SEPTEMBER 30, 2015 10:16 AM September 30, 2015 10:16 am
President Xi Jinping of China at the White House state dinner held for him last week. Mr. Xi raised the profile of an adviser, Ding Xuexiang, when he was included in the guest list for the event.Credit Mike Theiler/Reuters
He was on the guest list for the state dinner that President Obama hosted for President Xi Jinping of China on Friday. He was also one of four officials that Mr. Xi took with him to meet Mr. Obama and an American policy delegation in Beijing in November.
Ding Xuexiang, 53, has emerged as the latest notable entrant into Mr. Xi’s inner circle, which has a reputation for being secretive and purposefully distant toward Westerners.
Mr. Ding serves as a secretary to Mr. Xi, after a career as a Communist Party cadre in Shanghai, where Mr. Xi spent eight months as party chief in 2007 after a political purge there. Mr. Ding moved to Beijing in 2013 after being appointed deputy director of the General Office of the party’s Central Committee. The director of the General Office is Li Zhanshu, an old friend of Mr. Xi’s from Hebei Province who essentially serves as Mr. Xi’s chief of staff. The General Office has the task of coordinating administrative affairs for senior party officials.
“Ding Xuexiang is more of the gatekeeper guy,” said Christopher K. Johnson, a former China analyst for the C.I.A. who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “He’s smart. There’s no doubt Xi listens to his thinking. He will likely become the General Office director once Li Zhanshu goes.”
Mr. Ding was the head of the Shanghai party committee’s General Office in 2007 when Mr. Xi arrived, and he was soon promoted to the post of secretary general of the municipal party committee.
“Here is another young man, and he was born after 1960,” Mr. Xi said of Mr. Ding while introducing his municipal cabinet to Chinese reporters that May, according to a 2013 article in Beijing Youth Daily.
The article said that when Mr. Ding was head of the Shanghai party’s General Office, he wrote an article for Secretary Work magazine that laid out his philosophy for serving as an aide to leaders.
“The prosperity of a country depends on political affairs, and the achievement of political affairs relies on the work of the assistant,” he wrote. “The general office of the party committee, as the think tank of the party committee and brain of the leaders, should place as its first priority its service of consultation.”
Secretaries must “plan with the heart of a commander despite having a post as a soldier,” he wrote. “If you cannot do this, it will all be in vain, no matter how much additional effort you make and how much more work you do.”
Mr. Ding has a technical background typical of many officials of his generation. He graduated from Northeast Heavy Machinery Institute and worked at the Shanghai Research Institute of Materials from 1982 to 1999, before beginning his rapid rise through the party ranks. His first cadre position was as a deputy director on the science and technology work committee of the Shanghai municipal party committee.
Under Mr. Xi, the General Office has been expanding its duties and moving into the realm of policy. Mr. Xi placed the executive office of the secretive National Security Commission, which he created to defend the party against domestic and foreign threats, inside the General Office.
“The General Office staff has grown dramatically under Xi,” Mr. Johnson said.
There are about 300 people from the General Office who “play an important role in pushing paperwork and decision documents to Xi and act as the staff of the N.S.C.,” David M. Lampton, director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote in a paper on the commission this year.
Political observers in Beijing have noted others in Mr. Xi’s orbit with secretarial roles. One is Zhong Shaojun, who is Mr. Xi’s secretary on the Central Military Commission. In 2013, he was appointed deputy director of the military commission’s General Office.
Before that, Mr. Zhong had a civilian career as a party cadre. A native of Zhejiang Province, he worked there as a propaganda official when Mr. Xi was the provincial party chief. He was then transferred to Shanghai, where he worked under Mr. Ding in the General Office. His last move was to Beijing. At each step, Mr. Zhong was transferred at the same time that Mr. Xi moved into posts in those cities, indicating that he has been one of Mr. Xi’s most trusted aides, according to one report online.
A state television news clip from 2013 shows Mr. Zhong visiting a satellite launch base in Gansu Province with Mr. Xi and wearing a green, short-sleeve People’s Liberation Army uniform that has shoulder insignia designating him as a colonel.
Another man, Zhu Guofeng, has also been labeled a secretary to Mr. Xi. In footage from state television he was seen at a meeting with Mr. Xi and other world leaders during the Boao Forum for Asia in southern China in April 2013.
