By Jesús Centeno
Beijing, Oct 15 (EFE) . – The military secretary general in chief and president of China, Xi Jinping, 69, will make history at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of China, which starts this Sunday with a third term of five years unprecedented among his predecessors.
Born in Beijing in June 1953, Xi knew from an early age how the regime’s cadres were distributed according to the directives of the time. His father, deputy prime minister in the early 1960s, was purged of the Cultural Revolution – newly liberated in 1975 – while “transferred” to a remote domain of Shanxi province.
It was the time when Mao Zedong sent other young people to rural spaces to “degentrify” and Xi, after the initial impact, to “survive wearing the reddest of all reds,” his biographers describe.
Although his circle of relatives was then blacklisted, at the age of 22 he controlled his entry into the ranks of the Party, where he stood out for his pragmatism, realism and, above all, for his ambition.
Following the rehabilitation of the family clan, Xi began building his own network and climbing positions in the country’s most evolved coastal provinces to appoint Fujian governor and later party secretary in Fujian and Shanghai.
In the late 2000s, the party was looking for a candidate with a pedigree and Xi — now driven by his father, exalted the reforms of the 1980s — was intended to update then-President Hu Jintao.
“The (party) felt that China’s reform was going through a ‘deep water’ phase and that strong leadership was needed. There may be no doubts, not even about the vertical conception of force that, according to the mantra of ancient China, is not shared more than necessary,” Spanish teacher Xulio Rios told EFE.
In 2012, Xi won the party’s general secretary and, the following year, the country’s presidency on a promise to fight corruption — critics say it is eroding rivals — and put China at the table of major world powers.
The party has bet everything on Xi’s letter and has built a cult around a personality that he has explained as “the man of the people”, but who has hesitated to make decisions.
While this cult existed towards other Chinese leaders such as the charismatic Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, Xi did not dislike and began selling theoretical guides announcing the arrival of a “new era” in which China would modernize until 2049, the year in which the country will commemorate its centenary.
Xi, whose biographers point to his ability to broaden his political base, decided in 2018 to reform the charter to remove the two-term presidential limit.
“Figures like Jiang’s still have significant influence, but other minor factions are comparable. So a third term for Xi means breaking a more collegial rule within the Party,” Rios said, adding that there were some “reservations” to change. EPE
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