It was at this time - during a trade war between China and the EU over textile quotas - that I got a rare invitation to interview the commerce minister. Such interviews with top Chinese officials were excruciatingly dull, but this was the opposite. He says the party needs a "unity ticket" in wake of the economic situation, and that there's no point spending another four to five days voting for a leader. The word on everyone's lips was "xia hai" or "dive into the sea". It meant quitting your old job in a state company and plunging into private business. I remember the day one of our assistants came into the BBC office, handed in his ID and declared, "I'm off to Shenzhen", the boom city on China's southern coast. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru Nothing lends legitimacy to the Communist Party quite like Mao - the iconic revolutionary whose portrait still reigns over Tiananmen Square, where he declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. "The great emperors - that is who Xi actually looks up to, this guy is enormous in his ambition," Prof Tsang says. It was implemented for recent mid-term exams, which were sat by hundreds of students at the college in the third week of October. The leadership of the United States frames support for Ukraine as a matter of defending a “rules-based international order” that is under attack by rogue authoritarians. Xi was a princeling - the son of one of Mao's lieutenants, Xi Zhongxun, who had been purged and later rehabilitated. Colleagues described the younger Xi as humble, self-disciplined and hardworking but otherwise unremarkable. Even on the eve of his elevation to general secretary of the Communist Party there was little hint of what was to come.