Xi Jinping
Xi Jinping is an actor, born 1953.
Xi Jinping is the paramount leader of China. He has been general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the party's Central Military Commission since 2012, and president of the People's Republic and chairman of the state military commission since 2013.
He was born in Beijing in 1953, a son of Xi Zhongxun, a veteran revolutionary of the party's first generation. When his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution, Xi was sent to the countryside as part of the sent-down youth movement, to the village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi, where he lived in a cave dwelling, did manual labour and eventually became the local party secretary. He applied to join the party repeatedly before he was accepted, then studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student. The political career that followed was built in the coastal provinces: governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, then Zhejiang, then the national leadership.
He has a page here because documentary film keeps needing him. Every credit attached to his name is himself, most of it archive footage, in films and series about climate policy, geopolitics and the American reading of both. That is a filmography in the technical sense only. It is really a record of how frequently a head of state becomes raw material, and it reads best as a list of the arguments other people have used him to make.
Movies (4)
TV (7)
Where to start with Xi Jinping
None of these are films about him, which is the first thing to know. Before the Flood gives him the most presence, inside the climate diplomacy the film is arguing for, and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power covers adjacent ground from within the Paris negotiations.
For analysis rather than footage, Frontline is the standing option, since its China reporting is the most substantial long-form journalism on this list, while History 101 takes the graphs-and-narration approach to similar material at a much shallower depth. Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj is where he appears as a punchline in American comedy, which is its own kind of document, and Fahrenheit 11/9 borrows him briefly to make an argument about somebody else entirely. Start with the climate pair if you want him speaking, and with Frontline if you want him explained.