Just finished reading a 17-page story of Xi. Here are some interesting facts about him. 🧵
At 15, #XiJinping left Beijing for a village called Liangjiahe, spending 7 years in the countryside, working and living alongside farmers.
He carried with him a small sewing bag embroidered with Chinese characters "mom's heart" by his mother Qi Xin.
Xi recalled his earnest wish then was "to make it possible for the villagers to have meat and have it often."
In the late 1970s, after graduating from @Tsinghua_Uni, Xi served as a secretary to the minister of defense.
Xi is the first Chinese president to swear allegiance before the country's Constitution.
For some time, air pollution was bad in Beijing. Xi once said the first thing he did in the morning was to check Beijing's air quality.
Xi often stays up late working. He has openly revealed one occasion on which he had a sleepless night.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year 2020, with COVID-19 clouding festivities, Xi had a sleepless night.
The next day, he convened a Party leadership meeting to discuss the country's response.
Xi is an avid sports fan. He enjoys football, ice hockey, boxing and swimming, often taking time out of his busy schedule to swim.
He uses sports to learn how to deal with challenges.
Just as athletes focus on cooperation during great football matches, we should focus more on cooperation than on individual skill, Xi once told cadres who were in charge of economic work.
As a young man, Xi was already fascinated by the rich diversity of the world. In rural Shaanxi, he devoured literary classics of the world, such as Faust and William Shakespeare's plays. He read Das Kapital three times; his reflections on the book filled 18 notebooks.
In 1979, Xi traveled to the Nordic countries as part of the entourage of a vice premier. In #Norway, he was quite impressed by the social welfare system.
In 1985, Xi, then a county-level official, traveled as part of a Chinese delegation to the US on an agricultural research trip. He was accommodated in a homestay in rural Iowa.
This is him posing for a photo as he visited San Francisco in 1985.
Xi has visited the US eight times.
He was the first Chinese leader to watch an #NBA game in a U.S. arena.
When visiting Cuba, he paid a special visit to the breakwater in Cojimar where Hemingway wrote "The Old Man and the Sea," and dropped by the bar Hemingway frequented to order a mojito. End
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