Will Xi Jinping Be the Reformer China Needs?

During the Cultural Revolution, the future paramount leader of China spent seven years in Shaanxi Province, then a remote, poverty-stricken area in the northwest. Xi Jinping’s father, a top revolutionary leader, fell from grace in one of Mao’s periodic purges. In 1969, 15-year-old Xi was sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants, hauling manure and coal. At one point, families in his village subsisted on bark and herbs, and women and children had to beg. “The knife is sharpened on the stone,” Xi said in a 2000 interview that appeared in the magazine of the Communist Party’s youth league and was translated into English last year. “People are strengthened in adversity.”

During the National People’s Congress that convenes on March 5, Xi will assume the title of President of China. The bleak, insular nation of his youth bears little resemblance to today’s economic giant, which is poised to become the world’s biggest economy within the next decade. Since 1978, per capita annual income has grown from $225 to more than $6,000, and 600 million people have been lifted out of poverty. China’s development has benefited government officials like Xi, whose extended family has business interests in companies with total assets of $376 million, a Bloomberg News investigation revealed last June. (No assets were traced to Xi, his wife, or their daughter.) In Xi, a consummate insider and scion of the Maoist revolution, the Communist Party appears to have tapped a leader who will strive for political continuity above all, safeguarding the power and prerogatives of China’s ruling elite.