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission in March 2013. At that time,he was seen as a pragmatic leader who would continue to honour the Party’s evolving and still young tradition of collective leadership. However, after assuming power, Xi assumed a different character altogether and has become a kind of leader that no one saw coming. Another view suggests that he was only hiding his real self as a compromise until he possessed adequate power as one must. As the book shows, even some of Xi’s own friends ‘concede to having misjudged a longtime friend’ (p. 19). Amidst all this, there is an ongoing debate whether Xi has indeed become bigger than the Party itself which on another occasion would be considered sacrilegious or whether everything that has been done in the last twelve years is actually what the Party wants, and it only gets done if Xi’s name is affiliated with the process.