He is the most powerful leader in the world. He rules over more than a billion people, controls a nuclear arsenal and runs a gigantic economy. It constitutes the number one challenge of the new American administration of President Donald Trump. However, we know little about him. Xi Jinpingthe man who is the new emperor of China. For what?

I started studying Xi over ten years ago. At first I thought it was just another dreary communist in a suit – the kind that King Charles once called “dreadful old waxworks” when he encountered them during the handover of Hong Kong. Kong.

I watched him sit for hours in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, as still as a statue. But when he spoke, it was in a confident imperial voice.

The reason we knew little about Xi when he came to power in 2012 was because China’s leaders lived behind a veil of secrecy. Obsessed with security, the regime does not even publish his date of birth. By the way, it’s June 15, 1953, but we only know that because his “friend” Vladimir Putin sends him a telegram every year.

But little by little, the veil was lifted.

With the help of Chinese researchers and a few courageous dissidents and editors, we now know that his life story is one of incredible hardship, strength of character and perseverance.

He endured things that would have broken many politicians raised in the comfort and security of the West, even as they boast their own stories of overcoming their humble origins or prejudices. Xi thinks they are soft.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his foreign minister, David Lammy, should not underestimate him as they try to chart a new course with China. This man comes from the toughest school on the planet.

He was born near the Forbidden City in Beijing, where emperors once ruled. His parents were communist revolutionaries, following Chairman Mao Zedong. They invaded the capital, took power and settled in the most beautiful houses. Little Xi Jinping – pronounced SHEE jin PING – went to an idyllic preschool, where they waved red flags and sang songs to Chairman Mao. But everything went wrong when his father fell from power during one of Mao’s purges. Xi lost his parents, his home and his education.

Denounced as the son of a “gangster”, he was harassed, beaten and paraded on stage to be mistreated. Then he was arrested by Mao’s fanatical Red Guards.

One rainy night, he escaped and ran towards the small house where his mother was sheltering. She turned him away and denounced him. Other punishments followed.

“They told me I could be shot a hundred times,” he once recalled, “so I asked myself, ‘What’s the difference between being shot once and being shot a hundred times?’ What was there to be afraid of?

Eventually, Xi was sent as a teenager to work in one of the poorest and most isolated regions of central China, joining millions of young people exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave, eating grainy food, with a wooden barrel as a common toilet. Life was so hard that he escaped again.

But he was arrested and put to work on a crew of workers digging sewers. Then he was sent back to the isolated village to devote himself there.

Surprisingly, Xi made key decisions at that time. He wouldn’t fight the system. He would rule it. He joined the Communist Party after eight attempts, established himself as a village chief, and finally returned to university to obtain a “worker-peasant-soldier” degree.

He had almost no secondary education but he worked hard. It turned out that his family still mattered: Mao forgave his father and the path to power was open again.

It took Xi decades to reach the top. He did it through perseverance and intrigue. One by one, his rivals disappear. The biggest threat to him came from a populist genius named Bo Xilai.

But Bo was hit by scandal after his wife was found guilty of murdering British businessman, old Harrovian Neil Heywood, by poisoning him following a business dispute.

My research for the book convinced me that she could not have committed the crime and had simply been trapped in a show trial. Regardless, Xi triumphed.

In power, Xi has been ruthless. He punished more than a million civil servants as part of a campaign against corruption. He fired generals and imprisoned bankers. Deaths in custody and suicides are common. His own foreign minister, Qin Gang, who speaks fluent English and served in the Chinese embassy in London, disappeared amid rumors of an affair, a love child and the CIA. Two defense ministers have fallen.

So what does he want?

Xi wants to make China great again. He once said Joe Biden that China had suffered so much at foreign hands that “the lesson we have learned is to never give in on anything.”

He thinks Americans should leave Asia and says the Western-led global trading system is bad — even though it has led the Chinese people from poverty to prosperity during their lifetimes.

Then there is his strange “friendship” with Russiathe president Vladimir Putin. Xi stood on a red carpet at the Kremlin and said the two were “driving changes in the world not seen in a hundred years.”

He supported Putin’s war Ukraine with weapons technology and trade deals, while talking about peace. For him, the prize is a new world order led by autocrats.

Yet many people in China think he is wrong. China and Russia are not real friends. I was given declassified US documents showing that Xi himself was encouraged, in his youth, by China’s top defense chief, to fear and distrust the former Soviet Union.

And even if Xi actually does Russia a satellite state by extorting its aid under harsh conditions, what purpose can this serve? It makes no sense, say its detractors in China, to destroy China’s already slowing economy by alienating the West.

The rich who have profited from China’s rise do not want a war with the Americans and their allies – a war, make no mistake, that would involve Britain. The same goes for millions of ordinary Chinese, who work hard to improve their lives.

The worry in Western intelligence circles is that Xi is ill-informed – and also a risk-taker. The other worry for this country is that Xi doesn’t like the UK.

As a child, he was taught that Victorian England stole Hong Kong, sold drugs and pillaged China during the 19th century Opium Wars.

It’s a distorted history lesson but one that is still required in Chinese schools.

His own views did not improve when his first wife, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, divorced him and moved to London.

In my book I tell of how he heard stories about her spending too much time with a prominent Cambridge professor and how she chatted at dinner parties about his habits. She has not been seen in public since traveling to China for her father’s funeral in 2019.

David Cameron came face to face with Xi’s unflinching intransigence when he led a desperate delegation to Beijing in 2013 to promote the “golden age” between our two countries.

The Prime Minister’s Etonian charm crumbled at a moonlit banquet where neither jokes nor flattery broke the ice. Undeterred, Cameron then invited the Chinese leader for a pint in his local pub, but it was already closing time for the “golden age”.

Then there was Xi’s excruciating state visit to Buckingham Palace, when the first two Chinese exchanged cautious pleasantries with Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh.

While Xi’s second wife, a famous singer named Peng Liyuan, is renowned for her social graces, the queen was unimpressed when other Chinese guests at a state dinner sat parading their cell phones and making fun of their own takeaways. Frivolous or not, impressions matter in a culture that values ​​the “face.”

When protesters in Hong Kong – now under Chinese rule – decided that the portly Xi looked like Winnie the Pooh, posters and Internet memes depicting the adorable bear appeared and spread across China, code for the leader.

It took time for Xi’s army of censors to realize this threat to national security. They may not have dared to tell their boss, hastily choosing to remain cautious.

Winnie the Pooh is now banned in China. It sounds laughable, but nothing is left to chance when you work for the most powerful man in the world.

The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and his New China, by Michael Sheridan (title, £25) is now available. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK postage on orders over £25