A growing body of evidence has emerged indicating that China is making significant headway in its plans to conquer Taiwan. In early January 2025, the Naval News published satellite photos revealing the construction of D-Day-style landing barges at the Guangzhou Shipyard in southern China. The barges have "unusually long road bridges extending from their bows," naval analyst H.I. Sutton observed, making "them particularly relevant to any future landing ... forces on Taiwanese islands." China’s People’s Liberation Army is already testing the barges.
The same week that Naval News revealed the construction, the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, published a report showing that China has "built hundreds of hardened shelters in the past decade or so to protect its air force on the ground in the Western Pacific." Weeks earlier, U.S. officials belatedly admitted the Salt Typhoon hack into American telecommunications systems was far more extensive than they’d let on. According to H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to President Trump, the hack indicates that "China wants nuclear first-strike capabilities."
And yet little is known about the man with his finger on the button. In his new book, The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China, journalist Michael Sheridan lifts the veil on the Chinese leader and the nation he commands.
Xi Jinping is inarguably the most powerful man in the world. He rules over a nation whose economic and military might dwarfs previous U.S. foes, including the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. Noted historian Stephen Kotkin famously observed that Joseph Stalin had the "power of life and death over every single person across eleven time zones—more than 200 million people." Xi is perhaps more powerful. And he clearly sees himself as a transformative figure, a man of destiny.
Xi was born in 1953 "in the afterglow of the Chinese Revolution." As Sheridan makes clear, it is impossible to understand the current leader of the Chinese Communist Party without understanding his parents. "To be born in China in the mid-twentieth century was to be part of the most gigantic experiment in human behavior in recorded history."
His father, Xi Zhongxun, fought in the decades-long Chinese Civil War, helping establish bases in the northwest and overseeing logistics. His work on behalf of the CCP led to important postings after the Communists won in 1949. In 1952 his father was named chief of the party’s propaganda department, overseeing cultural and educational affairs. Xi Jinping’s mother, Qi Xin, also boasted revolutionary bona fides, having seen combat in the internecine conflict.
Accordingly, Xi’s upbringing was far different from many Chinese. He grew up in Beijing, near the center of power and regime founder Mao Zedong. His family received privileges granted only to top CCP officials. But there were drawbacks too.
As Sheridan observes, "even in the heady year of 1953 adults in the new hierarchy knew that to live near the top, near Mao, was to live on the edge of a precipice." The fall would be steep.
Xi Zhongxun fell victim to court intrigue, denounced by rivals in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. During the upheaval, Mao called on the young to attack the "Four Olds": old culture, old habits, old customs, and old ideas. In fact, it was an attempt by Mao to vanquish rivals and critics in the wake of the failures of his disastrous attempt at industrialization, the so-called Great Leap Forward, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 45 million Chinese.
The elder Xi was persecuted and jailed, his family cast out. His son, Xi Jinping, was denounced by the Red Guards and ostracized. Once a privileged "princeling," Xi Jinping was forcibly detained. He escaped confinement only to be turned away by his own mother who feared that taking him in would lead to grave consequences for both her and her other children. Xi was only 15 at the time.
Sent to the countryside, Xi became one of the "sent-down youths," those who fled the inner cities during the Cultural Revolution, making their way to rural China and, they hoped, redemption. Chinese people call the Xi Jinping generation "those who were raised on wolf milk" to describe their toughness, suffering, survival skills, and sheer ruthlessness. Xi learned to mingle with peasants. And he learned discomfort, from flea bites and lice to a hard day’s toil. His response to these trials and tribulations was to become "redder than red."
These years have become part of the Xi legend, burnished by state propaganda. But Xi also benefited from his revolutionary lineage, which eventually helped him obtain plum jobs and credentials. As Sheridan notes: "Today’s cult of Xi Jinping leads people to believe that he and his family came back from disgrace when China entered its age of reform, conveniently associating them with a saner era. The truth is that they were rehabilitated by Mao Zedong himself and owed their survival to his say-so: the restoration of their fortunes began four years before Mao’s death."
Xi would lean on the connections of his rehabilitated father, serving as an aide to a former defense minister and then an official in several provinces. A defector who knew Xi at the time later told the CIA that Xi had one abiding and unmistakable characteristic: "from day one he never showed his hand."
Trotsky famously described Stalin as a "gray blur" who "flickered obscurely and left no trace." Similarly, Xi bided his time, did his best not to make enemies, and slowly built up his power base, rising to the top in 2012, before turning and eliminating rival power centers and consolidating his grip.
Yet Xi is different from the dictators of old. Unlike Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, he didn’t birth a totalitarian system. Rather, he was raised in one. But unlike his contemporary, Vladimir Putin, a low-level KGB apparatchik in his early years, Xi was born an insider. The Xi that emerges in Sheridan’s well written volume is both an ideologue and a pragmatist—and, perhaps most of all, a very dangerous man.
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
by Michael Sheridan
Headline, 368 pp., $30
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.