Wang Huning: the man behind Xi Jinping

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, over a billion copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were distributed across the People’s Republic. This small pocket-sized collection of quotations provided the scaffolding for an era of communist purges. Utopians need theory. And while the Maoist orthodoxies of the last century have faded, China’s need for a solid intellectual foundation is as strong as ever.

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is that new theory. But it is written not by the General Secretary himself but by an unassuming 65-year-old: his supreme theoretician.

Wang Huning has quietly shaped China over the last three decades, despite the fact that few of his countrymen could pick him out of a line-up. The French language graduate has served as an advisor to three generations of Chinese leadership since the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi himself.