Xi Jinping

After the founding of the PRC in 1949, Xi's father held a series of posts, including Party propaganda chief, vice-premier, and vice chairperson of the National People's Congress.

Xi had two older sisters, Qiaoqiao, born in 1949 and An'an, born in 1952.

Xi's father was from Fuping County, Shaanxi.

Xi Jinping (, pronounced ; born 15 June 1953) is a Chinese politician who has been the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and thus the paramount leader of China, since 2012.

Xi Jinping was born in Beijing on 15 June 1953, the third child of Xi Zhongxun and his second wife Qi Xin.

Xi went to the Beijing Bayi School, and then the Beijing No. 25 School, in the 1960s.

He became friends with Liu He, who attended Beijing No. 101 School in the same district, who later became China's vice premier and a close advisor to Xi after he became China's paramount leader.

In 1963, when he was aged 10, his father was purged from the CCP and sent to work in a factory in Luoyang, Henan.

In May 1966, the Cultural Revolution cut short Xi's secondary education when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticise and fight their teachers.

Student militants ransacked the Xi family home and one of Xi's sisters, Xi Heping, "was persecuted to death".

Later, his mother was forced to publicly denounce his father, as he was paraded before a crowd as an enemy of the revolution.

His father was later imprisoned in 1968 when Xi was aged 15.

Without the protection of his father, Xi was sent to work in Liangjiahe Village, Wen'anyi, Yanchuan County, Yan'an, Shaanxi, in 1969 in Mao Zedong's Down to the Countryside Movement.

He worked as the party secretary of Liangjiahe, where he lived in a cave house.

According to people who knew him, this experience led him to feel affinity with the rural poor.

Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007.

Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007.

He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and was the first-ranking secretary of the Central Secretariat in October 2007.

In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader; to that end, Xi was appointed vice president of the PRC and vice chairman of the CMC.

Xi has also been the president of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013.

He belongs to the fifth generation of Chinese leadership.

The son of Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution.

He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi province, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary.

After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces.

Xi met with Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou in 2015, the first time PRC and Republic of China leaders met, though relations deteriorated after Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the presidential elections in 2016.

He officially received the title of leadership core from the CCP in 2016.

Xi is the first CCP general secretary born after the establishment of the PRC.

Since assuming power, Xi has introduced far-ranging measures to enforce party discipline and to impose internal unity.

His anti-corruption campaign led to the downfall of prominent incumbent and retired CCP officials, including former PSC member Zhou Yongkang.

He has also enacted or promoted a more aggressive foreign policy, particularly with regard to China's relations with the U.S., the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, and the Sino-Indian border dispute.

He has sought to expand China's African and Eurasian influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi has expanded support for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), advanced military-civil fusion, overseen targeted poverty alleviation programs, and has attempted to reform the property sector.

He has also promoted "common prosperity", a series of policies designed with stated goal to increase equality, oversaw a broad crackdown and major slew of regulations against the tech and tutoring sectors in 2021.

Often described as an authoritarian leader by political and academic observers, Xi's tenure has included an increase of censorship and mass surveillance, deterioration in human rights, including the internment of a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang (which some observers have described as part of a genocide), a cult of personality developing around Xi, and the removal of term limits for the presidency in 2018.

Xi's political ideas and principles, known as Xi Jinping Thought, have been incorporated into the party and national constitutions.

As the central figure of the fifth generation of leadership of the PRC, Xi has centralized institutional power by taking on multiple positions, including new CCP committees on national security, economic and social reforms, military restructuring and modernization, and the Internet.

He and the CCP Central Committee passed a "historical resolution" in November 2021.

In October 2022, Xi secured a third term as CCP General Secretary, and was reelected state president for a third term in March 2023.

He responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China with a zero-COVID approach from January 2020 until December 2022, afterwards shifting towards a mitigation strategy.

Xi also oversaw the passage of a national security law in Hong Kong, clamping down on political opposition in the city, especially pro-democracy activists.