LIANGJIAHE, China — The next leader of China spent much of his youth living in a dug-out cave. Xi Jingping’s seven years in this remote northern community meant toiling alongside rural villagers by day and sleeping on bricks by night, in stark contrast to his pampered early years in Beijing.
He was born into the communist elite, but after his father, Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, fell out of favor with Mao Zedong — and before his later rehabilitation, the younger Xi was sent to a rural hinterland to learn peasant virtues at age 15.
The Liangjiahe years are among the scant details known about Xi’s life and personality partly because he himself chronicled them as a formative experience. He is now poised to become the ruling party chief next month and president next year of an increasingly assertive China.
What is clear is that Xi has excelled at quietly rising through the ranks by making the most of two facets: He has an elite, educated background with links to communist China’s founding fathers that are a crucial advantage in the country’s politics, and at the same time he has successfully cultivated a common-man mystique that helps him appeal to a broad constituency. He even gave up a promising Beiing post in his late 20s to go back out to the countryside.
He did not at first come willingly, however, to Liangjiahe, a tiny community of cave dwellings dug into arid hills and fronted by dried mud walls with wooden lattice entryways. He tried to escape and was detained.
“Knives are sharpened on the stone. People are refined through hardship,” Xi said in a rare 2001 interview with a Chinese magazine. “Whenever I later encountered trouble, I’d just think of how hard it had been to get things done back then and nothing would then seem difficult.”
Villagers remember a tall bookworm who eventually earned their respect.
“He was always very sincere and worked hard alongside us. He was also a big reader of really thick books,” said Shi Chunyang, then a friend of Xi and now a local official.
It is in the nature of China’s politics that relatively little is known about Xi’s policy leanings. Xi’s résumé in provincial posts suggest he is open to private industry and some administrative reforms as long as they don’t jeopardize the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
Tall, heavyset and married to a popular folk singer in the military, Xi is at ease in groups, in contrast to China’s typically stiff and aloof leaders, such as current President Hu Jintao.
A Xi administration is expected to pursue a more forceful foreign policy based on Beijing’s belief that its chief rival Washington is in decline and that China’s rise to global pre-eminence is within reach.
“Xi was chosen in part because he has the large, assertive, confident personality to lead in that kind of strategy,” said Andrew Nathan, an expert on Chinese politics at New York’s Columbia University.
