林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

20100131 Heartland Return for

Chinese Leader

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577186992329708730.html

By JEREMY PAGE and MARK PETERS

    MUSCATINE, Iowa—This small city on the Mississippi River has long boasted that Mark Twain briefly called it home in 1854. Now, residents realize they have a more unusual bragging point: Muscatine played a minor but memorable role in the ascent of Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China's top leader this fall.

    Twenty-seven years ago, Mr. Xi, then an up-and-coming official in a pig-farming region in China, led an animal-feed delegation to Iowa. He toured farms, visited a Rotary Club and watched a baseball game. He spent two nights in the split-level home of a Muscatine couple, sleeping amid the Star Trek toys on display in the bedroom of their two boys, who were away at college. It is believed to have been his first trip outside China.

    On Feb. 15, one day after he visits the White House for the first time, Mr. Xi, now China's vice president, plans to return to Muscatine and share tea with the people he met in 1985. His trip back to the American heartland appears intended to showcase what makes him so different from China's current leader, Hu Jintao—a confident, personable style and easygoing familiarity with the U.S.

    Chinese leaders have staged photo opportunities in the U.S. before. Deng Xiaoping donned a cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo in 1979. But none has ever made such a clear attempt to demonstrate a long personal connection to America.

Over the years, Mr. Xi, who is 58 years old, has made periodic trips to the U.S. His daughter attends Harvard. He has had regular dealings with U.S. officials and business leaders, including Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary. When Vice President Joe Biden visited China last August, Mr. Xi accompanied him to the western province of Sichuan and shared dinner with him at a local restaurant.

China is on the cusp of a once-in-a-decade political change. In October or November, Mr. Hu and six other members of the nine-man Politburo Standing Committee, the top decision-making body, are set to retire. The Communist Party's next generation of leaders, led by Mr. Xi, will take over at a time of slowing growth for the world's second-largest economy and mounting public pressure to address a raft of social, economic and environmental problems.

Mr. Xi's personality and relative popularity have raised hopes in some quarters, both inside and outside of China, that he will resume the kind of reforms that marked the 1990s but ground to a halt in the past 10 years. The U.S., for its part, is eager to see whether his ascent to Communist Party chief and president will lead to changes in the combative diplomacy that has alarmed many of China's Asian neighbors in recent years and prompted the U.S. to focus more on the region in its military planning and diplomacy.

Mr. Xi is the most prominent member of a group known in China as "princelings"—the sons of well-known revolutionary leaders, many of whom grew up together. His father, Xi Zhongxun, helped lead Communist forces to victory, was purged in 1962, then was politically rehabilitated and helped oversee economic reforms before his death in 2002.

That background distinguishes Mr. Xi from the man he is expected to replace. Mr. Hu, whose father ran a tea shop, had to clamber up through party ranks. Once in power, Mr. Hu promoted and relied on people from a similar background, including current Vice Premier Li Keqiang, whom he favored as his successor.

Mr. Xi "is a key figure among princelings. His father was a very popular figure," says Zheng Yongnian, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore."That makes him more confident, while at a personal level he's much more knowledgeable about the West. I think he's confident that he can consolidate power much faster than Hu did."

Mr. Xi will have a greater familiarity with the West than any of his predecessors, including Mr. Deng, who studied in France in the 1920s and made a landmark visit to the U.S. in 1979 after diplomatic relations were re-established. Mr. Hu, like Mr. Xi, made his first foreign trip in 1985, but it was to North Korea, and he didn't visit the U.S. until shortly before he took power in 2002.

Mr. Paulson, who last met Mr. Xi in December, describes him as a "strong, confident leader" with an easy manner, good communication skills and an understanding of the U.S. that has been growing since his first Iowa visit.

After meeting Mr. Xi for the third time last year, Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State, said: "He's more assertive than Hu Jintao. When he enters the room, you know there is a significant presence here."

Mr. Xi's father is renowned within the party as one of its most capable and outspoken early leaders. After helping lead Communist forces to victory, he served as vice premier until he was purged in 1962 for supporting the publication of a book deemed critical of Chairman Mao Zedong. After his rehabilitation in 1978, he proposed and supervised the establishment of China's first special economic zone, in the southern province of Guangdong—an important step in the nation's emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse.

The senior Mr. Xi was a relative political liberal, speaking out in defense of a reformist party leader sacked in 1987 and condemning the violent 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, according to some people close to the party elite. That put him out of favor once again.

His roller-coaster political career made for a turbulent upbringing for his children. Xi Jinping was born into the relative luxury of a party leaders' compound in Beijing. He was just nine years old when his father was placed under house arrest, which lasted for most of the next 16 years.

At age 15, Mr. Xi was among millions of Chinese students sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to the northern province of Shaanxi, where his father was famous for having helped to lead Communist partisans in the 1930s. "Everyone knew who his father was, so they treated him well," says one person who knew the family well in the 1970s.

Mr. Xi didn't return home for seven years. He lived for much of that time, according to state media, in a traditional cave dwelling in the village of Liangjiahe, where he dug ditches and explored ways to collect methane gas from animal waste.

In an interview with a state-run magazine in 1996, Mr. Xi said that during his youth he had "borne a lot more hardships than most people" because of his background. He told another reporter he was forced to denounce his own father, and had himself been jailed three times.

Nevertheless, he applied repeatedly to join the Communist Party while he was in the countryside, according to a 2003 essay by Mr. Xi. After being rejected nine times because of his father, he was accepted in 1974. His applications to the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing were rejected twice. He was accepted after his father arranged for a note to be sent to the university saying his political problems shouldn't affect his son's education.

By the time Mr. Xi graduated in 1979 with a degree in organic chemistry, his father was back in the party elite. Mr. Xi got a job as a personal secretary to one of his father's old comrades in arms, Geng Biao, a vice premier and defense minister. That uniformed job would provide Mr. Xi with enduring connections to the military—something both Mr. Hu and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, lacked.

Mr. Xi shed his uniform in 1982 and took a job as deputy Communist Party chief of Zhengding county, a pig-farming region in the northern province of Hebei. That is when he first met Terry E. Branstad, the current governor of Iowa, who visited Hebei in 1984 as part of a "sister-states" exchange. The following year, Mr. Xi led the animal-feed delegation to Iowa.

Sarah Lande of Muscatine worked for the exchange organization back then and hosted the delegation for dinner one evening. "Some people in town were wondering why we were hosting people from a Communist country," she recalls. At the dinner, she says, "we were inquiring about China, and they were asking lots of questions, too. I remember hogs were very important to them as they needed more lean meat at the time."

Mr. Xi's group came to inspect the greenhouse where vegetable farmer Tom Hoopes was growing seedlings for sweet potatoes. "I kind of explained to them what I was doing," Mr. Hoopes recalls. "Golly, I really don't remember much more than that."

Mr. Xi spent two nights at the four-bedroom home of Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. Ms. Dvorchak, who now lives in Florida, recalls that in the morning she would serve him tea—not coffee—before a car would pick him up for his daily rounds. When his translator was absent, she says, they struggled to communicate.

She says Mr. Xi gave them a bottle of Chinese spirits when he left. "Whoa, it was tough," she recalls of the drink.

Back in China, Mr. Xi rose steadily in the party. The Hebei job led to one as deputy mayor of the eastern port of Xiamen, working for another protégé of his father. After that came powerful posts leading Fujian and Zhejiang, two of China's most economically dynamic provinces, where he proved himself as a capable and business-friendly administrator.

While Mr. Hu was handpicked by Mr. Deng as a future leader 10 years before he took power, Mr. Xi emerged unexpectedly as heir apparent in 2007 through an informal vote within the party's upper ranks.

When Mr. Xi assumes the top leadership posts, he will be the first among equals on the standing committee. His main duties will be to maintain unity and forge consensus among its members.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Xi will be more assertive than Mr. Hu in handling bureaucratic and business interests that oppose reform, or the hawkish generals who have shaped China's diplomacy in recent years.

Many Chinese regard him as a more likable figure than Mr. Hu, thanks in part to his easy smile and glamorous wife—famous folk singer Peng Liyuan—and common touch that some friends attribute to his years in the countryside.

Mr. Xi's visit to Iowa years ago apparently made a lasting impression on him. John Tkacik, a former U.S. diplomat, recalls Mr. Xi telling him in 1991 that he also had visited Oregon and California, but most enjoyed his home stay in Muscatine.

When Mr. Branstad, the Iowa governor, met Mr. Xi last year on a trade mission to China, the vice president immediately recalled his visit to Iowa, the governor said in an interview.

"The first thing he said was: 'I met you in your office in the state capital on April 26, 1985,'" Mr. Branstad said. "Then he named some of the people he met."

Late last year, Mr. Branstad wrote to Mr. Xi to invite him back to Iowa, suggesting a reunion with his 1985 hosts.

About two weeks ago, the Chinese consulate in Chicago informed the governor they were considering the invitation. A few days later, the Chinese ambassador in Washington flew to Iowa to help with arrangements. The Chinese Embassy in Washington and the Foreign Ministry in Beijing didn't respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Xi's return to Iowa is partly diplomatic theater. He will be the most senior foreign leader to visit the state since Nikita Khrushchev came to inspect American agriculture in 1959 on the first visit to the U.S. by a Soviet leader. Mr. Xi's trip is an opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of trading with China, which bought $627 million of Iowan exports in 2010, according to the U.S.-China Business Council.

Few people in Muscatine had any inkling of what had become of their long-ago visitor until they started getting calls about a reunion. Mr. Hoopes, the now-retired vegetable farmer, says that when he found out that one of the delegation was about to become China's top leader, it "just blew my mind."

Ms. Lande had traveled to China four times, but she hadn't followed Mr. Xi's career. She says she was surprised when the governor called her two weeks ago to tell her she might have a visitor.

Since then, she has been helping with preparations, including tracking down the people Mr. Xi met. She says the Chinese advance party had requested a photograph of the bedroom in which he slept. The Dvorchaks plan to travel up from Florida for his visit.

The reunion, Ms. Lande says, will be an informal affair, probably a teatime reception. "He only wants to meet with his old friends," she says.