The conclusion of the recent Communist Party congress in China has turned the world’s spotlight on a hitherto elusive figure, the 62-year-old scholar-turned-official, Wang Huning. Wang, who has just been elevated to the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee that rules China, is widely believed to be the mastermind behind the ideological frameworks set out by all three recent Chinese leaders — Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping with his “Chinese dream.”

Wang’s writing over the years is so strikingly parallel to the policies Xi has adopted that he is regarded by many as the brain behind the throne, the mandarin behind the emperor. What Wang has written offers huge clues to understanding where China is headed. 

As President Donald Trump embarks on his first official trip to China, we can learn a good deal about what Xi thinks by examining Wang’s thoughts on America. In August 1988, while still a young but high-achieving academic at Fudan University, Wang won a prestigious scholarship to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar, staying at Iowa University for the first three months before traveling elsewhere, covering over 30 cities and nearly 20 universities, including three weeks at the University of California, Berkeley. From his diaries and notes on that six-month sojourn, he produced a book in 1991 titled “America Against America” in which he surveys the contradictions he saw in American society.

Please click here to read the full “Meet the mastermind behind Xi Jinping’s power” article in the Washington Post by Griffith Asia Institute member, Dr Yi Wang.