5 Years Ago, China's Xi Jinping Was Largely Unknown. Now He's Poised To Reshape China
What a difference five years can make.
In the autumn of 2012, Xi Jinping — the Chinese Communist Party general secretary, someone the Economist recently dubbed the "world's most powerful man" — was a little-known figure. As the 18th Party Congress neared, he had spent five years as Chinese president Hu Jintao's heir apparent, but he was not associated with any specific policy, phrase or ideological position.
Little was known about his personal life, except that he was married to a famous singer — or his personal history, except that he was the son of a onetime comrade in arms to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
When specialists speculated about him, they often considered two possibilities: Would he turn out to be, like Hu during the preceding half-decade, a colorless, rule-by-committee sort who maintained the status quo, gradually tightened control over civil society and made only cautious economic moves? Or would he follow in Deng's footsteps and reboot China's economic reforms — and perhaps even, in the mode of his
