The Red Emperor, Son of the Yellow Earth, Born to Rule China

BOOK REVIEW: The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China

by Michael Sheridan / Headline Press

Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole

The ReviewerJean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.

Review – In the closing sentence of his new book, The Red Emperor, Michael Sheridan writes plainly: this is about Xi Jinping, the man. However, since the said book sat all along at the intersection between academia and journalism in the study of the contemporary, closed Chinese communist regime and society, readers will realize way before that the book’s end that the author’s task went in reality well beyond his primary stated purpose.

Thus, Mr. Sheridan deliberately used here the classic vehicle of a biography to explore the rich panorama of modern Chinese history. It is also a very simple, clever way to present and understand big historical changes over a chronological period. Of course, modern China has experienced many times this sort of paradoxical cycles; one can think of, for example, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up period and, since 2012, the Xi Jinping era, to name only a few.

Xi has effectively converted what was a semi-collective leadership into, essentially, a hierarchical, authoritarian one-man rule. That’s why understanding his personality and his rise to power, among other elements, is so important. He is, after all, one of the world’s most powerful, consequential and inscrutable, leaders.

In a nutshell, head of the Communist Party, the state and the military, Xi restored the dictatorship and is set to rule for life. Son of a purged revolutionary, punished as a youth, he later served as a provincial official, then vice president. Xi considers himself, in his own words, as “a son of the yellow earth” from the time he spent away in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

As Mr. Sheridan writes well, he was indeed born in the afterglow of the Chinese revolution. Yet Xi would also live through revolutionary times. He grew up during an outbreak of chaos when the party turned on itself. He matured just as China opened the doors of reform. He saw the defeat of liberal ideas and was loyal to the dictatorship. Its victory was a win for him. Through it all, Xi’s way to survive and succeed was to become redder than red.

Xi had a deep sense of entitlement. He thought he and his generation were the legitimate heirs to the victories of their forebears and, as such, they “deserved to rule China.”

His rise and success represent, in hindsight, the triumph of authority in Beijing, not the peaceful revolutions of Eastern Europe nor the democratic ideals defended and then brutally squashed in violence and blood in Tiananmen Square.


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According to Mr. Sheridan, Stalin is the most important influence in Xi Jinping’s political psychology. For Chinese Communists, Joseph Stalin was the bridge-builder who transmitted Marxism-Leninism to their founding comrades and Stalin’s Soviet Union, from 1922 to 1953, was the great example of revolution, resistance and survival.

The Stalinist references scattered through Xi’s early speeches served notice that he aimed to restore total ideological control. They also underlined the suspicion of foreigners and paranoia about conspiracies that Xi had learned from Stalin.

Events would show that the Red Emperor’s instinct was to turn inwards, to fortify and not to reach out, to isolate and not to engage, to crush and not to yield. Xi’s predecessors had taken the same path with disastrous results in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His policy went against the interests of China’s new middle class, it worried the rich, punished enterprise and denied opportunities to the young. But it served the throne.

Is Xi taking China ‘down the path to Fascism’, making the same mistakes as Nazi Germany and Japan in the late 1930s, as some of its Chinese opponents contend? Only time will tell. The story is still unfolding…

In that context, what Mr. Sheridan tried to do in fact is excavating an authoritarian state under clan rule. The title itself, The Red Emperor, clearly signals that orientation from the outset; it came originally from an article by the late British sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar, who was the Leroy. B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University, that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2018, a year before his death.

MacFarquhar’s understanding of what Xi Jinping had become was not least because he taught Xi’s daughter, Xi Mingze, at Harvard and talked to her at length. Professor MacFarquhar then shared his insights on the Xi family with Sheridan on a visit to Hong Kong in 2015, an information the author could not use at the time but now feels free to publish.

For Mr. Sheridan, this book is the fruit of a long engagement with China that began in June 1989, covering its rise, the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 and the city’s struggle for democracy; it continued through two decades when he was Far East Correspondent of the Sunday Times from 1996 to 2016 and led him to write a history of Hong Kong titled The Gate to China, published in 2021, before turning to the subject of China’s new emperor.

Many of the sources used in the writing of The Red Emperor are not named or even cited for reasons that are, alas, obvious. They include Chinese officials, diplomats, journalists, scholars and businesspeople who helped Sheridan over the years, as well as people who directly aided the work on this book. Some of the latter still have much at stake in China and their willingness to speak, even anonymously, is striking.

Mr. Sheridan saw many dramas at first hand, such as the end of the democracy movement in 1989, the persecution of dissidents, the drawn-out tragedies of Xinjiang, the Tibetan borderlands and Hong Kong, the Beijing Olympics of 2008 and the power struggles of 2012.

Mr. Sheridan benefited from confidential or background briefings, as well as guidance on archives and papers, from a range of former and serving ministers and officials in the democracies who dealt with the Chinese party-state at close quarters or met Xi Jinping face to face. They include senior people in the intelligence and security world who know more than they can say in public.

Finally, Mr. Sheridan acknowledges the work of Howard Zhang, the former head of the BBC News Chinese Service, who agreed to act as lead researcher on the Chinese sources, which are the foundation of this book; Mr. Zhang provided meticulous fact-checking and guidance on the intricacies of power in the People’s Republic.


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On that note, with his short guide to modern China that opens the book, Mr. Sheridan usefully set the scene for his general reader. He identifies from the outset the rulers, the rivals, the regime’s three pillars: party, state and army. He also includes what he describes as the four factions; although some say there are no proper factions in China and scholars dispute their existence and membership. But there are generally held to be four identifiable groups: the princelings (Xi Jinping is the first among ‘princelings’), the China Youth League, the Left and the Patriots.

He concludes its guide with Xi’s family main members: father, mother, first wife (divorced in 1982), current wife (married since 1987) and daughter (born in 1992).

Mr. Sheridan clearly uses a variety of sources and the book has an index but no footnotes. Therefore, it does not allow the reader to check the validity of certain assertions of the book, especially in relation with questionable Xi’s family business, professional or personal. He always strongly suggests but never convincingly demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt stories about Xi peasant’s habits, jealous streak, lovers or drinking. As well, it is hard sometimes to distinguish the man from the Party he represents.

Overall, Mr. Sheridan’s book allows the western general reader to peek quite interestingly behind the veil of mystery and secrecy surrounding the Chinese Communist political nomenklatura and its paramount leader: beyond the propaganda spins and the apparent monolithic red front, it is usually not so pretty, divided between combative factions within the party, often violent, not to say deadly, always ruthless and without mercy. A very humane society, of sorts.

Also, his considerations on China’s imperial progress should give pause to any former or current US policymaker concerned with the American presence in the Asian theater, particularly, but not only, regarding Taiwan. In this scenario, Sheridan believes that rather than a traditional war, Xi’s military planners may be preparing to deliver a kinetic shock of such magnitude in the Pacific to the US that its national willpower would crumble, its alliances would unravel, and its retreat in their minds would be inevitable.

Who knows what the future holds?

The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats

3.5

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