In 2015, I had lunch with an old chum of Xi Jinping. He described how China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao was born into the Communist party’s ‘red aristocracy’ but had to toughen up fast when his father was jailed in the Cultural Revolution. The young Xi briefly became a street hoodlum who swore like a trooper, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. He survived by turning ‘redder than red’, climbing the party ladder from a branch secretary in a lowly village all the way up to the top job in Beijing. ‘I am fond of Xi, but he is isolated from his old friends and there is a danger of emperor syndrome,’ the friend warned me. ‘I think Xi will want to rule for 20 years.’

This week, at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), Xi Jinping looks set to win a third five-year term as general secretary – a.k.a. party boss. He will also remain chairman of the Central Military Commission – a.k.a. commander-in-chief of the world’s biggest army. To top it off, many Pekingologists expect Xi to receive a grand new title, elevating him alongside Mao in the party pantheon. There is nothing in the CCP’s constitution to prevent Xi from serving a third term as party chief, but it does break with norms established to ensure the smooth transfer of power. A fourth term is not out of the question, meaning that Xi could indeed rule for 20 years.

He is not quite a dictator, given institutional constraints within the CCP, but he is an extraordinarily dominant figure. Next spring he is expected to return as president, his least powerful position in the curious world of the Chinese party-state. Xi and his allies have constructed a cult of personality, chipping away at four decades of collective leadership-building. Ahead of the Party Congress, the state television broadcaster aired pictures of China’s ‘core leader’ waving to a frenzied crowd. ‘We love you, Uncle Xi!’ they cheered. The syrupy voiceover could have been beamed in from Pyongyang. From schoolchildren to government officials, everyone must study ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.

Why does this matter? It is not unusual these days to talk about Xi as the most powerful man in the world, holding sway over 1.45 billion lives and a US$18 trillion economy. When China sneezes, the world catches a cold – or a deadly coronavirus, as it turns out. Given China’s growing super-power rivalry with the United States, a cool head is needed in Beijing. If Xi builds unchecked power, we should all worry.

Only ten years ago, many observers naively hoped that Xi would prove to be China’s Mikhail Gorbachev, liberalising the economy, state and society. Instead, he turned out to be an ‘uber-Leninist’, in the words of Alfred L. Chan, a Canadian political scientist who has written the first full-length biography of Xi in English. His hefty tome is joined by two shorter accounts of Xi Jinping’s life, one written by the veteran British China-watcher Kerry Brown, the other by two German journalists. They all agree on Xi Jinping’s guiding vision, which Brown pithily sums up as ‘making China great again by making the Party great again’.

Chan’s dense and meticulous narrative portrays Xi as the ultimate party man: what Xi cares about above all else is preserving CCP rule and its monopoly on power. As a bureaucrat in the 1980s and 1990s, that meant diligently solving problems and refusing the temptations of wine, women and ill-gotten wealth. As party chief, it means purging the ranks of corruption, disciplining civil society, tightening surveillance and cracking down on dissent. As Xi puts it: ‘Party, government, military, society, education, east, west, north, south and central, the party leads everything.’

Chan’s academic book, with 130 pages of footnotes, documents Xi’s unlikely ascent up the greasy pole, the minutiae of his record in governance and the machinations of elite politics. All worthy stuff, but it is a slog. More interesting for the non-specialist is his description of Xi’s traumatic childhood, a heroic tale known by everyone in China but few outside.

Xi Jinping grew up in privilege as a ‘princeling’, his father one of the revolutionary founders of the People’s Republic. But when Xi Zhongxun was purged, put under house arrest and eventually thrown into solitary confinement, the 15-year-old Xi found himself a pariah. He volunteered to be ‘sent down’ for re-education among the peasants, ending up in a small, mountainous village near the communist base at Yan’an, 500 miles west of Beijing. Here he lived in a cave, sleeping on a straw mat with six others, defecating in a wooden barrel and surviving on meagre rations of coarse grain. It was akin to transplanting a cabinet minister’s son from central London to a croft in the Scottish Highlands, only jumping back a century or two.

When a desperate Xi fled home, his mother refused to feed him and he was arrested as a vagabond. ‘I suffered hunger and experienced being a beggar,’ he has said. ‘I was infested with fleas when I was in jail.’ Eventually he made it back to the village and buckled down to the back-breaking life of a peasant farmer, reading classical literature by a kerosene lamp deep into the night. According to communist hagiography he was a model worker, carrying impossible loads and wading through icy water to save the village from flooding. What is clear is that he won the respect of the locals, becoming the village leader. Xi said that the experience turned him into a man. Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean statesman, credited it for forging a leader with ‘iron in his soul’.

Xi bagged a place at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing under a ‘worker-peasant-soldier’ quota, rather than through academic merit. From there he began a steady rise up the ranks, beginning in the poverty-stricken hinterlands and moving on to the prosperous cities of the south-east coast, ending up as party secretary of Shanghai. In 2007, he was catapulted into the nine-man Standing Committee of the Politburo as Hu Jintao’s heir apparent. Xi is not an intellectual, despite his fondness for literary quotations, but he is a consummate politician. He played the cut-throat game of political snakes and ladders brilliantly, his apparent lack of ideology allowing him to appeal to hardliners and liberals alike.

In Xi: A Study in Power, Kerry Brown describes him as ‘a supreme opportunist, a converter of chances into goals’. The most interesting insight in his brisk primer is that Xi’s faith in the CCP is like religious belief. He was viewed as a competent but undistinguished provincial leader, yet ‘the quality and intensity of his faith’ took him to the top. The articles he wrote as governor of Zhejiang province read like priestly sermons seeking to preserve the moral authority of the CCP. As party chief, he demands that all senior officials must be ‘true believers’. Those who fail his test have been hunted down like tigers and swatted away like flies, including his greatest rivals.

Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges’s Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World is a colourful and opinionated account, originally published in German last year. Under Xi, the authors argue, China has become a great country again. But it is also a surveillance state, with Xi directing spy cameras and artificial intelligence to create a ‘perfect society’. Where Mao had his Little Red Book, Xi has his little red smartphone app. Party members collect points for watching Xi’s speeches and answering Xi-themed quizzes. The authors make the important point that ‘China provided the blueprint for lockdowns around the world’, as the West downloaded its techno-authoritarian playbook. Remember the NHS health app? China’s influence is here and it is real.

Aust and Geiges also pin the blame for the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang on Xi himself: ‘It is he who ordered the introduction of the re-education camps’ and who has remained silent in the face of international outrage. For Brown, ‘the treatment of the Uighurs shows Xi’s China at its most disturbing’. Oddly, Chan barely gives two paragraphs to the subject. After drawing a fatuous comparison to something called the ‘North Ireland conflict’, he declares: ‘Most indications suggest that Uighur culture and religion is thriving, dynamic and resilient.’ I’m afraid this reads like party propaganda.

What none of the authors manage to do is get under Xi Jinping’s skin. Who is he really? The man they present is a bloodless construction of the party. But in the black box of Chinese politics, no one is willing to talk.