The son of a senior Communist Party official, he grew up in Beijing. However, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and Xi was sent to work as a manual labourer in Shaanxi (1969–75), where he joined the Communist Party (1974). In 1979 he graduated in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and thereafter worked for the Party and government in Beijing, Hebei, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. In 2007 he was appointed to the standing committee of the Communist Party Politburo, and in 2012 he succeeded Hu Jintao as Party General Secretary. He became President of China in 2013. Domestically, he has suppressed opposition and concentrated power in his own hands, while tackling corruption within the government, the Party, and ithe financial services industry. In foreign affairs, he has wooed many countries by offering to make major investments in their economies, and found this one way of deflecting criticism about human rights abuses in Tibet, for example. Closer to home, he has become more belligerent, particularly in the South China Sea, where China’s claims on a number of geographically quite distant islands has soured relations with neighbours, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines.