Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World

This book contains surprisingly little information about Xi Jinping or his regime. Entire chapters and interviews have nothing to do with Xi or the CCP’s global influence, but are instead about other recent global political events of a wholly unrelated nature.The actual information about Xi could be summarized in a few pages. What’s left is a painfully superficial narrative about how Xi ended poverty, saved the climate, and built a lot of airports, with no particular insight into Xi and his regime’s political repression, Orwellian surveillance system, blocking of the western Internet, acts of genocide, unrestricted information warfare, military threats, or the elimination of term limits from China’s constitution, or what might be motivating Xi to do these things.The author’s sources are often various German officials who, like the author himself, have no particular expertise on China or Xi. Likewise, the interviews with Chinese officials are generally outdated and irrelevant to understanding Xi or his regime.The author seems to have lacked the necessary expertise on China necessary and put inadequate effort into the research to accommodate that knowledge deficit. The book seems to have been written solely to sell copies based on its cover.