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Sue-Lin Wong is a China correspondent at The Economist. Previously, she reported on China for the Financial Times and Reuters. She is now based in Singapore and is transitioning to cover Southeast Asia, after she was forced to leave Hong Kong in 2021 when her visa was not renewed. She recently released a podcast series, The Prince, about the life of Xi Jinping. In this lightly edited interview, we spoke about making the series, what we know about Xi’s motivations and personality, and how his childhood trauma shapes him today.

Q: Why is it important to understand Xi’s own story? 

A: Over the past ten years, Xi Jinping has gathered enormous personal power. He, along with many Chinese officials, would argue he needs it to turn China into a superpower. But the catch is that the future of China’s 1.4 billion people — and many more people around the world — hinges on the mind of this one man. So it’s important to try to understand his story, even if it’s a difficult story to tell.

In order to have a better framework for understanding China, we need to understand both the Chinese Communist Party as well as Xi Jinping. But as much as I would have loved to make a podcast series about the Chinese Communist Party, I think it’s easier to tell the story of individuals. And so I’m hoping what we did with The Prince was to explore the history of modern China and the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the life of this one man. Xi Jinping himself is a very important figure — he has changed China a lot over the past ten years. We saw him as a vessel to examine both the party and the country.

So little is known about Xi’s life and it is difficult, and dangerous, to get access to people who may know more. Can you describe your process and how you approached the story given these difficulties? 

This is something I thought about endlessly throughout the making of the series. To be totally honest, this was not my idea. My bosses came to me and said, “We’re thinking of making a podcast series on China. What do you think of making a series about Xi Jinping?” And my immediate reaction was, “Could we maybe pick an easier topic? How about the Belt and Road? We could go around the world and look at China’s influence.” But to their credit, they really wanted to have a series about Xi Jinping.

It would have been possible to do eight episodes looking at all the horrific and tragic costs of his regime. But I didn’t feel like that was the whole story of Xi Jinping the man. So it was a process of elimination – thinking about accessible ways to get into the story. I would have loved to interview Xi himself, his brothers and sisters, his family, his childhood friends. But that was just impossible given the political climate, no one would speak to us. Like all reporting in China, I knew nothing was going to be served on a silver platter. 

I said to my producers, “One thing we often had to do in China reporting is go through multiple people. And so maybe we would need to reach out to some oral historians of the Cultural Revolution, interview them and ask them if they can recommend anyone who had a similar childhood to Xi Jinping, whose parents served alongside Mao Zedong, and then were purged.” We were very fortunate to find an oral historian of the Cultural Revolution who connected us to the daughter of Mao Zedong’s personal secretary, Li Rui, whose name is Nanyang Li.

The first half of the series is looking at Xi’s rise, and then the second half is what happens when he takes power. We did that partly because what he did once he takes power is so important and so interesting, but also because it was just much easier for us to find characters to drive each episode. We were able to find a Chinese censor and a Uyghur, and people who had interacted with him when he visited America in the 1980s, and who have interacted with him in America in more recent times.

The story of Nanyang Li, the daughter of Mao’s personal secretary, was particularly powerful because even though she had a very similar upbringing to Xi, she came to such different conclusions about the Communist Party. Why do you think Xi ended up with this unshakable faith in the Party? 

There are a couple of reasons why Xi Jinping committed himself to the party, when so many others of his generation wanted not only nothing to do with the Chinese Communist Party, but nothing to do with China — there were so many people who migrated overseas. One really big point was that his parents had raised him and his brothers and sisters to believe that they were the true inheritors of the revolution. There were all these stories that Xi Jinping has written about, of how his Dad made him wear floral pattern clothing as a kid because he has four older sisters, he got all their hand-me-downs, and he hated it. He desperately wanted boys’ clothing, but his Dad was trying to instill this austerity and discipline of the revolution in his own children and in his house. He talks about how when they would come home from boarding school, his Dad would line them up along the wall and tell them stories of what it was like during the revolution. His Dad was also a brutal disciplinarian, which is slightly different from raising your kid to believe he was a true inheritor of the party. 

There’s a family friend who tells the story of how Xi Jinping was expected to kowtow before his parents every Chinese New Year. And if he didn’t do it properly, his Dad would smack him. So that was the environment in which he grew up. It’s very difficult for people who didn’t grow up in that era in China to grasp, it was all about the party. The best possible thing to aspire to was to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party. It was both at a societal level, but also an individual family level. Xi Jinping was surrounded by the message that the party was his future. And it was also the family business. Unlike the many millions of other Chinese of his generation, the conclusions he drew from his childhood, and his teenage years were different. It wasn’t that the party in and of itself was bad, it was that the party had lost control. And if he ever rose to the top, he would make sure that the party didn’t lose control again.

You also really drive home just how traumatic his childhood was, given his family falling from grace, the Cultural Revolution and his sister committing suicide. Do you think that impacts him today?

I think it must. It’s so hard to get inside the head of Xi Jinping. But imagine if you were born into immense privilege, then when you were nine years old, your whole world turned upside down. He talks about how he genuinely feared for his life and how there were Red Guards who gave him five minutes to live. And as you said, his older sister committed suicide. Xi Jinping talks about how one of the few times he’s cried, officially, is receiving the news of that. It’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t shape you. And we really see that in his approach, like his absolute fear of chaos and his obsession with control. That partially stems from his own life experiences, and the chaos that he experienced as a child.

Many people thought the influence of his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was a revolutionary and official, would lead Xi to be a reformer. Did digging into his history help you understand why that didn’t turn out to be the case?

One thing that really struck me when I was looking into Xi’s father’s life is that on his tomb is a quote saying something like, “He strove every day. He was happy every day,” which clearly is just totally untrue, given all the trauma that Xi’s father went through. Next to that quote, is a quote from Mao Zedong, which is “The party’s interests come first.” That is very, very telling.

When we look back at what journalists at Western publications or universities in the West were saying, and even a lot of Chinese elite people who knew Xi, they thought he maybe would be a reformer back then. But we were all very wrong.

That being said, I know back in 2012, there was a lot of punditry and analysis from Western media and a lot of Chinese who were saying that Xi was going to be some kind of reformer because of who his father was. I don’t know to what extent that was wishful thinking. When we look back at what journalists at Western publications or universities in the West were saying, and even a lot of Chinese elite people who knew Xi, they thought he maybe would be a reformer back then. But we were all very wrong.

One of my favorite segments was about the scandal around Lai Changxing, a businessperson in Fujian who was accused of massive corruption, smuggling, and bribery. Can you talk about why you chose to include that?

It’s the biggest corruption scandal since the founding of the People’s Republic. And the fact that Xi was in Fujian at the time, it just seemed like it would be a shame not to include it. And then there was great audio from the Red Mansion [a pleasure palace which Lai set up for officials to enjoy], which was just such an intriguing and colorful place. It was an important story, it was connected to Xi because he was in Fujian at the time, even though in the end, we weren’t able to directly link it to him. We couldn’t say, he definitely went to the Red Mansion, although that was something we looked into, and there were a lot of rumors that he had visited, but nothing conclusive. There was a great tape from archival audio and we interviewed [China veteran] Jim McGregor, who had met Lai Changxing, and he was such a great character. The way McGregor expresses that period of time in China and the type of corruption that he witnessed was really compelling. I think it also gives us an insight into what life would have been like for Xi in terms of his day to day as a rising government official in the 1990s. What were the types of things he would have to have to think about in his nine to five? What were some of the challenges of being a party official in Fujian?

You include analysts saying that the establishment view is that Xi is truly not corrupt himself, and, according to a WikiLeaks cable written by a friend of Xi, is disgusted by displays of wealth. Do you agree with that? 

The important line from the WikiLeaks cable is that Xi was likely not going to be corrupted by money, but what could corrupt him is power. And that, I think, is true.

There’s been really amazing reporting by the New York Times and Bloomberg on the Xi family’s wealth. If you’re born into a very elite party family, you don’t really necessarily need to be corrupted by money, given how the party works and how China works. If you are the son of Xi Zhongxun, I don’t know if money is necessarily what is going to drive you. And we definitely didn’t find any evidence of that. But based on everything that has happened, it does seem like the WikiLeaks cable was correct, that he is incredibly ambitious, incredibly driven, incredibly power hungry. He could be corrupted by power, as opposed to taking a $10,000 bribe here or there.

You talk about his princeling background throughout the series. Do you think he could have risen through the ranks without that background? 

I don’t think so. There were many people we interviewed who said similar things. It was a shame we didn’t end up having space to include an interview we did with [former Australian prime minister] Kevin Rudd, who had met him when he was rising in Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs. Xi was in Xiamen at the time, and Kevin Rudd told us that it was very, very clear that the only reason Xi Jinping was in Xiamen was because of who his father was. That’s one example. 

His Dad was very close to Geng Biao [a Chinese official and former defense minister]. At the time that Xi was working for Geng Biao in his first job, straight out of university, Geng Biao’s daughter was working for Xi’s Dad. It was you scratch my back, I scratch your back. And later it was Li Rui, who was in the organization department at that time, who called in a favor and transferred Xi out of Hebei to Fujian. So undoubtedly, his family helped him rise throughout his career. But I also don’t think it was just that. When Xi was transferred to Fujian, he was replacing another princeling. And that princeling was a total disaster and had spent their whole time in Fujian shopping.

You have a segment about Xi’s time in Iowa in the 1980s. I heard you say in other interviews that you were hesitant about including that, because you didn’t think it was very illustrative about his approach to the U.S. and the outside world. Can you explain that, and after doing the reporting, do you think that period tells us anything about Xi?

This is a great question, because it is something that I have thought a lot about and it was also one of the big clashes we had internally between the China team and the audio team while making The Prince. The audio team was like, what an amazing whimsical story, perfect for a podcast. We absolutely have to give Iowa as much time and space as we need. Whereas the China team, myself included, was like, what does Iowa tell us about Xi? Iowa is a red herring. 

I think it has been an instinct of journalists [to say] Xi is so difficult to report, we’ll just go to Iowa, because that’s an easier way for us to speak to some people who met him for one hour. 

In hindsight, it does make sense that we included it, because it was such a fun, whimsical story. We use Iowa as a thread to look at how the [U.S.- China] relationship has evolved. We opened with Xi and his four colleagues landing in Iowa in 1985; we had the guy who drove them around in his tiny car by himself and was the driver and the tour guide and the luggage handler. He reminisces about that trip and how they only brought one suit, and they washed their socks in the hotels every night, and how they had never attended a potluck dinner before. It was all totally new to them. 

They were quite scared of America because they had grown up consuming anti-American propaganda in China, and they were too afraid to leave their hotel rooms initially. And then we trace how much fun they had in Iowa and how warmly they were received by the Iowans and also how fondly Xi remembers his time in Iowa. 

But all of that doesn’t tell us about what Xi’s attitude towards America actually is in terms of China’s foreign policy and America as China’s adversary. In fact, what is much more revealing is a speech that he gave in Mexico in 2009, where he talks about how there are some countries who criticize us, but we don’t export revolution. Why are people constantly in other countries constantly pointing their fingers at us? And then we get into how the U.S. China relationship has deteriorated, the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy and how much that is driven by Xi Jinping and domestic Chinese policies and the desire for Chinese diplomats to show their loyalty to Xi back home. 

We end the episode with this very revealing anecdote about how the Iowans had such a happy time and had had such happy memories of Xi’s visit that they wanted to make a book with photos and stories from that trip and many of the stories were censored because so much of Xi’s story was so airbrushed and so curated and so controlled by propaganda organs. 

Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are fine with contradictions. So it’s very possible that Xi genuinely has very fond memories of his two weeks in Iowa in 1985 — while at the same time, he sees America as China’s greatest adversary, and believes that America is trying to keep it down.

Do you feel like you have a sense of Xi’s personality?

Yes and no. No in that there were so many really basic questions that I set out to try to answer but I could not answer. For example, what is his daily routine? What time does he wake up? What does he do? Who are his closest advisors? Who does he listen to? How does he make decisions? Really, really important questions that are consequential not just for the 1.4 billion people in China, but for many more people around the world. So much about Xi and Chinese politics more generally is a black box. There were several people who I spoke to while reporting out the series who said that the West had some insights into previous Chinese leaders, like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, but there was just a dearth of information about Xi. So it’s not just that Chinese politics generally is a black box. It’s become even harder to find out information about Xi compared to his predecessors. 

Now to the yes part. I definitely think I have a better sense of his personality. He’s genuinely very controlled. He holds his cards close to his chest until he thinks the time is right. He’s playing a very, very long game. As Xi was rising, he wasn’t particularly outspoken or flamboyant. Nanyang Li tells the story of how her dad met with Xi Jinping as he was rising through the ranks and was saying, ‘You need to be more outspoken, you need to push for reform, you need to push for China to become more open.’ And Xi said, ‘you can do that because of who you are and how established you are and how respected you are within the party. But I’m nobody, I have to be really careful. I have to keep my head down and bide my time.’ That was his approach for many, many decades, as he was rising to the top of the party. 

He’s genuinely very controlled. He holds his cards close to his chest until he thinks the time is right. He’s playing a very, very long game.

He is probably a workaholic. He talks about how he didn’t see his wife, or his daughter for long stretches of time as his daughter was growing up. He would call once a day. So presumably, he was out in the provinces, and I think Peng Liyuan was mostly in Beijing.

Another basic question: does he genuinely love football? Or does he prefer basketball? Because the propaganda is about how much he loves football. And when he goes overseas, he does these photo ops in football stadiums. But when we interviewed people who knew him back in Fujian, for example, they told us how he loved to go play basketball with the army guys just across the government compound. And diplomats have said that the one thing that really gets Xi excited is sport. He really lights up when he talks about sport, compared to anything else. 

Another interesting question is, how much he actually likes reading. This has become a trope among China journalists and people joke about how he’s apparently read all the classics in every single major language, because every time he goes to a country abroad, he talks about how he loves all the great Russian writers, or when he’s in France, he talks about all the great French philosophers he’s read. I think he genuinely did read a lot as a teenager in Liangjiahe when he was a sent down youth. One reason I believe this is because there were many young people of that generation who talked about how they didn’t have that much to do in the countryside. But they had books, and so they would spend a lot of their spare time reading. He’s also spoken quite openly about how he has a thirst for knowledge, because he missed out on so much of his education. 

Given all you now know about Xi, what did you think about the episode at the Party Congress last month when Hu Jintao was ushered off the stage? 

I was thinking, ooooh, this could also have worked as the opening of the podcast, because we opened with Xi’s disappearance in 2012 [in which he did not appear in public for two weeks, fueling massive speculation]. The point we were trying to make with his disappearance is that Chinese politics is a black box, it’s so hard to know what’s going on. The Hu Jintao episode illustrates a similar point that we will probably never know what actually happened between Xi and Hu Jintao and what that exchange was. 

You had to leave Hong Kong last year, can you talk about the circumstances of your departure and why you think you were singled out? 

I really don’t know why I was singled out. My work visa was up for renewal in Hong Kong, I got a letter asking for all kinds of information, including every single story I’d ever written on Hong Kong, or contributed to, so it wasn’t even just stories I authored. And I submitted all of that. But it didn’t feel safe to stay, especially because the National Security Law had just come in and it was really hard to predict what was going on. The authorities were using the security law in all kinds of ways. And so my bosses suggested I fly to London. Then we found out that my visa had not been renewed. But again, there was no explanation. And when Carrie Lam was asked about it, she immediately referenced the fact Hong Kong had a new National Security Law. Then, a bunch of Chinese WeChat accounts, and Chinese state media came out and said that my reporting on Hong Kong had been pro democracy. And I deserved to be kicked out. And yes, the reality is, the newspapers I worked for — the Financial Times and the Economist — our editorial lines are pro democracy. So that is factually correct. But I’ll probably never know exactly what happened. A couple of other people have reached out to me privately saying that their visas have been denied in Hong Kong, journalists, or people who were trying to do journalism internships. I’m definitely not the only one. 

Just in terms of how I feel, it’s very bittersweet. I was hoping that that was something that we captured in the podcast series. As a print reporter for the Economist, we don’t even have bylines. So I really am not used to talking about my personal story. But I was told by my producers that’s a key part of making a podcast. That was difficult for me because I’m not used to that. 

What I tried to do was encapsulate how I felt back in 2008, when I was working as a tour guide at the Beijing Olympics. I genuinely did feel excited and optimistic about China. I was in university then and I remember thinking, wow, I would love to come back here and work once I graduate. And then towards the end of the podcast series, I reflect on how much has changed since the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Looking back, I think my optimism was pretty naive. It’s been an amazing experience for me as a journalist to have been on the ground and get to know China and see it up close, and make friends in China and just experience the breadth and depth of the country. It’s very sad and grim that we are where we are now. I’m not at all optimistic about the future, either. 

It’s been an amazing experience for me as a journalist to have been on the ground and get to know China and see it up close… It’s very sad and grim that we are where we are now.

At the end of the podcast, I speak about how I am moving on and I’m going to cover Southeast Asia. But Chinese people don’t have this easy choice. And that was quite an important line for me, this notion of an easy choice. Of course, I feel I have these ties to China and I feel very connected to the country. And I would love to go back at some point. But the reality is I’m not a mainland Chinese, it’s not like I grew up there and have all my family and friends there. So in a way, the changes that we are witnessing in real time in China impact me, but they do not impact me at all to the extent that they impact mainland Chinese people. Even though it’s very, very bittersweet that I’m moving on from China, everything that is happening right now isn’t really about me. There are so many other people who are so much more directly impacted by the changes in China under Xi Jinping. 

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