Editing Xi Jinping (section)

== Biography ==
The son of Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, he was [[exile]]d to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution, and lived in a cave in the village of Liangjiahe, where he worked as the party secretary. After studying at Tsinghua University as a "Worker-Peasant-Soldier student", Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces.

Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, and governor, then party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the CPC Secretary of Shanghai Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He joined the Politburo Standing Committee and central secretariat in October 2007, spending the next five years as Chinese paramount leader Hu Jintao's presumed successor. Xi was vice president from 2008 to 2013 and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission from 2010 to 2012.

Since assuming power, Xi has introduced far-ranging measures to enforce party discipline and to ensure internal unity. His signature anti-corruption campaign has led to the downfall of prominent incumbent and retired Communist Party officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Described as a Chinese nationalist, he has tightened restrictions over civil society and ideological discourse, advocating internet censorship in China as the concept of "internet sovereignty".

Xi has called for further socialist market economic reforms, for governing according to the law and for strengthening legal institutions, with an emphasis on individual and national aspirations under the slogan "Chinese Dream". He has also championed a more assertive foreign policy, particularly with regard to China-Japan relations, China's claims in the South China Sea, and its role as a leading advocate of free trade and globalization. Xi has sought to expand China's African and Eurasian influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Considered the central figure of the fifth generation of leadership of the People's Republic, Xi has significantly centralized institutional power by taking on a wide range of leadership positions, including chairing the newly formed National Security Commission, as well as new steering committees on economic and social reforms, military restructuring and modernization, and the Internet. Said to be one of the most powerful leaders in modern Chinese history, Xi's political thoughts have been written into the party and state constitutions, and under his leadership, the latter was amended to abolish term limits for the presidency.

Due to his accumulation of more power than anyone since [[Mao Zedong]], the significant increase of censorship and mass surveillance, significant deterioration in human rights, the return to a [[cult of personality]] and the removal of term limits for the President in 2018 under his rule, Xi Jinping has been called a dictator by many political observers. However, Xi Jinping remains widely popular in China. A YouGov poll released in July 2019 found that 22% of Chinese people list Xi as the person they admire the most.

In 2017, ''The Economist'' named him the most powerful person in the world. In 2018, Forbes ranked him as the most powerful and influential person in the world, replacing Russian President [[Vladimir Putin]] who had been ranked for five consecutive years.

Beginning in 2017, Xi established re-education camps in Xinjiang in an attempt to suppress extremism, terrorism, and separatism among the Uyghur population of that province. Conditions in these camps are brutal, and some have called them "concentration camps" or "gulags". In 2020 it was reported that under Xi's order's, Uyghur women were forced to use contraceptives, get sterilized and get abortions, while use of contraceptives was actually declining across the rest of China. This caused severe drops in Uyghur birth rates, declining 24 percent from 2019 to 2020. Because of the decline, many have accused Xi of genocide.