n 2015, I had lunch with an old chum of Xi Jinping. He described how China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao was born into the Communist Party’s “red aristocracy” but had to toughen up fast when his father was jailed in the Cultural Revolution. The young Xi briefly became a street hoodlum who swore like a trooper, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. He survived by turning “redder than red,” climbing the party ladder from a branch secretary in a lowly village all the way up to the top job in Beijing. “I am fond of Xi, but he is isolated from his old friends and there is a danger of emperor syndrome,” the friend warned me. “I think Xi will want to rule for twenty years.”
