Is there really a Beijing Model of governance: authoritarian politics steering economic growth, diluting the appeal of the West’s democracy and freedom? The ruler of China thinks so. He’s focused on sticking around and seeing it triumph.

Xi Jinping is the first Chinese Communist leader to have been born after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He did not study or spend early years abroad like most predecessors. Deng Xiaoping, who ruled in the 1980s, studied in France and the Soviet Union after World War I; Jiang Zemin, who ruled in the 1990s, studied in Philadelphia. Only Mao Zedong, prior to Xi, reached maturity before glimpsing the foreign world. For Mao, that meant Moscow; for Xi, born in 1953, it was a 1985 trip to the cornfields of Iowa. Is he then a nationalist, like some other recently installed world leaders?