How Xi Jinping’s past helps explain the China of today

Sarah Lande vividly remembers the start of her unlikely friendship with Xi Jinping.

It was 1985 in Muscatine, Iowa. At the time, Xi held a low-level job in the Chinese Communist Party and was part of a small delegation sent to rural America.

Working at Iowa’s ‘sister state’ organisation, Muscatine resident Lande helped coordinate the two-week trip and spent time with Xi.

“He was curious about everything, he was almost giddy and happy … And of course, China was just opening up, so we were curious. [There were] good vibes of trust,” she tells ABC RN’s Take Me To Your Leader.

Lande recalls how the 31-year-old Xi stayed at a neighbour’s home, in a vacated teen’s room with “Star Wars [paraphernalia] on the wall”.

“We just treated him like an everyman,” she says.

“The story came to us that the night before these five gentlemen came to Iowa, [Xi’s] father held a dinner for them in their home. And he said [to them]: ‘Go to America and learn how to feed our people’.”

The visit was the start of a lifelong friendship between Xi and Lande, which continues to this day. But much has changed since that first meeting in 1985.

Xi rose through the CCP ranks, becoming China’s leader in 2012, with both the party and the country now firmly in his grip.

His brand of nationalism and control dominate nearly all areas of life there. And China’s relations with the West have tanked.

Stories from Xi’s past – like that of Lande’s – offer insight on how he became one of the most powerful leaders of our time.

‘A huge impact on our life’

According to Professor Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Xi is consequential not just for China, but for all of us.

“Whether we like him or not, we will have to acknowledge that he is going to have a huge impact on our life,” he says.

“China is now so integrated into the rest of the world, what changes in China – for better or for worse – will impact upon us.”

Yet Xi’s ascent to the top was a rocky one — and far from assured.

He was born in Beijing in 1953, just a few years after Mao Zedong’s communist revolution culminated with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Sue-Lin Wong, China correspondent at the Economist, explains: “His father [Xi Zhongxun] and mother [Qi Xin] were revolutionaries. Xi Jinping’s father fought alongside Mao Zedong and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern China.”

Wong says Xi Zhongxun “raised his children, including Xi Jinping, to believe that they would inherit the Chinese Communist Party revolution, that they, too, would be revolutionaries”.

“While Xi Jinping’s father’s generation founded modern China, it would be Xi Jinping’s generation that would make China bigger and stronger.”

Wong says Xi grew up “in immense privilege, at a time when millions of Chinese were living in abject poverty in the 1950s”.

“He lived in a fancy compound and had nannies, housekeepers, security guards and went to the top boarding school.”

Because of this, Xi’s father tried to instil the spirit of the revolution in his children by running an austere household, as a brutal disciplinarian.

Wong points to one story where Xi’s father would make his son “wear hand-me-downs from his older sisters”, which Xi hated.

Father’s fall from grace

After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun went up the party ranks. But in 1962, he had a huge fall from grace, after supporting writing that was deemed “anti-party”.