every day; we had practically nothing in common,”
she is said to have told friends at a 2013 dinner in
London. Her father died in Beijing in 2019 at the age
of 103, undisturbed by his former son-in-law.LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Freed from a marriage he disliked, Xi climbed the
ladder of provincial communist politics, never
deviating from orthodoxy as he served in junior
administrative and party posts. There is, however,
intriguing evidence from American diplomatic
cables that as a young man he was comparatively
open-minded. He talked to friends about Buddhist
mysticism, martial arts and the spiritual practice of
qigong, which combines meditation and controlled
breathing. According to the US documents, he knew
the mountain retreat of Wutaishan, a sacred
Buddhist site studded with temples. He supposedly
evinced a belief in the supernatural. None of this, of
course, interfered with his ambitions.
Xi’s experience of intellectual snobbery in his
marriage may even have spurred him to improve his
own credentials. He later gained a postgraduate
doctorate in law from Tsinghua, citing 97 Chinese
books and 26 in English in a dissertation on rural
markets that ran to 160,000 Chinese characters.
Some scholars voiced scepticism at this feat,
achieved while Xi was running Fujian, a province of
35 million people. They also noted that an influential
faculty member, Chen Xi, was swiftly promoted to
head of the university, then became vice-minister of
education. “How did he have time to do this even if
he did not eat, drink or sleep?” asked Professor Jin
Guantao, an expert in elite politics at Taiwan Political
University in Taipei, speaking to Hong Kong’s Apple
Daily — a newspaper since shut down on Xi’s orders.
In 1986 Xi met the woman who would make him
famous before he rose to supreme power. She was
Peng Liyuan, a popular soprano who performed
Chinese opera and syrupy patriotic songs for the
People’s Liberation Army, often clad in its uniform.
Peng was known across China and she brought
instant glamour to the divorced party bureaucrat.
“Xi and Peng fell in love at first sight,” the official
biography declares. They married within a year.
Peng has a stellar career in her own right and the
Chinese media are keen to portray their union as one
between equals, true to Mao’s dictum that “women
hold up half the sky” (although the solitary woman in
the politburo, the vice-premier Sun Chunlan, may
have something to say about that). The public heard
that while Peng performed in the annual Spring
Festival Gala — perhaps the world’s biggest TV event,
with an audience officially stated to be 1.27 billion this
year — her husband was making dumplings at home,
awaiting her return for an extended family banquet.
For her part Peng is said to treat her spouse with
care and consideration, cooking his favourite cuisine
from northwest China and showing understanding
when he “drinks a bit during parties with friends”, in
the words of the official biography, or stays up late
watching sport on television. Peng no longer performs
due to her role as first lady, though she has appeared in
a charity music video holding hands, Princess
Diana-like, with children living with HIV/Aids.
In 1992 the couple had a daughter, Mingze, who
grew up in the same protective cocoon of schools
and servants as her father. She trailed him as he rose
to be governor of two coastal provinces, Fujian andZhejiang, then party chief in Shanghai, on his route
to the top. In 2007 the family moved to Beijing as the
prizes fell into his lap — a seat on the politburo
standing committee, the vice-presidency and the
prestigious job of running the 2008 Olympics. But
then Mingze did something that broke with the
traditions of the Xi family — she went abroad to
explore the world beyond China.A DAUGHTER IN AMERICA
Mingze enrolled at Harvard University in 2010 under
an assumed name to study psychology and English,
shared a mixed undergraduate flat with fellow
students, cooked her own food and did her part of
the chores. Her identity was known to only a handful
of people, but she was well trained by the Ministry of
State Security to avoid awkward contacts and to
report on all those around her.
Mingze did, however, deviate from the norm in her
voracious curiosity. She decided to attend non-
compulsory classes on the most sensitive aspects of
Chinese political studies given by a British professor,
Roderick MacFarquhar, the author of critical books
on Mao’s Cultural Revolution. MacFarquhar, who
GETTY IMAGES, REX died in 2019, was a charismatic teacher. He
Left: the British academic
Roderick MacFarquhar
taught Xi’s daughter,
Xi Mingze, at Harvard.
Below left: Mingze and
her mother, Peng Liyuan,
in New York in 2018Mingze
appears
to have
persuaded
her father
that her
path lay
overseas.
She is back
at Harvard
The Sunday Times Magazine • 29