"One of the world's most powerful men is heading to town." "China's president, Xi Jinping." "A man the British Government wants to impress." "We want the UK to be China's best partner in the west." "So what kind of a partner is he?" "He's a hugely popular leader." "A man who wants a strong China abroad." "Dominant in East Asia to start with, and then the top dog in the whole world, above the United States." "And who's crushed opponents at home." "Xi wants to control every aspect of the society." "Just obey this." "Obey Chinese Dream." "I'm Carrie Gracie, the BBC's China editor." "There's no point in me trying to do anything without my friend from the propaganda department because we're obviously joined at the hip today." "And I'm retracing Xi Jinping's remarkable journey from cave-dweller to 21st-century emperor." "On the eve of his state visit, this is a story the Chinese government doesn't want us to tell." "The real story of China's new strongman." "A Chinese leader like no other." "King of the photo op." "He mucks in, gets pally with the locals." "And pops up in the oddest of places." "Even here, queueing up for lunch." "Paying for it himself." "No official TV crews, just punters filming on their phones." "A simple publicity stunt two years ago which electrified China." "It's obviously no big deal for a western politician to eat in a local diner, talk to voters and ordinary citizens." "But I've been reporting here since the 1980s, and I've never seen this until now." "The president, down amongst the citizens, proving he is a man of the people." "IN CHINESE:" "Well, let's give it a go, because that's what the president had." "It's actually pig intestine." "I'm not going to go there." "Everything the president does is carefully choreographed." "And his spin doctors are busy online." "Here he is, portrayed as a superhero, in state-sanctioned cartoons." "Even his marriage is idolised." "His wife, an A-list celebrity, with a glass-shattering voice." "OPERATIC SINGING" "This song and schmaltzy video, a tribute to their love for each other." "Produced, we're told, by adoring citizens." "It went viral." "For the leader of a secretive Communist state, kissing babies isn't normally top priority." "But China's top man is building a personality cult." "The hero worship of an emerging strongman." "For much of China's history, its vast population was ruled by emperors, shut away behind the walls of the Forbidden City." "Despite Xi Jinping's image of approachability, access to the real man is just as closely guarded." "Behind the smiling mask is an ice-cold schemer, a man whose journey to power reveals a ruthless and calculating operator." "Xi Jinping was born to rule." "His father was a hero of Chairman Mao's Communist revolution in 1949." "He grew up on tales of the huge accomplishments of the Red Army, of the greatness of China." "And I think, very early on, he wanted to repeat the footsteps of his father, help in the construction of a great China." "His charmed early years were described by a childhood friend, in what was supposed to be a private conversation with an American diplomat until their exchange was made public by Wikileaks." "Our contact is convinced that Xi has a genuine sense of entitlement, believing that members of his generation are the legitimate heirs to the revolutionary achievements of their parents, and therefore, deserve to rule China." "But then his pampered childhood was shattered by a political earthquake." "Chairman Mao had become a dictator who demanded to be worshipped." "For those who crossed him, torture and even public execution." "Xi's father was humiliated, the family jailed." "A sister died." "Alone in Beijing, the 14-year-old Xi faced death threats." "But Xi is a survivor." "I'm travelling to the part of China where he fled, nearly 50 years ago." "Tens of millions of people still live in caves here." "And back then, Xi did too." "But the isolated village which offered him shelter is long gone." "Today, it's a heavily guarded shrine to China's most famous son." "These people look like day trippers." "But I'm pretty sure they're actually government minders and plain-clothes police, all keeping an eye on me." "Me and Mr Li, my friend from the propaganda office, are heading now towards the cave where Xi Jinping actually lived when he was here." "I feel that there is no point in me trying to do anything without my friend from the propaganda department, because we're obviously joined at the hip today." "But they did let me see into his cave." "So this is one of the caves where Xi Jinping lived as a teenager in the village." "He shared this brick bed with three others." "And, gosh, yeah, it is a bit hard." "And he said that he slept on a pile of fleas, and that he was bitten until his entire body swelled up." "A hard introduction to village life." " TRANSLATION:" " Everything was difficult." "All we had to eat was porridge, herbs and buns." "If you're hungry, you don't care what you're eating." "Sharing the bed and the fleas back then was farmer Lu Ho-Shung." "While he read, I would roll the cigarettes." "He'd read the selected works of Mao Zedong." "Mao's quotes and the newspaper." "There wasn't anything else." "I got more of an insight than I was expecting." "He wasn't funny." "He didn't have a sense of humour." "When we had free time, we would play poker or hang out." "But he rarely went out with girls." "Clearly, not the life and soul of the party." "But he did pass on one bad habit." "He taught me how to smoke." "But now he's quit, and I'm still smoking." "But then this ordinary boy did something extraordinary." "Despite all his family's suffering at the hands of the Communist Party, he joined up." "The first step in the long march to the top." "A march which would take him to the kind of power and personality cult that Mao once had." "Xi's childhood friends summed up the kind of young man he'd become." "Xi was always exceptionally ambitious and had his eye on the prize from the very beginning." "Xi Jinping chose to survive by becoming redder than the red." "I think what Xi Jinping learned through those days of adversity was the basic skills of political survival." "He knows how to survive." "He knows how to struggle." "And he's got to the top." "And we were having a struggle of our own." "Even though they were watching our every move back in the village, the propaganda officials became extremely nervous about having us there." "And they asked us to promise that every single word we said about Xi Jinping in the entire film must be positive." "Time to go." "Xi set about plotting a path to power." "Far from Beijing, he played the long game, rising slowly, offending no-one." "Shipping tycoon and calligrapher Sze Chi-Ching has been close to Xi for 30 years." "He's watched his career develop from humble beginnings." " TRANSLATION:" " He ate all three meals at the canteen." "He washed his own clothes." "He looked like a man who could deal with a lot of suffering." "But Xi wouldn't be washing his own clothes forever." "When I talked to a group of my Hong Kong friends, I said," ""Our little brother is going for it."" "We still laugh about that." "Reporters assigned to follow Xi say he took the low-key to a whole new low." "Always very boring." "People cannot remember him." "He didn't want to get any kind of bad record." "He always make right decision." "So he always made the right decision, or no decision?" "Mostly no, but sometimes make right decision." "Never made wrong decision." "Behind this mask of blandness was a cunning strategy." "If you are trying to rise in a state like China, you don't want to show yourself, because then everyone will be against you." "So you are very low-key until you get to power." "Xi was sizing up the political landscape." "His childhood friend reveals how one thing really bothered him." "Xi knows how very corrupt China is, and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values." "After Mao's death, China had opened up." "Capitalism was allowed." "China had become an Aladdin's Cave of riches." "And officials helped themselves." "The public was as repulsed as Xi." "But instead of stopping the plunder, even top leaders piled in." "The scale of their ill-gotten gains was absolutely vast." "Gold, paintings, designer watches, not to mention the luxury villas and the foreign bank accounts." "The party was rotten to the core." "And Xi Jinping was determined to purge it." "In 2012, his moment came." "Xi became Communist Party boss." "The teenager who had fled Beijing fearing for his life had clawed his way to the very top." "The man who'd seemed so dull, so safe, began confounding expectations." "He gave himself more powers than any leader since Mao." "The period after Xi Jinping's rise to power was a great surprise for Chinese." "I think they thought he would be an amiable person, who would just go along to get along." "And he's turned out to be a very powerful leader." "Is he a strong leader?" "Yes." "Has he consolidated political power around himself?" "Yes." "He is utterly comfortable with the exercise of power from day one." "The edicts of China's emperors have always been immortalised in ink." "We're doing the same for Xi's words." "In a speech to Communist party insiders, he revealed a guiding obsession." "After the collapse of communism in Soviet Russia, he was terrified that China would be next." "Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?" "An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken." "Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist." "China would be different." "China had a man to save it." "Xi started by restoring the party's reputation." "He launched the biggest crackdown on official corruption in Communist history." " TRANSLATION:" " Problems such as corruption by some party members, being out of touch with the people, placing undue emphasis on formality and bureaucracy, must be addressed with great effort." "It was a campaign of terror." "Tens of thousands of officials behind bars." "For the image makers in the propaganda department, it was a gift." "A victory for Xi, the tough guy who preferred the simple life." "Corruption had reached industrial scales." "Now, I think it's probably running at wholesale scales." "He'd rather reduce it to retail scales." "Xi went after the big beasts of the party, the men he called the tigers." "But he had a hidden agenda." "Destroying his rivals." "Whilst Xi himself seems clean, there is evidence some family members got spectacularly rich as he rose." "But it's his enemies who have ended up in court." "Men like Zhou Yongkang, the head of China's vast security network." "A tiger whose power threatened Xi's own." "A corruption scandal got rid of him." "Zhou was deeply corrupt." "But Xi Jinping's tiger hunt isn't just about clean government, it's classic Imperial Palace politics." "Destroying Zhou has been a way to eliminate a rival and cement absolute power." "The party's problems were deeper than corruption." "In modern, connected China, it looked out of touch, hostile to change." "If China was going to avoid the fate of Soviet Russia," "Xi needed a positive message alongside the purge." "Cue the Chinese Dream - a message of strength, wealth and loyalty to the leader." "But what about the fine print?" "This is one of the most famous bookshops in China, and they've got a very prominent display of the works of our man Xi Jinping. it's in every language under the sun." "Classical allusions he uses in his speeches." "Ancient Chinese wisdom." "Governance of China." "About the theory of the rule of law." "The point, if I could just summarise, is to say that China needs the Communist Party." "The Communist Party needs Xi Jinping." "Therefore China needs Xi Jinping to make it strong, wealthy and united." "Has the message cut through?" "I'm not doing very well here, I can't find anyone who's read any of these." "Even so, they may not read his books, they may not even know what his Chinese Dream is, but they do like the fact that he's fighting corruption, and that he's a strong leader." "Oops, another tangle with Big Brother." "The police don't take kindly to us asking people about their leader." "The Chinese Dream is about a strong China." "Sport matters." "And no sport more than football." "Xi was once in the crowd when his national side was defeated 5-1 by..." "Watford." "The humiliation left him furious." "Now he's in power, Xi likes to win." "Part of his dream - to qualify for, host and win the World Cup." "That's a long way off, says celebrity commentator Tony Zhao." "The realistic one now is qualifying for the World Cup again." "And then hosting, then is winning." "That's a long way." "We have to wait before that." " The defending was a bit ropey!" " Yeah!" "Football is a handy symbol for international ambition." "An easy ball for Xi's propaganda team." "With Russia's Putin on side, he's building a new world order, in which the West - particularly the United States - no longer sets the rules of play." "He has been rattling the sabre, not just in the Asia Pacific region, but all around the world." "His China Dream is dominant in East Asia to start with, and then, frankly, if you talk to Chinese officials, and you don't have to have had many drinks, then the top dog in the whole world, above the United States." "Xi dreams of a China that is rich and strong." "The great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history." "But not a China that is free." "His Chinese Dream requires discipline." "In order for China to advance, he feels that the people must be controlled." "They cannot be allowed to get out of hand, because there's a lot of people there." "So they must be under no illusion but that the party leads, and Xi Jinping leads the party." "Xi Jinping has no particular interest in transforming China into a democracy." "Let's be very clear about that." "Anyone who dares to dream a different dream is in trouble." "Even women trying to post stickers on public transport to highlight sexual harassment." "In March, China detained five women for more than a month." "Others went into hiding." "We've tracked down the women, who've agreed to give a rare interview." "I'd say it's quite an ironic story." "Five families who want to do something innocent and campaign against sexual harassment then they got harassed by police." "And they got over one month's detention." "I also feel disappointed that the authorities think we are dangerous to the society, or something." "I think Xi is like the father of the country, he wants to rule the country like he is ruling his own family." "It's really..." "I think it's really backward." "In Xi's China, citizens can't demand rights." "He sees free speech and democracy as a Western plot to keep China weak." "Xi may enjoy Hollywood movies, and chose an American education for his daughter, but he's waging war against Western ideas." ""Western anti-China forces and internal dissidents are still" ""actively trying to infiltrate China's ideological sphere." ""We must see the ideological situation" ""as a complicated, intense struggle."" "One newspaper found itself on the wrong side of that struggle when it planned an edition urging Xi to honour citizens' rights." "Its reporters got a nasty shock." "When we got the newspaper in our hands, we found that some of the content has been changed, mysteriously changed." "Changed by the government's propaganda department to a line it preferred." "The Chinese Dream." "It's a dark time for journalists, but most people don't notice, content for now to get on with their own lives." "How many people think that there should be more room for journalists to do real journalism?" "I would say at most 1% of people" " are like me." " Yeah." " It's not many, is it?" " Not many." "You haven't got much of a future, have you?" " But you need more than that, don't you?" " Of course." "China is a huge society going through enormous, fast change, it's full of contradictions and turbulence, it surely needs journalism more than a developed society." "Yeah, I think so, so I'm quite sad to see all these changes." "For China's paranoid leader, what's just as dangerous as journalism is a joke." "Especially if Xi is the butt of it." "Some Chinese wag pointed out a resemblance between the strongman and a famous yellow bear." "Now it's banished from the Chinese internet." "Xi is more powerful and more paranoid than any leader since Mao, but things went disastrously wrong under Mao." "Is the new strongman in danger of repeating history?" "It's places like this which may hold the clues." "Cute and cutting edge, Xiaomi sees itself as a rival to Apple." "They want to sell you your next mobile phone." "But behind the shiny business front," "Xi wants to fight his war of ideas right here." "They may be privately owned, but that hasn't stopped Xi forcing tech companies to set up Communist Party cells, telling them to demonstrate positive energy and to purify cyberspace." "That language is hard for a global audience to understand." "What does "purifying cyberspace" mean, what does "positive energy" mean?" "I don't want to discuss these issues, it's not something I'd like to discuss publicly." "'No-one wanted to talk politics.'" "Under Xi, a single word out of line can land you in big trouble." "He wants China to have world-beating companies and free markets, but he also wants to control them." "In today's global economy, is that even possible?" "Over the summer, China's stock markets said no, shaken by the obsession with control." "Millions of people lost their savings, and all over the world, traders took fright." "All the economists say they totally mishandled the stock exchange bubble that took place during the summer." "If they can't get it right, then we will suffer." "Fixing an economy whose future affects the whole world - the major challenge facing Xi." "It's a make-or-break battle for China's strongman." "A show of strength at the gate of the Forbidden City." "Not a moment too soon for a leader under pressure." "This is President Xi Jinping's first big, public occasion as commander-in-chief and he's trying to signal to the whole of China that he is firmly in charge, and with the military in his grasp, he is unassailable, master of everything." "He's marching on with the Chinese Dream, in the UK this week, signing record-breaking deals that will bring us ever closer to China." "From palace to cave to absolute power, the Communist prince has had an incredible journey." "Xi's China marches in lockstep for now, but it matters to all of us if dreams turn sour." "MUSIC:" "She by The Monkees" "# She" "# She told me that she loved me" "# And like a fool I believed her from the start" " # Yeah!" " Yeah!" " # Yeah!" " Yeah!" " Yeah!" " Yeah!" " Yeah!" " Yeah!" "# She... #"