BBC News: “Xi Jinping is expected to be the next Chinese leader.
Vice-President Xi Jinping is widely tipped to become China’s next president and Communist Party chief.
Current leader Hu Jintao must retire as head of the party in 2012 and from the presidency in 2013, and Mr Xi’s current positions all suggest he is in place to assume the top jobs.
The 59-year-old, seen as a “princeling” – a term applied to senior officials who are thought to owe at least some of their success to family connections, is already on the standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
He is also one of the vice-chairmen of the party’s Central Military Commission, which controls the army.
Analysts see this appointment – a position Mr Hu held before he secured the top post – as a key indicator that he is tipped for the top in the leadership change expected in coming weeks.
Path to the top
Born in Beijing in 1953, he is the son of revolutionary veteran Xi Zhongxun, one of the Communist Party’s founding fathers.
Xi Zhongxun was purged from the post of vice-premier in 1962 prior to the Cultural Revolution and eventually imprisoned. The young Xi Jinping was then sent to work in the countryside like most other “intellectual youth” of the time.
He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which has produced many of China’s current top leaders, including Hu Jintao.
Xi Jinping’s military appointment intensified assumptions he will succeed Hu Jintao
Joining the Communist Party in 1974, he served as a local party secretary in Hebei province and then went on to ever more senior roles in Fujian and then Zhejiang provinces.
He was named party chief of Shanghai in 2007 when its former chief, Chen Liangyu, was sacked over corruption charges. Shortly after, he was promoted to the party’s Standing Committee and, in 2008, became vice-president.
Xi Jinping is seen as pro-business, after working hard to attract foreign investment to Fujian and Zhejiang.
In 2005, when he was the Communist Party secretary in Zhejiang, he told media that “government should be a limited government”.
Whenever there are issues that the government was incapable of handling, he said, the public should be given back the power to tackle them.
Seen as having a zero-tolerance attitude to corrupt officials, Mr Xi has twice been drafted in to trouble-shoot major problems.
In Fujian he helped to clear up a corruption scandal in the late 1990s which involved the jailed smuggling kingpin Lai Changxing.
In 2004, he reportedly told officials: “Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain.”
When, in June 2012, a Bloomberg investigative report examined the finances of his relatives, the company’s website was blocked in China – even though the report said there was no indication of wrongdoing by him or his family.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 
Leave a comment