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Beijing. In 1985, Xi Jinping led a delegation to Muscatine, Iowa, to study advanced hog-raising techniques. He comes back next week, preparing to lead the world’s most populous nation.

China’s vice president, who will take over the presidency from Hu Jintao next year, will be in the United States to meet President Barack Obama and other leaders and introduce himself to a US audience. His decision to also visit the families who hosted him years ago is a rare personal touch for a Chinese leader, one that feeds his reputation as a new type of official who dares to step away from the traditional aloofness of Chinese high office.

“He appreciated learning about America on that level, and he is signaling by going there that he is going to be a different kind of leader,” said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an author and a long-time adviser to the Chinese government. “He is going to be open.”

Xi’s ability to make personal connections and his unassuming confidence will be in high demand as he takes over the leadership of the ruling Communist Party this year, a step toward assuming the presidency.

The 58-year-old faces the tricky task of advancing China’s development against the tides of global financial insecurity, resource scarcity, environmental crises and simmering social unrest, particularly in the western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet.

In his appearances, including a Feb. 14 White House meeting with Obama, Xi will offer reassurance that China and the US remain committed to healthy relations.

“China wants a sign of respect to establish its up-and-coming leader on the world stage,” said Joseph Cheng, head of the Contemporary China Research Center at the City University of Hong Kong.

Such visits by other Chinese leaders have been revealing. Deng Xiaoping left his mark in 1979 by attending a rodeo and donning a ten-gallon hat. Visiting just prior to taking power in 2002, Hu showed himself as bland, hyper-cautious and inscrutable.

Xi, who has a glamorous wife and a daughter at Harvard, was a consensus choice when tapped as successor in 2007. He has proven adept at suppressing his own views and avoiding antagonism among the party’s various branches and factions.

Henry Kissinger described him last year as “a more assertive type than we’ve seen,” while Vice President Joe Biden told Xi he was impressed with his “open ness and candor.”

In Chinese political parlance, Xi is a “princeling,” as the sons and daughters of communist China’s founding fathers are termed.

His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a key figure in the revolution that swept the communists to power in 1949 but was later imprisoned for nearly 30 years. Released in 1978, he helped establish China’s ground-breaking Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

Xi Jinping spent seven years toiling in the rugged loess hills of northern China before earning a chemistry degree at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. He spent three years as a top general’s aide before opting for a decidedly unglamorous administrative posting in heavily agricultural Zhengding county southwest of Beijing.

It was as Zhengding Communist Party secretary that Xi went to Iowa on a mission to study hog raising and experience a slice of Americana. Xi stayed with local families for two nights, visited farms and watched baseball.

Sarah Lande, a Muscatine native who hosted Xi, remembers him as outgoing, organized and self-possessed, dressed in a Western-style suit rather than the drab Mao jackets of previous visitors.

“It was all through interpretation so we couldn’t talk one-to-one, but they were very interested in how to produce more food for their country,” Lande said. “It seemed special to us that he would want to know so much about us and how we worked.”

Xi’s next few postings were in the coastal province of Fujian, where he built up a reputation for breaking bureaucratic logjams.

He eventually became governor, then jumped to one of China’s most economically dynamic provinces, Zhejiang. Following a brief spell leading the financial hub of Shanghai, he moved to Beijing as one of nine members of the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee in 2007.

For observers of Chinese politics, Xi poses a riddle: Will he continue to follow or tighten the model of rigid one-party rule married to a market economy, or will he embark on a relatively more liberal path that could weaken communist authority?

During Xi’s five years in Zhejiang, private businesses and business associations thrived. In one provincial city, citizens were given a say in how the local government spent its budget, something that remains extremely rare elsewhere in the country.

While Xi was not necessarily behind those moves, he still gets credit for not standing in their way, Beijing political analyst Li Fan said.

“Xi is a person who is able to listen to other opinions and accept other views, although he isn’t an initiator,” he said.

Zhejiang-based pro-democracy activist Yin Weihong was more skeptical, saying Xi was quick to move against pro-democracy activists and did not halt the demolition of a Protestant church.

“I can’t recall any instance when he came across as particularly tolerant,” Yin said.

It may be years before Xi’s true attitudes are known. Hu, after relinquishing his posts as head of party and state, is expected to retain the key position of military chief through 2014 or beyond.

Associated Press