“Great historical progress always happens after major disasters,” Mr. Xi said during a recent visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University. “Our nation was steeled and grew up through hardship and suffering.”
Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adversity as a young man, has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the party after early mistakes let infections slip out of control, and to rally national pride in the face of international ire over those mistakes. And the state propaganda machine is aggressively backing him up, touting his leadership in fighting the pandemic.
Now, Mr. Xi needs to turn his exhortations of resolute unity into action — a theme likely to underpin the National People’s Congress, the annual legislative meeting that opens on Friday after a monthslong delay.
He is pushing to restore the pre-pandemic agenda, including his signature pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by this year, while cautioning against complacency that could let a second wave of infections spread.
He must do all this while the country faces a diplomatic and economic climate as daunting as any since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.
A photo released by state-run media showing Mr. Xi visiting a school in Shaanxi Province in April.Credit...Xie Huanchi/Xinhua, via Associated Press
“If you position yourself as a great helmsman uniquely capable of leading your country, that has a lot of domestic political risk if you fail to handle the job appropriately,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of Chinese law and politics at Fordham University. “That’s a risk for Xi going forward.”
So far, Mr. Xi has largely succeeded in rewriting the narrative in China.
The disarray in other countries, especially the United States, has given him a reprieve from domestic political pressure by allowing officials to highlight China’s lower death toll, despite questions about the accuracy of the numbers.
The Trump administration’s withholding of funds from the World Health Organization handed Mr. Xi a chance to appear munificent when he pledged $2 billion in assistance and promised to make any vaccine widely available.
Mr. Xi has cast himself as the indispensable leader, at the ramparts to defend China against intractable threats. The shift has provoked the party cadre — and by all appearances much of the public — to coalesce around his leadership, whatever misgivings they may have about the bungling of the outbreak.
“If we had frozen time at Feb. 1, this would be very bad for the Chinese leadership,” said Jude Blanchette, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
China’s leaders in the past have often invoked the theme of triumph over adversity, but for Mr. Xi, who turns 67 next month, the idea threads through his own biography.
His father, a famous revolutionary leader, was purged and held in solitary confinement under Mao Zedong. The younger Xi was hounded as a child after his father’s disgrace and later, during the Cultural Revolution, ritually denounced by his own mother and exiled from Beijing to labor in a village for seven years.
A photo released by state-run media showing Mr. Xi in March, at an industrial park in Ningbo, in Zhejiang Province, China.Credit...Shen Hong/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Joseph Torigian, the author of a forthcoming biography on the father, said Mr. Xi’s personal hardships did not erode his loyalty to the party — at least outwardly. He emerged instead steeled, a word his father, Xi Zhongxun, used to describe his time in prison and that the son used when speaking at the university. “This moment of challenge is what makes leaders in China great,” Mr. Torigian said of Mr. Xi’s worldview.
It is a dramatic turnaround from only months ago, when Mr. Xi faced a shaken and skeptical public. The party apparatus seemed to shudder as outrage over silencing warnings about the virus and other early mistakes spilled beyond the censors.
“I see not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown who stripped naked and insisted on continuing to be an emperor,” a prominent real estate tycoon, Ren Zhiqiang, wrote publicly in March, prompting his arrest.
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