Who is Xi Jinping?

Date: 10 June 2015

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in power for almost three years, but the question remains: Who is Xi Jinping? One view is that Xi Jinping is a younger version of Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China in the late 1970s and 1980s who brought the fundamental changes to China. Another view is that Xi is the mainland version of Chiang Ching-kuo, a leader of the Guomindang (KMT) who liberalized Taiwan’s politics and made democratization in the island possible. A third view is that Xi is a Chinese version of Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who has been in power since 1999 with alternating titles.

In this lecture, Professor Bo will provide an historical framework for understanding China’s politics and introduce Xi Jinping from both historical and international perspectives.

About the speaker

Professor BO Zhiyue, a world leading authority on Chinese elite politics, recently took up his position as Director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre and Professor of Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Professor BO obtained his Bachelor of Law and Master of Law in International Politics from Peking University and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

He has taught at Peking University, Roosevelt University, the University of Chicago, American University, St. John Fisher College, Tarleton State University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the National University of Singapore. He is a recipient of the Trustees’ Distinguished Scholar Award at St. John Fisher College and the inaugural holder of the Joe and Theresa Long Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at Tarleton State University. He has also been Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University in China and Chair Professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.

He has published more than 160 book chapters and articles and is the author of a trilogy on China’s elite politics, including Chinese Provincial Leaders: Economic Performance and Political Mobility since 1949 (2002), China’s Elite Politics: Political Transition and Power Balancing (2007), and China’s Elite Politics: Governance and Democratization (2010). He is the winner of the “most quoted by Western media prize” on China’s leadership transition in 2012 and a regular contributor to the Diplomat, the most popular online journal on Asia-Pacific affairs with about three million readers.