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In 1993, a local TV station profiled a rising Chinese official at his home. A baby-faced Xi Jinping sits smiling with his infant daughter, Mingzi, on his knee. Xi and his wife are hosting the TV crew for a home-cooked meal. He says, when I lived in the countryside, I cooked for myself. But it was all pretty basic stuff.

Then he looks down. Little Mingzi has wet herself. And it's gone all over him. He seems happy at home. But for a man with such great things ahead, Xi Jinping didn't stand out much at this time. He wasn't even the most interesting person in his house. He was married to Peng Liyuan, a singer famous across China for her patriotic hits, much more famous than Xi.

Peng performed for the troops. She made regular appearances on state TV's annual New Year's special, The Biggest Show in China. This is her in 1991, the picture of glamour, bedazzled in bright yellow. This was actually Xi's second marriage. His first wife, Ke Lingling, was a diplomat's daughter. They split after three years. Xi was introduced to Peng Liyuan, his current wife, by a mutual friend,

They married in a small ceremony in 1987. It was a humble affair, according to the official account. First, a simple meal at a hotel. Then, when they invited a couple of party colleagues around to the house to celebrate, they had to wash out toothbrush cups so all four could have tea. Make no mistake though, this was a major union.

And Xi Jinping may have been a princeling, but Peng was the star. In the late 90s, Peng appeared on a Hong Kong talk show. The host says to her, It must be hard for the man you married.

I bet most people only know him as Peng Liyuan's husband. A lot of men wouldn't be able to handle that. Peng says, I wouldn't marry someone who I really felt was beneath me. She wanted a man with a successful career, with lofty aspirations and high ideals. She wanted a capable man able to tame her.

I'm a traditional Chinese woman, says Peng. I'll always be subservient to him. Watching the clip makes me wonder, why did she think that man was Xi Jinping? I'm Su Lin Wong. From The Economist, this is The Prince, a podcast about China's leader, Xi Jinping. Episode two, Hide and Bide. China's boom years brought huge opportunities and big risks for Xi Jinping's generation.

How would Xi, a man who set out to be an inheritor of the Communist Party's legacy, make his way in this new world? The young Xi Jinping's years in the farming village of Liangjiahe ended in 1975, when he got a rare opportunity to go to university. Higher education had largely shut down during the Cultural Revolution and was now reopening to just a select group of students, chosen by local leaders. This was before universities required competitive entrance exams.

How did I get into that? Totally by chance. Totally, totally by chance. Sui Cheng-chou was part of that small cohort of entrants at another top university. He enrolled in an economics degree. But the Cultural Revolution wasn't over yet. It was not economics. We say economics. Basically, we study so-called Marxist literature and Mao Zedong thought. Instead of the laws of supply and demand, they studied party ideology.

But according to that ideology, university study was inherently problematic. Teachers were intellectuals, a despised class of people in Mao's China. Who were they to tell students what to do? So the whole world was upside down. The students became teachers to the professors.

Professors every day morning came to our dorms to ask students what should we do today. It's totally we were supposed to

So at that time, the dynamic on campus was that the students were supposed to teach the professors. Shang Guan Gai was a slogan at the time. Attend university, manage the university staff, change the university with Mao Zedong thought.

So what kind of management would some of the other older students do? For example, we did not have a class taught by professors. We sit together to study most teachings. And the students basically tell these professors how wrong they were in the past. They have to confess what they taught in the past was totally wrong. This is why some Chinese scoff at Xi Jinping's schooling.

Ostensibly, See studied chemical engineering, no doubt with a healthy dose of Mao Zedong thought. He finished in 1979 at 26 years old.

And just as C needed a job, his father, who'd been purged from the party leadership in 1962, was back in favour. Mao had died a few years earlier, finally bringing an end to the Cultural Revolution. The party was changing hands, and so C had a path back to power, with his family name and his rare, if dubious, university credential.

So, what does a young princeling, a true believer in the revolutionary Communist Party of his parents' era, do, fresh out of his studies? With some help from his father, Xi Jinping started out as a private secretary, a mishu, to a military boss, geng biao. It was a great job at a pivotal time for the military. Geng biao!

Geng Biao's job was to modernise and strengthen the People's Liberation Army after an embarrassing defeat in a brief war with Vietnam. And as his mishu, the young Xi Jinping would help however he could. Xi accompanied General Geng on foreign trips. Mishus manage schedules, write speeches and keep their bosses informed.

But after the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution, the general didn't want anything written down that might cause problems later. See has described how he would take notes secretly, run to the bathroom to commit them to memory, then burn the paper. Working as Gungbyal's Mishu was impactful for him just in terms of a couple of things. Chris Johnson used to be the CIA's top China analyst.

One, understanding how to run things. You know, as a Chinese leader, he had a lot of respect for Gong. And then, of course, the vital relationships that he was able to form with senior PLA officers that, you know, continue to serve him very well. The PLA, the People's Liberation Army, is China's military.

But it doesn't actually work for the Chinese state. This is not the National Army of China. It is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. And so therefore their number one mission is to act as an anti-coup force and keep the CCP in power. And so it's vital for any Chinese leader to have legitimacy with PLA rank and file.

He's one of the few civilian officials who actually has what could be called military experience. You know, while he was working for Gongbyao, he did have a military rank. And interestingly, when he first started rising, I believe it was when he was still vice president. It certainly was the case when he took over as general secretary. All of a sudden, his official biography expanded to include all of these, you know, kind of pseudo-military posts that he held in the various provinces.

So there's Xi Jinping, young and apparently on the up among Beijing's elite. But after three years on the job, he left it. While others of his generation pursued cushy careers in Beijing, Xi left the comforts of the capital to become deputy party secretary, the number two official of a poor rural county in Hebei province. Why? Why?

A TV show called New Star offers a window into what party leaders thought at the time. It tells the story of an official who brings new ideas to a backward province. The show is fiction, but the main character was inspired by real party officials, including Xi Jinping. Promoting the party line in the provinces was a way to win CV points, kind of a communist MBA. CHOIR SINGS

Xi's choice to return to the kind of rural poverty he'd seen in Liangjiahe was still unusual. But it worked. Around this time, the early 1980s, the Central Party dispatched recruiters to identify the country's future leaders. The average age of China's top leadership was 72. After extensive interviews, the party produced a list of 1,000 people. These people were the party's future. And Xi Jinping was among them.

A photo of him in his office in Hebei shows Xi full of potential. In a green army jacket, he sat at his desk, cigarette in one hand, a pen over some papers in the other, and a smile on his face. A model official pleased to be serving the people and the party. That party mission had changed pretty radically since Mao Zedong died. No more famine of the Great Leap Forward or mob violence of the Cultural Revolution. And no more hardcore socialism.

The party would preach, quote, socialism with Chinese characteristics. In other words, a little free market experimentation. This was China's reform and opening. It would be a period of astounding economic growth.

And its face was China's new leader, Deng Xiaoping. The eyes of Texas were on Deng Xiaoping today. To show the world how serious he was about opening up, Deng visited America. He seems to be having a grand time. Appearing on the White House lawn, at the headquarters of Coca-Cola, and at a Texas rodeo. Indeed, at the rodeo, the Chinese came alive.

all wore cowboy hats and drank beer. We learned some new things about Dung. He likes astronauts, cowboys and basketball and has two grandchildren who asked grandpa to bring home gifts. He needn't have worried. Dung was given a pewter owl, a moon picture, some Texas spurs and not one but two $10,000 bulls. Dung was going to do things differently and the C family would be on hand to help.

Deng Sen-si's father to lead the economic transformation of Guangdong province, which is next to Hong Kong. Remember Nan Young-li, the daughter of one of Mao's personal secretaries? She's the one who turned away from the Communist Party after the Cultural Revolution. The rumour she heard was that Xi Zhongshun called in a favour for his son with a local party leader in Hebei and asked him to take special care of Xi Jinping. It backfired. Nepotism might have worked elsewhere, but this leader in Hebei bristled.

Nanyang said that her father called in another favour and instead helped move Xi Jinping out of Hebei in 1985, this time to Fujian province. Fujian is a mountainous place on China's southern coast. It had been one of the hubs of international trade until the party closed the country off to the world. When Xi arrived, Fujian was among China's poorest provinces, a world away from the important meetings he had with General Geng.

But Fujian would be a big part of Xi Jinping's life. He would spend the next 17 years there, climbing through the party ranks. It would require some personal sacrifice.

"I call my wife every day," he says, in an interview from around that time. Peng Liyuan was mostly in Beijing for her singing career. Xi missed a lot of his daughter's upbringing. He says he wasn't there, for example, to help her with her homework. He spent some time managing Ningde, a struggling coastal city.

A photo from then shows him smiling as he leads farmers through fields, a hoe over his shoulder. He liked to play basketball with the army guys next door. In the early 1990s, he moved to Fuzhou, the provincial capital.

People never imagined that he would become the national leader. Why? Why did no one imagine he would become national leader? The reason is he really looked humble. So he did not actually really exercise power. And also he did not actually really make himself visible. Alfred Wu was born and raised in Fujian province.

He lived in Fuzhou when Xi was with the city government. Xi Jinping was my city's mayor and also party secretary. So he was the party secretary in early 1990s. Alfred became a journalist. The media was freer back then. I was assigned to follow his stories.

Mostly just not very much like exciting news. In general, I would say that many people really want to follow someone else. Xi Jinping as a governor, I would say that just was very quiet and a little bit timid. He was a little bit timid? Yes. He did not want to speak too much, particularly in public. And Alfred told me Xi didn't need to be so timid. China was changing and local leaders had far more leeway than in Mao's time.

But these new freedoms also brought new risks, dangers that could wreck Xi's career. That's in a moment. I'm pausing the story for a brief moment to remind you that if you're not an Economist subscriber, you're missing out. I work with the best China correspondents in the business. Every week they write about all kinds of fascinating China stories, often in very difficult circumstances.

To read their coverage and so much more, you'll need a subscription to The Economist. It's really easy to sign up. Visit economist.com slash chinapod for our best offer. The link is in the notes for this episode. Now, on with the story. In November 2000, in Niagara Falls, Canada, police arrested a Chinese tourist. A very rich Chinese tourist. He'd been gambling at a casino for weeks.

His name was Lai Chung-sing, and he was China's most wanted fugitive. He was accused of running a massive smuggling ring in Fujian province. After years of quietly going about the business of a provincial party official, keeping his head down, Xi Jinping had risen to be governor of Fujian. But just as he was coming into that job, this huge scandal hit, one that would reverberate across Fujian's political establishment. And the man at the center of it all was Lai Chung-sing.

Prosecutors said he'd snuck more than US$6 billion worth of goods—oil, cars, cigarettes—into the port city of Xiamen, and that he'd evaded billions of dollars' worth of import taxes, bribing countless officials up and down the Fujian government to do it. Lai Changxing is one of millions of peasant, worker, no-background people,

who were just smart as hell and knew their system and worked their system and became wealthy. Jim McGregor spent 30 years in China, including as a consultant to foreign companies. He wrote about Lai Chang-Singh in a book on the perils of doing business in China. His problem was he was just too damn good at it. Lai was one of eight kids born poor during the famine of the 1950s in rural Fujian.

He was only semi-literate, so he worked the family plot of land. You know, the guy was a ditch digger, farmer. But when China opened up, he saw his chance. When Deng Xiaoping opened business, he started a little company making lug nuts and little car parts with some friends. And then he realized that, you know, in order to do anything, you had to have friends in the government.

Lai's real asset was his charm. Even with all that reform and opening, doing business in China still required navigating a whole lot of rules and, most importantly, political interests. So he got to know the police, army and people in government. He'd generously fund their pet projects or help them out through hard times. In return, they'd look the other way on some of his less honest schemes.

And in the end, he basically controlled the customs system in Xiamen, the major city. And he actually went right to the top. The vice minister of public security was one of his buddies, and he rewarded him well. He could drive into the Chinese Kremlin, the Zhongnanhai, in his car, and the guards wouldn't stop him. He was so connected.

By the late 1990s, Lai was a household name. His company, Yuanhua, built a new airport terminal in Xiamen, and at one point it was importing one-sixth of China's oil. He was a folk hero in Fujian, a rags-to-riches success story, and a provider of cheap imports for locals. Lai built a replica of Beijing's Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace complex, in Xiamen.

He bought the soccer team and even made a few appearances as goalie. And he was a generous benefactor. He paved the road to his rural home village and funded schools and retirement communities. And then he had the Red Mansion. The Red Mansion was an office tower in Xiamen, seven stories high. Inside, it was a pleasure palace.

The Red Mansion was a playground for officials. It had gambling, it had massage parlors, it had saunas, it had the finest wine, it had prostitutes, it had rooms. Instead of having to go out and drink with these guys, he decided to be more efficient and bring them all in to him. A TV crew from state media would later take a tour of the abandoned Red Mansion. The building behind me is the headquarters of the Xiamen Yuanhua Group.

On the second floor was a restaurant, staffed by top Hong Kong chefs and stocked with fine wine and cognac. Floor three, the spa. Floor four, the karaoke rooms and dance floors. And on floors five and six, private rooms where Lai employed prostitutes. Lai's office was on seven.

Lai was a close friend of mine, a former customs official says in the documentary. In the Red Mansion, no one exchanges money, he says. Not for the food, the massages or the women. A woman who worked there, her face blurred, says the majority of clients were from the Customs Bureau and other government agencies.

Eventually, Lai's corrupt ring became too big to ignore. China's premier dispatched investigators to Xiamen. But one of Lai's contacts, a top police chief in the province, tipped him off. Lai took a boat to Hong Kong, then flew to Canada with his wife and three kids. The Chinese government announced that Lai Chongxing was a wanted man.

I was working in the embassy on my second posting at the time. Charles Burton is a former Canadian diplomat. He'd been interested in China since he visited a communist bookshop in Ottawa as a teenager. And he was one of the few foreigners to study in China the year universities fully reopened in the 1970s. He was posted to the embassy in Beijing when the line news broke.

So it was an explosion. And I remember the people that I worked with, these were employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who were assigned to work in embassies. They were all gathered together, like talking in an extremely excited tone about this whole Lai thing. And the fact that Mr. Lai was in Canada, you know, was quite a feature for them as they were, you know, assigned to work in the Canadian embassy. We were just staggered by excitement.

the degree of his ability to engage in smuggling and the scope of the number of Chinese communist officials who he had managed to bribe to turn a blind eye to his massive enterprise. More than 150 officials faced charges for their alleged ties to Lai. Several were sentenced to death, including China's deputy police chief.

Lai was living with his family in Vancouver. China sent investigators, posing as businessmen, and they pressured him to return. He got spooked and applied for refugee status in Canada, claiming the Chinese government was out to get him for political purposes. Lai lost his refugee case, and he appealed. But the case dragged on for years. Jim McGregor visited Lai in Vancouver. You know, I was expecting some nasty gangster guy

He looked like any Chinese peasant who had made money on a North American holiday. He's wearing a T-shirt. He's very jovial. He's smoking cigarettes and juggling his two phones. His view was that he had done nothing wrong, that his relations with these officials and helping them with money and bank accounts and their kids going to school overseas and houses in Australia, he was helping friends.

And that was OK. Lai gave interviews to Chinese language media in Canada. He claimed the government had gone after innocent people in its investigation of his network. I'm not saying that the country framed them, he says. But the investigators aren't fair. By July of 2011, after 12 years, Lai's legal options were exhausted and Canada deported him back to China.

He was arrested on arrival. The Communist Party made a show of it. A police officer read Lai the charges against him as two others held him on either side by his arms. Lai was sentenced to life in prison.

Do you think it's possible that Mr Lye was both a criminal and also a victim of a shifting political system? Yeah, I think that that's possible. You know, I mean, why did they focus on Mr Lye when they did? I think he certainly had no anticipation that his modus operandi was going to be suddenly stopped. In truth, Charles Burton says, Lye was just the tip of the iceberg.

Is there a single Chinese Communist official at a senior level who would not be eligible for some sort of investigation for bribery or tax evasion or abuse of power for the financial benefit of family and friends? You know, I suspect not. It would be very hard to be the only person who doesn't comply with those kinds of demands. Xi Jinping was a senior party official in Fujian when Lai's gangster empire was at its peak.

But the official story of Xi's time in Fujian doesn't even mention Lai Chongqing. No evidence has ever emerged that Xi joined in the corruption, though it's hard not to wonder, like Charles Burton does, how exactly he could have risen in a system so thoroughly rotten without being a part of it. After Lai's crimes were revealed, Beijing summoned Xi, who was Fujian's governor by this point, to explain how this could have happened. Xi pledged to clean up.

And that was that. The biggest corruption scandal in the history of the People's Republic. And Xi Jinping comes out looking like the only clean official in Fujian.

Chris Johnson, the former CIA analyst, says the most likely explanation for how Xi evaded Beijing's wrath for that pervasive corruption might be the simplest one. I think it was mainly because they determined that it wasn't his fault. The general impression really is that he has steered clear of corruption, you know, really throughout his whole career. Xi himself could afford to be incorruptible, at least as far as money was concerned. After all, he was born a princeling.

He had friends and family in high places who could look after his needs. What did C make of guys like Lai? And what did C make of his many colleagues who drank Lai's wine and spent nights with the women Lai hired? In terms of the impact it had on him, I've heard from some of my contacts that it did instill in him this mindset of the pervasiveness of corruption, right, inside the system. Foreign journalists have searched for any signs of corrupt activity among C and his relatives.

In 2012, Bloomberg News reported Xi's extended family members owned hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate and businesses. Most of the assets were linked to Xi's older sister and her family. After the story came out, a Chinese billionaire said in response to a New York Times profile that he'd helped the Xi family dump some of its assets as Xi Jinping came to power. That billionaire, by the way, disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel soon after.

He's been sentenced to 13 years in prison for bribery and other corruption charges. None of this has been linked directly to Xi Jinping himself. Western observers at their peril ignore his ideological zealotry, right? He really does believe in this stuff. This stuff is nostalgia for a more pure communist China, as it was in the 1950s when Xi's mum and dad were leading party revolutionaries before the tycoons rotted away its core.

And Chris Johnson's view is echoed in that American diplomatic cable from 2009 published by WikiLeaks. In it, an unnamed old friend of Xi's says Xi Jinping was repulsed by China's corrupt nouveau riche. He thought they were debauched and undignified. According to the source, there was only one thing that could really corrupt Xi Jinping. Power. Power.

Xi Jinping's elderly father sits by the window at his nursing home. Big green easy chair. Red cardigan. He's singing along to the East is Red, a Mao-era communist anthem. His wife smiling at the old man's exuberance. At the end, he chuckles. Xi Zhongshun died in 2002 at the age of 89.

He got the usual send-off for the country's leaders at the Baobaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. Beijing's top officials were in attendance. Xi Jinping and his mother returned some ashes to their patriarch's ancestral village. Now there's a statue of him there, 60 tonnes of granite. Xi Jinping's mother, Qi Xin, describes the inscription on the monument. He fought his whole life. He was happy his whole life.

Next to the statue is a quote from Mao, carved into stone. The party's interests come first. Xi Jinping's dad loomed large in his life, inspiring his devotion to the party and helping him in his career. Now, Xi would have to make it on his own. Deng Xiaoping, China's leader from the late 70s to the early 90s, had a saying, hide your strengths and bide your time. Deng was talking about China's foreign policy strategy.

But I think it suits Xi's own tactic through this time. After his experiences in the Cultural Revolution, and after nearly two decades navigating the corruption, crime and changes in Fujian, Xi understood power. He had learned the dangers of overestimating how much power he possessed. He knew taking a controversial opinion might later be held against him. He kept his head down and waited for his opportunity.

In 2002, the year Xi Zhongshun died, Hu Jintao became general secretary, the top job in the party. And a wave of retirements made room for a new generation of leaders. After 17 years in Fujian, Xi was promoted to party secretary of the province next door, Zhejiang. Zhejiang was a plum assignment, a fast-growing province on the leading edge of China's economic reforms.

Xi mostly stayed out of the way. If he felt any disgust at all the new wealthy businessmen who were becoming more and more powerful, he didn't let it show. In 2006, the Party fired its boss in Shanghai. The ostensible reason was a corruption scandal. But it was widely reported that Hu Jintao was trying to consolidate power by eliminating a vocal critic with close ties to another faction. The Party chose Xi for the job.

He'd helped clean up after the Lai Changsing scandal and was unaffiliated with a clear political faction. This was to be Xi Jinping's final test. The People's Daily, the party newspaper, ran a story that September. Glad tidings from Shanghai are a pleasure to behold. The Chinese character for tidings, Tao, also appeared in the name of China's paramount leader at the time, Hu Jintao.

Was this Hu's personal stamp of approval on Xi Jinping's crisis management in Shanghai? A month later, the world would discover the answer. The members of the new Politburo Standing Committee filed onto stage at the 17th Party Congress. These nine men would run China for the next five years. Hu Jintao walked out first.

He was beginning his second term as General Secretary. Keen observers might also learn who'd be succeeding Hu Jintao in five years' time, depending on who followed him onto stage and in what order. We are very happy to invite the newly elected members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 17th Central Committee... There was Xi Jinping walking out ahead of his main rival. It was clear to Chris Johnson that this was, effectively, Xi Jinping's anointing as heir apparent.

You know, you knew that this critique was developing in that the period just before Xi Jinping arrived formally as leader, there was this sort of meme about a lost decade, right, from 2002 to 2012, where a lot of opportunities were missed. There was this idea that perhaps having somebody who is a little more large and in charge would be good. Hu Jintao had been a little too cautious. For China's next leader, the Communist Party had picked a princeling.

Someone who'd defend the party's rule with a little more chutzpah. The way I put it, sort of what they thought they were getting was a sexy Hu Jintao. But Xi Jinping, so adept at hiding his strengths and biding his time, had big plans. Bigger, perhaps, than the party elders who'd promoted him even realised.

What the other leaders failed to recognize was that he was sort of preparing the ground for a lot of the things we subsequently saw him unveil early in his tenure as top leader. He was just doing it so well and so quietly, right, that it seems that while he wasn't plotting, he was certainly crafting an agenda whilst appearing to be the studious understudy.

And soon, he'd be free to pursue his own ambitious vision and to address the problems he'd seen throughout his career, from Fujian to Zhejiang and Shanghai. So this idea that I'm the right guy for the job and I'm going to be the one that, you know, oversees this great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, as he puts it. I wouldn't say he has a messianic complex, but he definitely sees himself as a man of history, right? That he's on a mission to save the party.

And the party, by this point, certainly needed saving. But that's next time. The Prince is produced by Sam Colbert, Claire Reid, Barclay Bram and me. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin, with original music by Darren Ng. Our executive producer is John Shields. We couldn't have made this without the help of some very brave people we can't name. For more of The Economist's China coverage, get the best offer on a subscription at economist.com slash chinapod.