Profile: With popular mandate, Xi Jinping spearheads new drive to modernize China

Xi was first elected to the Party's top post in late 2012. For the first time, the position was held by a person born after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Since then, he has taken the nation on an ambitious path of revival, according to international media reports. Xi has a clear vision for China, to see it as a powerful country in the world, the reports said.

THE CORE

In 1969, Xi left Beijing for a small village on the Loess Plateau to live as a farmer, sharing the same fate as millions of youths who came of age during the Cultural Revolution.

For someone like Xi who grew up in Beijing, life in the countryside was extremely difficult at the beginning. Villagers often went without meat for several months. Despite the hardships, Xi looked back on this experience as the time when he truly understood the struggles of the common people and society.

This unique experience fueled Xi's determination to always do something for the betterment of the people.

While many of his college peers opted to go abroad, Xi applied to work in a poor county called Zhengding in Hebei Province in the early 1980s.

In 2012, soon after taking office as the general secretary, Xi visited poor rural families in Hebei. In Gu Chenghu's home, Xi sat on a heated brick bed and chatted with him.

"I have come here to check your living conditions and see what the Party's leadership can do more for you and people like you," Xi said.

He held up Gu's sleeve and showed it to the officials around him, saying, "Look, his coat is worn out."

At the time, there were around 100 million rural Chinese living under the poverty line of earning an annual income of 2,300 yuan ($366).