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How Xi Jinping became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong
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Xi Jinping, president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since 2012, is one of the most powerful political figures in the world. By initiating an unprecedented third term as China’s leader in October, 2022, Xi has signaled that he may plan to remain in power for life – making him the first Chinese leader since Mao Zedong to hold unchecked power over the People’s Republic of China.
But Xi’s connection to Mao goes deeper than a shared outlook that emphasizes unifying the party around a single leader. When Xi was just a young boy, his family – who had held elite party status thanks to his father’s pivotal role in Mao's “Long March” in 1935 – was denounced during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of purges and persecution that saw even Mao’s closest allies removed from power. During this time, a teenaged Xi was forced to work hard labor in the countryside outside of Beijing, and his father was imprisoned.
Xi’s subsequent rise after Mao died in 1976 was a methodical process in using his restored elite status as leverage to gain prominent party positions in rural provinces around China, culminating in his promotion to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 2007.
From there, Xi pulled from Mao’s playbook: purging his political rivals and promoting those with whom he shared close personal ties. This process undid the work of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, to prevent the consolidation of power around a single leader in China.
By the time his third term began in October 2022, Xi had reshaped the party and Chinese military leadership to be fully packed with Xi loyalists. And even in the face of social upheaval surrounding his failed Zero Covid policy, Xi has shown no sign of giving up any of the power he has consolidated since taking over as leader of the country.
Follow our channel more interesting videos
Xi Jinping, president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since 2012, is one of the most powerful political figures in the world. By initiating an unprecedented third term as China’s leader in October, 2022, Xi has signaled that he may plan to remain in power for life – making him the first Chinese leader since Mao Zedong to hold unchecked power over the People’s Republic of China.
But Xi’s connection to Mao goes deeper than a shared outlook that emphasizes unifying the party around a single leader. When Xi was just a young boy, his family – who had held elite party status thanks to his father’s pivotal role in Mao's “Long March” in 1935 – was denounced during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of purges and persecution that saw even Mao’s closest allies removed from power. During this time, a teenaged Xi was forced to work hard labor in the countryside outside of Beijing, and his father was imprisoned.
Xi’s subsequent rise after Mao died in 1976 was a methodical process in using his restored elite status as leverage to gain prominent party positions in rural provinces around China, culminating in his promotion to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 2007.
From there, Xi pulled from Mao’s playbook: purging his political rivals and promoting those with whom he shared close personal ties. This process undid the work of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, to prevent the consolidation of power around a single leader in China.
By the time his third term began in October 2022, Xi had reshaped the party and Chinese military leadership to be fully packed with Xi loyalists. And even in the face of social upheaval surrounding his failed Zero Covid policy, Xi has shown no sign of giving up any of the power he has consolidated since taking over as leader of the country.
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00:00These are the seven most powerful men in China.
00:06They represent the top leadership positions of the ruling party
00:09and their identities are revealed every five years
00:12at a carefully choreographed political event called the National Congress.
00:16China's Communist Party unveils its new leadership over the next five years.
00:20The order of appearance is symbolic.
00:22The first person to emerge is the head of the party for the next five years.
00:26At the most recent event in October 2022, that person was Xi Jinping,
00:31China's president for the last 10 years,
00:33who walked out in the top spot a historic third time
00:36after getting rid of China's presidential term limit
00:38that restricted all his predecessors to two terms,
00:41a signal that he may be planning to stay in power for life.
00:45The world hasn't seen a Chinese leader like this since Mao Zedong,
00:49the revolutionary founder of the People's Republic of China,
00:52whose ruthless dictatorship scarred the Chinese people for generations.
00:57Xi has been compared to Mao a lot, and he clearly draws from Mao's playbook.
01:02But there's something else that connects these two.
01:05When Xi was just a young boy, Mao ruined his life.
01:09Generations apart, their paths crossed unexpectedly,
01:12and a teenage Xi from an elite family in Beijing ended up in exile,
01:17condemned to hard labor in the countryside.
01:19Fifty years later, Xi is one of the most powerful political figures in the world
01:24and the only leader since Mao to have unchecked power over China.
01:29So how did he go from being banished in his country
01:32to taking complete control of it?
01:34Xi Jinping's connection to Mao formed long before Xi was even born.
01:47It goes back to when a bloody civil war was raging in China.
01:52A group of radical communist revolutionaries, including Mao,
01:56gained influence over large swaths of mainland China,
01:59and controlled a communist military called the Red Army,
02:03that fought the Nationalist Party ruling the Republic of China at the time.
02:07At this point, the communists were losing... bad.
02:10The bulk of their army was pinned down here,
02:12in a communist-controlled region originally established by Mao,
02:16now surrounded by nationalist forces.
02:18And they were running low on food.
02:20So the Red Army decided to launch a bold attack,
02:23to break through the nationalist forces
02:25and evacuate the roughly 130,000 communist soldiers and civilians stuck here.
02:31On October 16, 1934, they made their move,
02:35and attacked a weaker part of the enemy line.
02:38They broke through,
02:39and even though their numbers quickly dropped,
02:41with thousands dying and thousands more fleeing to the countryside,
02:45around 86,000 stuck together and pushed on.
02:49This was the beginning of a year-long historic retreat called the Long March.
02:54The journey to establish a new communist base,
02:57far from the nationalist forces.
03:01Mao, who used to be a military leader, wasn't in charge at this time.
03:05He'd insisted on using guerrilla tactics,
03:07which had heavily influenced the Red Army earlier in the war,
03:10but that approach had fallen out of favor,
03:12and he was demoted.
03:14The Long March changed that.
03:16After escaping the siege here,
03:18the Red Army continued to suffer relentless attacks
03:20by the pursuing nationalist army.
03:22The military leaders of the march had pushed
03:24for a more traditional wartime strategy of direct confrontation,
03:27rather than Mao's guerrilla tactics.
03:30And the result was catastrophic for the Red Army.
03:32Less than half of the original escape group
03:34survived the first three months alone.
03:36So it was at this first stopping point
03:38where Communist Party leader Zhou Enlai handed military leadership back to Mao.
03:43And Mao picked an endpoint for the march.
03:46Here, 800 miles away in rural northern China.
03:50But they didn't go straight for it.
03:52Mao led the Red Army deep into the mountains,
03:54where he predicted lighter resistance.
03:56And he was right.
03:58But the journey was still brutal.
04:00It was nine more months of non-stop marching and fighting
04:04along this several-thousand-mile route,
04:06before they ultimately arrived in northern China,
04:09where a guerrilla base led by a communist revolutionary named Xi Zhongshun
04:13offered Mao's army refuge,
04:15bringing the Long March to an end.
04:18That man was Xi Jinping's father.
04:21In the end, fewer than 8,000 of the original marchers survived.
04:28Even though thousands died on the Long March from starvation, fighting, and disease,
04:34Mao's leadership was credited with saving the Red Army from total annihilation.
04:38And he became the de facto head of the party as well as the military,
04:42entrusted with rebuilding the army to take on the nationalist forces for total control of China.
04:47Wherever and however the Red troops move into battle,
04:52they spread the glory of Mao Zedong.
04:55This is a good stopping point in the story to talk about how power in the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, works.
05:02Officially, the highest level of authority is a group called the Central Committee,
05:06and is responsible for all of the party's major policy decisions.
05:10Within the Central Committee is a select group of officials called the Political Bureau, or Polyp Bureau.
05:16In most communist parties, like that of the former Soviet Union,
05:20the Polyp Bureau represents the most powerful members of the party besides the General Secretary.
05:25But the Chinese Communist Party has a key distinction that makes it unique.
05:29It has one more, even smaller selection of top officials who ultimately have the final say,
05:34an elite class of Polyp Bureau members called the Polyp Bureau Standing Committee.
05:38This group, which includes the General Secretary, holds supreme control over the Central Committee,
05:44dictates the will of the party, and is in full control of the Central Military Commission,
05:48which oversees China's defense.
05:51Mao's promotion during the Long March landed him here,
05:54in the highest position of the military and the Polyp Bureau Standing Committee.
05:58Even though he was considered the de facto head of the party when the Long March ended in 1935,
06:03he officially became head of the party in 1943.
06:06With both the party and the military under his control,
06:09Mao began to exploit the system to ensure he remained at the top for the rest of his life.
06:15At Mao's first National Congress as the official party leader in 1945,
06:21the party introduced a resolution that brought his influence to a whole new level.
06:25It unified the party around a single understanding of its history,
06:30and declared Mao's political ideology, later called Mao Zedong Thought, or Maoism,
06:35as the unquestioned guiding principle of the Chinese Communist Party.
06:39Basically, Mao's ideas or policy decisions could no longer be challenged by anyone.
06:45It was here he unveiled his equivalent at the time of the Politburo Standing Committee,
06:49the four other top party leaders, all Long Marchers deeply loyal to Mao,
06:54like Lu Xiaoqi and Zhou Enlai,
06:56who would go on to hold some of the most powerful positions in the future government.
07:00Four years later, Mao declared final victory for the Communists in the decades-long Chinese Civil War
07:05and established a new country, the People's Republic of China, or PRC.
07:10Mao Zedong, once a lowly party worker,
07:14now assumed the stature of the dominant figure in all of Eastern Asia.
07:20But winning a revolution isn't the same as running a country.
07:23Because now that you're running a country, there's all these other things you have to do,
07:27like deliver the mail and build a dam and stuff like that,
07:31you can't possibly have the party do all these things.
07:34So the party set up a government that would take the policy decisions made by the Politburo Standing Committee
07:39and figure out a way to make them a reality.
07:42And so it evolved to a system where the party would make all the important decisions,
07:48and especially the Politburo Standing Committee.
07:52Then, as it is today, many of these decisions would go to the State Council.
07:57So the State Council is the highest decision-making body on the state side,
08:02led by the Premier of China.
08:04The Premier of China, by the way, is almost always a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.
08:09One way Mao kept a tight grip on power over the years was by promoting those loyal to him
08:14to top positions in the party and government, whether they had government experience or not.
08:19For example, Zhou Enlai, the former party leader who helped Mao rise to power during the Long March,
08:25became China's first premier.
08:27The advantage of that is that they could never challenge him.
08:31The disadvantage of that is they didn't know what they were doing,
08:34and so administration suffered, policy outcomes suffered.
08:40Long March survivors often became party elites under Mao.
08:44Xi Jinping's father, for example, was appointed Secretary General of the State Council.
08:49And as the son of a Long Marcher, Young Xi was given the informal title of princeling.
08:54Mao succeeded in never giving up his power during his lifetime.
08:58His unchecked policies resulted in massive famines and widespread persecution
09:03that cost between 40 and 80 million lives over a span of decades,
09:07and culminated in the disastrous Cultural Revolution,
09:10a violent final attempt from Mao to consolidate his power
09:13and force loyalty to the practice of Maoism.
09:16The idea was to make himself and his ideas eternal.
09:20The way he viewed communist figureheads like Lenin and Marx before him.
09:25Anyone that didn't fall in line with Mao's ideology was publicly humiliated,
09:29impoverished, excluded from society, and in many cases, executed.
09:34Either at the hands of the army,
09:36or by a militant youth group obsessed with enforcing Maoism, the Red Guards.
09:41Even those closest to the dictator weren't safe from his purges during the Cultural Revolution.
09:57High-level officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee and Long Marchers,
10:01were removed from their positions.
10:03Lu Xiaoqi was denounced as a traitor and died while imprisoned under harsh conditions.
10:08Mao also removed the chief of staff of the army and replaced him with a Maoist,
10:13leaving no one left to oppose him in the military.
10:15Mao's handpicked successor, who always appeared loyally by his side in photos and propaganda posters,
10:21died under mysterious circumstances when his plane crashed as he was fleeing to the Soviet Union.
10:26Mao later denounced him as a traitor.
10:28He denounced Xi's father, too.
10:31This is a photo of Xi's senior being restrained and publicly criticized by the Red Guards
10:36at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
10:38He would remain a prisoner in Beijing for eight years following this.
10:43With his father purged, Xi Jinping, 15 at the time,
10:46was expelled from his elite school in Beijing and sent to work in the countryside.
10:50He had to live in a cave and, you know, do hard manual labor.
10:54His food was barely enough for, you know, a growing young person.
11:01And Chairman Mao was responsible for all of it.
11:05But then Mao died.
11:08The Cultural Revolution ended.
11:10His successor was Deng Xiaoping,
11:12one of the Polyvirus Standing Committee members who was removed from power during the Cultural Revolution,
11:17who, just before Mao died, started making a promise to fellow exiled party veterans.
11:23Deng Xiaoping signaled credibly to all the surviving long marchers that he wanted to rehabilitate people.
11:31So when Mao died, they all supported the rehabilitation of Deng.
11:35And as soon as Deng was rehabilitated, he went ahead and rehabilitated all these people.
11:40With experienced leadership back in place,
11:42the party needed to figure out how to prevent something like this.
11:45From ever happening again.
11:51In order to undo Mao's cult of personality,
11:54the party introduced a second historical resolution in 1981.
11:58It condemned periods of Mao's rule
12:00and emphasized a renewed commitment to collective leadership,
12:04vowing to oppose the consolidation of power around one person moving forward.
12:08The successors to Mao didn't want a dictatorship,
12:12so they divided up these positions and put them in the hands of different people.
12:18Like Mao, Deng kept tight control over the Central Military Commission as its chairman,
12:23and held a leadership position in the government, but was never head of state.
12:27He never held the highest position in the party either.
12:29Instead, he set up a new advisory commission and served as its chairman,
12:33which allowed him to influence the party's direction without positioning himself directly on top of it.
12:39This allowed a power-sharing structure while still making Deng the de facto leader of China until he stepped down in 1989,
12:45following the army's massacre of students protesting in Tiananmen Square.
12:49A protester suddenly ran into the middle of the street and in front of the oncoming tanks.
12:55Anger at Deng Xiaoping, the entire Chinese government.
12:58It had the real feeling of rebellion in the streets of Beijing.
13:03People want to fight the military out of their city.
13:06Deng and his ideology, which moved away from Maoism, set a precedent of sharing power.
13:13He opened up China and established economic ties with these countries,
13:17and was the first PRC leader to visit the U.S. in 1979.
13:21Today we take another step in the historic normalization of relations which we have begun this year.
13:29Deng's reforms became the foundation for decades of economic prosperity
13:33that led China to having the world's second largest economy over time
13:36and being on the verge of becoming the world's next superpower.
13:40Communism is creating a consumer society.
13:43It also reminds you that the standard of living in China is going up.
13:46Here, capitalism rules.
13:50One thing power sharing did lead to was a lot of policy innovation
13:56and then some degree of decentralization,
14:00and both of these things helped China's economy enormously.
14:05Which is why this period of economic growth and reform stretching over roughly 30 years
14:09is known as the Deng era.
14:11And whether he wanted to or not, Deng kept his word
14:13and never tried to consolidate absolute power around himself.
14:17He did end up sharing power.
14:19And that set the stage for power sharing in the party until the rise of Xi Jinping.
14:27So what was Xi doing all this time?
14:31When Mao died in 1976, Xi was back in Beijing studying communist philosophy.
14:37Even though the Chinese Communist Party had ruined Xi's family, he had joined it,
14:41just as the Cultural Revolution was winding down.
14:44But why?
14:45Personally, he might begrudge Chairman Mao for doing all these terrible things to his family.
14:51But I think at this time, he also recognized that in the system of the Chinese Communist Party,
14:57power is everything.
14:59Without power, you're nothing.
15:01But in order to get that power, Xi did something unexpected.
15:05He left Beijing.
15:07As his competitors were fiercely competing with each other in the 1980s and 1990s,
15:12he sort of got out of their way and went to the provinces.
15:17He took positions in party leadership in rural, poor provinces all around China,
15:21where there were no other princelings to compete with.
15:24First in Hebei, a poor rural province outside of Beijing,
15:28where he easily reached the top spot as party secretary.
15:31Then in Fujian, a heavily militarized region where top members of the army were stationed.
15:36He moved up the ranks to party secretary here, too,
15:38before becoming the governor of the province a few years later.
15:41After making powerful friends in the military, Xi went here,
15:45where he once again assumed the office of party secretary
15:48and grew his support on the civilian side.
15:51This strategy of moving around didn't just give Xi a leg up in areas where competition was slim.
15:57It also gave him credibility as a humble, hardworking party leader.
16:01And he cultivated a growing group of supporters who would come back into play years down the road.
16:05It was his last stop, and his shortest one, that ultimately got him back to Beijing.
16:14A brief stint in the top party spot in Shanghai in 2007,
16:17where he rehabilitated the city's image following a high-level corruption scandal.
16:22Xi developed a reputation here as a prudent leader who towed the party line.
16:26Just seven months later, he finally returned to Beijing,
16:29having been promoted to the all-powerful Polypiro Standing Committee.
16:34Basically, the people who were deciding on top leadership at the time,
16:38they wanted a princeling.
16:40But they didn't want a princeling who was too ambitious or too strong.
16:43So Xi Jinping, he was seen as less ambitious because he was willing to go to the countryside
16:50and work in lower-level positions.
16:53When Xi emerged at the 2007 National Congress and leadership unveiling,
16:57he was one of the nine most powerful men in the country.
17:00It was at this moment that his strategic climb over 17 long years in the countryside paid off.
17:07Big time.
17:09When the General Secretary stepped down in 2012, Xi emerged at the top spot in the party as China's leader.
17:15Now, the elite son of a former revolutionary, turned exiled peasant, turned party darling,
17:22was poised to seize control of everything.
17:28Like Mao, Xi Jinping believes that rallying around a single figure is crucial to the party's survival,
17:34rather than the collective leadership Deng's reforms had normalized.
17:37So pretty much as soon as Xi Jinping came to power, he started getting rid of people.
17:42The news, four top officials removed for taking bribes, was announced on state TV.
17:49Xi Jinping has just sacked his foreign minister, just sacked his defence minister,
17:54he sacked a whole lot of other people at the top of the military establishment.
17:57The former security czar has not been seen in public for more than a year.
18:01The investigation against Xi allows the Chinese president to remove those opposed to his reforms.
18:06He launched a major anti-corruption campaign as soon as he took power in late 2012, early 2013,
18:15which led to the arrest of hundreds of senior level officials, as well as military officers.
18:22These purges targeted Xi's rivals in the party, whose vacant positions he filled with his own supporters.
18:28After this massive purge, Xi Jinping was in very tight control over both the party and also the Chinese military,
18:39thereby making him the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.
18:46That pattern continued in the second term, where he unveiled five new faces of the Politburo Standing Committee,
18:51three of them with close personal ties to Xi.
18:55In 2021, Xi pulled off one of his most dramatic acts yet to enforce his influence over the Chinese Communist Party.
19:03He introduced a third historic resolution that unified the party's ideology around one clear line of thinking, Xi Jinping thought.
19:12Xi's personal political ideology would now be the core in the party's thinking, political stance, and action.
19:20Basically, Xi Jinping's ideas could no longer be challenged.
19:24And they weren't for many years.
19:27During Xi's first 10 years in power, the size of China's economy more than doubled.
19:32So did average individual income.
19:34So did military spending.
19:36Under his leadership, China's presence on the world stage has grown, too,
19:40positioning the rising superpower to take on the role of an aggressor externally,
19:44reasserting claims over parts of the South China Sea, intimidating Taiwan and Tibet,
19:48and stripping democratic process in Hong Kong.
19:51Inside its own borders, strict internet censorship and surveillance are widespread.
19:56And oppression of Uyghurs, a mostly minority Muslim ethnic group, is marked by human rights abuses.
20:02But it wasn't until COVID that Xi saw the first real challenge to his authority.
20:07Anger in China is growing.
20:09Video showing protesters in Xinjiang fed up with China's zero COVID rules.
20:14The boldest public challenge yet for leader Xi Jinping.
20:20With these protests all around the country, and the party's reputation in peril,
20:26she reversed the failed policy.
20:28But is now faced with a shaky economy and cracks in his unchecked authority.
20:34It was just weeks before the widespread protests
20:41at the 20th National Congress in 2022 that Xi walked out in the leading position a third time.
20:48He had already locked in the presidency for another five years.
20:52And unveiled a Politburo Standing Committee completely packed with those loyal to him.
20:57After removing the final senior members of the party that had ties to his predecessor.
21:01Now, there is no one left in party or military leadership whose ideology differs from Xi.
21:07I don't think anyone can push him out at this point.
21:11I think he will be the most powerful leader in China as long as he's alive and conscious.
21:21Thanks so much for watching this episode of Atlas.
21:23So many teammates worked on this piece.
21:25A small army of editors, animators, and researchers helped bring this complicated story into focus.
21:30I'd especially like to shout out Raja, one of the key researchers on this piece,
21:34who conducted an incredible interview with our expert Victor Xi.
21:37It takes a lot of resources to make these videos,
21:39but we publish our work free to watch here because we think journalism should be accessible to everyone.
21:43If you believe in keeping journalism free and want to support our continuing work,
21:47go to vox.com slash give now to make a contribution.
21:50Thanks again.
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