New book offers rare insight into Xi's personal journey

"The book provides a great amount of facts and data on contemporary China. Any researcher on Chinese politics must refer to this book," Zhu Daping, publisher of The Xi Jinping Era, tells China Daily by phone from New York.

A former civil servant, Zhu is the founder and chairman of Beijing Media Time Books, a publishing house that aims to take more Chinese books to the US.

The book's chief editor is James Hsiung, a professor of politics at New York University. He is also an expert on Sino-US relations and the Asia-Pacific region.

In 1987, Hsiung was invited by the Chinese government to meet the late economic reformer Deng Xiaoping in Beidaihe, a seaside town in North China's Hebei province. Their conversation lasted some six hours.

In a separate media interview, Hsiung said his main reasons for editing the book were to refute the "China threat" theory, to objectively introduce the president and the country's development path under his leadership, and to let the world know that the essence of the Chinese nation's rejuvenation is peace rather than aggression.

Apart from Hsiung's broad view of international relations and his academic background, Zhu chose an American scholar as the chief editor out of another consideration.

"I realized that many Chinese books, although popular at home, fail in the US because American reading habits are different from Chinese, and translation is also a big problem," Zhu says. "So, I invited Hsiung to supervise the writing style and language of the book."

Three senior journalists from Xinhua News Agency and Workers Daily, and an associate professor from Tsinghua University are the book's main contributors.

Zhu says the writers had material on the subject that is seldom available to Western scholars.

He also says most Americans have never been to China and very few Americans speak Chinese. And their knowledge of China comes from the Western media, which in recent years has mostly been biased, talking up the so-called "China threat" and the "collapse of the Chinese economy".

"We needed to make an objective introduction of our country and leaders by telling good stories, so that American readers will understand China better," Zhu adds.