Dragon's Head: New China's Aspirations and Identity

By Jensen Cox

Is China really "close" as claimed in the title of a vintage arthouse movie? Jensen replies in his Dragon's Head, "No". It truly is a great distance away. Most importantly, it is unique. Because there are ten, one hundred, and thousand Chinas, the author, a sinologist who spent six years living in China, continues. When you explore them, it's like traveling through time, passing between isolated pre-industrial villages and cutting-edge smart cities where, while you're stuck at a stoplight on a moped, a drone might occasionally advise you to wear a helmet to avoid paying a large fine.

Thanks to his work, Jensen was able to closely investigate the contradictions of this country and above all to see what has been defined as "the era of ambition" take shape and mature. Traveled by an unstoppable flow of energy, momentum and progress objectives, the Celestial Empire has in fact been able to transform itself and make the most of the advantages of globalization, in a dizzying ascent that has subverted geopolitical paradigms like never before.

From the "New Mao" Xi Jinping to the challenge with the United States for global governance, from the Chinese Dream to the New Silk Road project, from the incredible technological innovations to the Hong Kong protests, the author takes us on an exciting journey through the today's China, clarifying stereotypes and reality, helping us to understand the present and the future of a country that is increasingly decisive on the global stage. In the new world order, for the first time we Westerners "have to deal with a different culture without our presupposing that we are better or superior to count or serve anything. A completely new scenario that requires listening, study, mutual understanding. It is a great challenge, the challenge of our time".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: May 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215347713

Jensen Cox

Jensen Cox is an esteemed author renowned for his profound insights and meticulous research in the fields of history and business. With an exceptional ability to weave captivating narratives and shed light on complex subjects, Jensen has established himself as a trusted authority in both disciplines. Through his thought-provoking works, he has consistently delivered invaluable knowledge and enriched the understanding of readers around the world.

Book preview

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The Chinese Dream

Without the ability to decipher non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on blank pages, no one should ever dream of analyzing the nature and reality of Chinese communism.

SIMON LEYS , sinologist

It's 12.30 on a sultry July day in Beijing. The restaurant is called Qing Feng Baozi Pu. It is crowded, there is a very loud background noise of chatter and crockery. The air conditioning, as often happens in this city, is so exaggerated that it forces you to cover your back. The waiter brings the menu. It's all in Chinese. I scroll through the fonts, but can't find what I'm looking for. Still, I'm sure the restaurant is the right one. I double check. Resigned, I nod to the fuwuyuan , as waiters are called in China, and ask: «I read that a few years ago President Xi Jinping had lunch here and that since then you have been serving the menu he ordered».

The young man changes expression. He frowns. I can't quite figure out what's going on. He approaches me and explains that it is better not to mention Xi Jinping, it is inappropriate.

I collect, but I persist with my request, avoiding making the same mistake. I just show him the photograph of the president's tray I found online.

A few minutes pass and the dishes arrive on my table: the traditional baozi stuffed with pork and onion, a portion of stewed pork liver and sautéed vegetables.

A few months after becoming President of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping walked in here, queued up, ordered his tray of food, and sat down among the regular customers to chat and eat his lunch, priced at 21 yuan (about 3 euros). An unprecedented move for a Chinese head of state. The news bounced around in all the newspapers and on all the websites, giving rise to refined theories according to which the choice of particularly frugal foods was intended to underline and publicize the great anti-corruption campaign among members of the Chinese Communist Party, launched by Xi Jinping who had just ascended in power. Since then, the Qing Feng Baozi Pu restaurant has increased its branches by 70 percent, reaching 314 establishments. The now legendary «President combo», however, need not be named.

Xi Jinping is the character you cannot ignore if you want to understand China today. He has been the secretary of the Communist Party of China since November 2012, and since March 2013 he has been the sixth president of the People's Republic of China. He is part of the so-called fifth generation of leaders and, already in 2017, he was defined by the weekly «Economist» as the most powerful man in the world.

Now I wouldn't want what I'm about to write to be misunderstood and mistaken for an unsolicited display of my language skills. However, I have heard countless variations of Italians pronouncing the name of the Chinese president, all strictly wrong. After all, we are talking about the most powerful man in the world. Knowing how to pronounce his name is certainly useful and seems to me an excellent starting point. Beware especially of those who call it Ksi Ginping, the most widespread of the incorrect formulas. In the Chinese language, the initial x has the sound of the sc of slip (actually, try to bring the tongue to the lower teeth, instead of the upper ones...) and the final g is silent. The correct pronunciation is this: «Sci Ginpin».

Since he became number one in the Celestial Empire, Xi Jinping immediately wanted to give himself a break with his predecessors: President of the people, as he wanted to be labeled. Perhaps because it has almost nothing popular, at least in terms of origins.

The Red Prince

Xi Jinping is a «little red prince» (in Chinese 太子党 tàizǐ dǎng ), the name used to define the children of the protagonists of the revolutionary process that led Mao Zedong to win against the nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek and found the People's Republic of China in 1949 His father, Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong during the Long March, and when Xi Jinping was born in Beijing (some say, however, he was born in Fuping in the northwestern province of Shaanxi) in 1953, the third of four children, is minister of the Propaganda department. Five years later, Xi Zhongxun becomes deputy prime minister.

Little Xi Jinping spent his childhood in Zhongnanhai, the highly armored headquarters of the Communist Party of China, where even today the country's political leaders act and make fundamental decisions. He is admitted to the prestigious Primo Agosto school, also known as the cradle of leaders, and attends the children of the other powerful people in the country. He lives with them, plays with them, grows up with them, and with them he is aware of the role of responsibility and of the destiny that being part of that elite entails.

In the early 1960s, however, everything changed. Xi Jinping's father falls from grace and is sent to work in a factory, while his mother, Qi Xin, is sent to a farm. The situation worsens with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the political campaign that Mao Zedong launches during his last ten years in power (1966-1976) to strengthen his authority within the party, where the reformists Deng were taking over Xiaoping, then secretary of the Communist Party, and Liu Shaoqi, then president of the People's Republic.

Labeled an enemy of the people, targeted by the Red Guards and forced into heavy sessions of public self-criticism in the Beijing Workers' Stadium, Xi Zhongxun ends up in prison, where - he will tell - he spends his days walking an endless circular path, ten thousand steps clockwise and ten thousand steps counterclockwise.

Thirteen-year-old Xi Jinping suddenly goes from a condition of extreme privilege to one of extreme hardship. The August 1st school is closed and he is forced to live on the street together with the other sons of like him. The Red Guards capture him and force him to denounce his father four times.

In 1967, like millions of other young people, he was sent to the countryside to be re-educated in the true values of the revolution by the only authentic custodians left, according to Mao Zedong: the peasants. Destination Liangjiahe, a small village in Yan'an prefecture, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, his father's stronghold.

In a 2004 interview, speaking of his journey towards re-education, Xi Jinping recalls that everyone was crying on the train to Yan'an, but he was smiling because he knew that if he had stayed in Beijing, he could have been a victim of the fury of the Red Guards and did not survive.

Life in Liangjiahe is not what Xi Jinping imagined. He was shocked by the fatigue of working in the fields and, in order to rest, he began to smoke and spend a lot of time in the bathroom. «The first test to pass» he will declare over the years «was that of fleas. As soon as I arrived, I couldn't stand them. My skin reacted badly to their bites. My body was covered in red sores which then turned into blisters and burst. It was very painful. After three years, however, I stopped being afraid of their bites because my skin had become as tough as that of ox and horse. ¹

The media report many suggestive details from this period. Xi Jinping lived in caves with the villagers, slept on a kang , the traditional Chinese bed of bricks and clay, grazed sheep, built dams and repaired roads. Above all, the hagiography wants him to read a lot: on the net there are documentaries in which the peasants of those countrysides remember the heavy suitcases full of books with which Xi Jinping had presented himself to the village.

The official press, however, fails to mention how much the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution has affected the Xi family. It is in fact in Liangjiahe that the young Xi Jinping receives the news of the suicide of his half-sister Xi Heping, his father's eldest daughter, who hanged herself at the auction of a shower after ten years of persecution by the Red Guards.

The seven years spent in Liangjiahe are very important because, in the public narrative, they become the basis of the fundamental concept of Xi Jinping, president close to the people. These are the period which, according to his own words, represented a sort of rebirth: "When I arrived in the yellow lands I was agitated and confused, when I left, at twenty-two, I had clear objectives and I was full of confidence » he wrote in 1998. Even today he claims to feel like a «native of Yan'an» and maintains that many of his ideas have matured in the formative years spent there.

In the early seventies, Xi Jinping returned to Beijing and - unlike his brothers and sisters, who moved to Hong Kong and Canada, and many red princes who choose to devote themselves to something else to forget the painful years just passed - he decides to become redder than the reds and join the political system that has persecuted him and his family. While his father was still in prison, he had made seven attempts before being admitted to the Communist Party of China and when he was finally accepted in 1974, he seemed to have clear ideas. A chemical engineering graduate from the prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing, he joined the army and began working as secretary to Geng Biao, a senior defense official who was a close friend of his father. He immediately showed that he was well aware of how much military roles in China serve to gain prestige and influence, but are not able to guarantee a high-level political reputation: in the early 1980s he left his career in the army to move to the civil one.

In the same period he marries Ke Lingling, the elegant daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Great Britain, but the two divorce shortly after, when she decides to move to London with her father instead of following her husband in a remote province of China.

The rise to power

Despite his noble birth, in his climb to the top of the party Xi Jinping gains experience in difficult provinces, aware that the apprenticeship away from Beijing is the only way to reach central power while avoiding the hatred and envy of his comrades with less high-ranking origins.

In 1982, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, he asked to be sent back to the countryside and ended up in the extremely poor province of Hebei, not far from Beijing. Within a year he becomes secretary of the prefecture of Zhengding and characterizes his policy with what we would define as populist positions: he gives the first foreign car imported into the country to the office of retired party cadres and keeps an old jeep for himself, grants priority medical examinations to elderly veterans, often wears his army green pants to show humility.

Xi Jinping is well aware of the lesson of his father who, after the death of Mao Zedong, was rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and in the early 1980s played a fundamental role in the establishment of the Special Economic Zones, in which the attraction of investments foreigners to favor the industrial take-off of China. Even the young Xi Jinping tries his hand at market policies and allows farmers to use the land to raise animals rather than to grow grain for the state.

In 1985 he moved to the southern province of Fujian, one of the most corrupt in the country, but also one of the busiest in terms of business. Very skilled in managing his image, having to meet foreign investors, he puts off his military trousers and begins to wear a Western suit. Among its many characteristics, Fujian has that of being located opposite the island of Taiwan: many argue that Xi Jinping's attention to the burning question of Taiwanese independence matured precisely in this period (we will deal with the topic later ).

In the same year, the future president made a trip to the United States. For two weeks he was a guest in Iowa of two American citizens, Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. He sleeps in their children's room. He does not introduce himself as a party secretary, but as a representative of the Shijiazhuang Food Association and studies cattle breeding methods. He will return to visit them in February 2012, shortly before becoming national secretary of the PCC , and in front of the cameras he will remember with emotion the small room in which they had welcomed him when he had not yet built his political future. Together with the visit to President Barack Obama, this will be one of the first public outings to present himself to the West as well.

The sixteen years that Xi Jinping spends in Fujian are fundamental both politically and in terms of personal history. It is here that he meets Peng Liyuan, his second wife, defined by many observers as his secret weapon. When a mutual friend brings them together, 33-year-old Xi Jinping is the deputy mayor of Xiamen City, while 24-year-old Peng Liyuan is already one of China's most famous sopranos, thanks to countless recorded records and her singing performances in the traditional broadcast on the evening of the Chinese New Year, a format that gathers something like eight hundred million viewers around the television (to be clear, the most watched Italian broadcast, the Sanremo festival, reaches ten million in the most successful editions). There are videos of her performances on YouTube: a Chinese soprano is very different from a western soprano. To understand it, it is essential to be prepared to listen.

Born in 1962 into a poor provincial family, Peng Liyuan enlisted at a very young age in the prestigious artistic company of the People's Liberation Army, even obtaining the rank of general. Although it has been completely deleted from the Chinese web, the photo on the back cover of an issue of the army magazine remains famous, showing her in uniform singing patriotic songs to comfort the troops engaged in enforcing martial law during the protests of Tiananmen Square.

When she and Xi Jinping got married, Peng Liyuan was much better known than her husband. This creates some embarrassment at first, but soon turns into a strength: in the 1990s, in fact, Peng Liyuan exploits her connections at the top of the army to introduce her husband among the leaders of the Shanghai faction of the party, which headed by then-President Jiang Zemin. ²

The two lived apart for twenty years, from 1987 to 2007: she in Beijing, where she pursued her career, and he in the suburbs. Xi Jinping was unable to stay close to his wife even when his daughter Mingze was born, because in those days in June 1992 Fujian was hit by a typhoon and he, as head of the local party, could only remain in his command post.

She is cultured and refined, he is a hard working civil servant who keeps a low profile. " Marriage soft power " has been called by some, and it has actually worked. The world of the Chinese web has often celebrated the love between the two through videos and photo montages. One of the most famous is the song Uncle Xi Loves Mother Peng , which reads: "Men should learn from Xi, women