Tue, Oct 19, 2010 page1

• Xi Jinping marked for bright future

  GLORY-BOUND: China’s likely next president is married to renowned former singer Peng Liyuan, but she was told to curtail her career when Xi Jinping’s star began to rise

  • Reuters, BEIJING
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  Married to a one-time famous singer and briefly in charge of China’s richest and most glamorous city, troubleshooting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平) is now well on his way to taking the top job in 2013.

  Picked twice to bring a troublesome part of the country under control, Xi yesterday won another boost to his succession prospects when the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted him to the body that oversees the country’s military.

  Xi, 57, has long been marked out as the likely successor to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), who must retire from running the CCP in late 2012 and from the presidency in early 2013.

  Xi’s prospects for clinching the top job became even clearer after the CCP’s Central Committee, a council of about 370 senior officials, promoted him to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the People’s Liberation Army. Hu is chairman of the Military Commission, and Xi’s promotion means he is following in the footsteps of Hu, who was also promoted to the Commission before becoming state president.

  Xi has crafted a low-key, sometimes bluff political style. Earlier this year, he complained that officials’ speeches and writings were clogged with CCP jargon and demanded more plain speaking.

  During a visit to Mexico early last year, he mocked foreign worries that China was headed down the wrong path.

  “Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us,” he said. “First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?”

  Xi went to work in the poor northwestern Chinese countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the chaos of the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official.

  He later studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, an elite school where Hu also studied. Xi later gained a doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

  He is the son of reformist former vice premier and National People’s Congress vice-chairman Xi Zhongxun (習仲勛), making him a “princeling” — one of the privileged sons and daughters of China’s incumbent, retired or late leaders. A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi Jinping was promoted to governor of Fujian Province in August 1999 after a string of provincial officials were caught up in a graft dragnet.

  In March 2007, the portly Xi secured the top job in China’s commercial capital Shanghai when his predecessor, Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), was caught up in a huge corruption case. Xi held that job until October 2007 when he was promoted to the CCP’s Standing Committee — the ruling inner-circle.

  Xi shot to national fame in the early 1980s as CCP boss of a rural county in Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. He had rare access to then-national CCP chief Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) in the leadership compound, Zhongnanhai, west of the Forbidden City.

  Xi is married to Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), a renowned singer who was once arguably more popular in China than her husband, until the CCP began ordering her to keep a low profile as her husband moved up the ranks.
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