Xi Jinping is at his boldest and brashest. How will Donald Trump fare this week?
What 14,000 communications over 13 years tell you about China’s evolving leader
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IT IS the start of the most important week of diplomacy for Donald Trump since he returned to office. A meeting between the American president and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, is planned for Thursday (Oct 30) and comes after Trump’s whistle-stop tour of many of his country’s most important Asian allies.
It will be the first time that Trump and Xi have sat down together in six years. The Chinese leader has changed in that time. A new analysis by The Economist of more than 14,000 of his speeches, writings and other communications since 2013 offers a window into his mind. Xi appears more assured and less tentative than ever before – a tough leader to sit across from at a negotiating table.
His personal megaphone is not Truth Social, but the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, which meticulously records his spoken and written output and publishes it in an online database. Since 2013 there have been entries which together contain more than 20 million characters (for comparison, the Bible in Chinese contains fewer than one million).
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