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The young Xi, son of a Communist luminary disgraced by the Red Guards, was “sent to work in Liangjiahe, a miserably poor mountain village of windowless cave houses in a barren landscape of deforested hills in northern Shaanxi.

It was there that another teenage exile lent him a copy of [Goethe’s] Faust, which Xi read again and again till he knew it by heart, as he credibly boasted on meeting Angela Merkel.”
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For a century after its completion in 1832, Faust commanded the attention of the whole literary world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a partial translation in 1821, and Percy Shelley tried his hand at a few scenes. The most influential Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, took it for granted that Goethe was the greatest writer after Shakespeare.
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Faust may be the best window that Western analysts have into the mind of the world’s most powerful man.

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Goethe explains, gave us material security and personal choice. But security breeds complacency and the arbitrary exercise of freedom makes us disgusted with life itself.

Goethe’s protagonist does not make a deal with the Devil, as in the popular Faust legend from which Goethe took his raw material. On the contrary: Faust bets the Devil that none of his blandishments – not money, sex, love, beauty, or even material progress – can lull him into complacency.
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The 2006 Nobelist in Economics Edmund Phelps sketched what might be called a “Faustian” economic philosophy in an essay published a dozen years ago:

I personally hold that the classical spirit of challenge and self-discovery is a fundamental human trait. By showing how the risk-taking activity of individuals contributes to social benefits, economics helps societies to accommodate what Augustine called our “restlessness of heart.” This is the better part of our human nature. Societies that suppress this restlessness stagnate and die. The issue of morality in economics is neither the fairness of income distribution nor the stability of financial systems. It is how human institutions can be shaped to correspond to human nature—to man’s nature as an innovator.

Phelps’s meditation on human striving brings us full circle to Xi’s fascination with Goethe’s Faust.
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Phelps argues that it is neither scientific discovery nor engineering expertise nor entrepreneurial talent that produces periods of extraordinary economic expansion but, rather, the willingness of people at every level of society to embrace innovation.

Faustian economic policy isn’t necessarily humane. In the second part of Goethe’s drama, Faust directs a vast project to reclaim land from the sea, believing that a people that must fight daily for its terra firma will not fall into complacency. He declares:

| By whatever means necessary,
| Find masses upon masses of workers,
| Inspire them through reward or severity –
| Pay them, entice them, conscript them!
I I want daily reports on how far the excavations have extended.

There is nothing painless or pleasant about Faust’s great project. On the contrary: Faust is capable of great cruelty. His orders have a tragic outcome; an old couple must be evicted to make way for the project, and Faust’s overseer, the devil Mephistopheles, kills them.
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The “last conclusion of wisdom,” Faust says with his penultimate breath, is: “Only he deserves freedom as well as life who must conquer them every day.”

In the original that is: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben/Der täglich sie erobern muß. I read those words for the first time half a century ago, and they have been my personal motto ever since.

One can only guess what Xi thinks about Faust. I conjecture that he thinks of his own regime as a relentless and often merciless campaign against complacency, driving the Chinese 1.4 billion people to achieve and innovate like no other country in the world.

=============VERY VERY INTERESTING.

Many historian had written off Chinese society as lacking dynamism. Thomas Metzger, the author of ESCAPE FROM PREDICAMENT held the opposite view. Neo-Confucianism goal is a relentless and often merciless campaign against complacency of the heart such that one could achieve the Confucianist goal of "Inner saint, outer king."

Remind me of Mao's poem.
别梦依稀咒逝川，故园三十二年前。
红旗卷起农奴戟，黑手高悬霸主鞭。
为有牺牲多壮志，敢教日月换新天。
喜看稻菽千重浪，遍地英雄下夕烟。

As far I can tell, Xi is a Maoist. But then Mao, although commonly portrayed as anti-Confucianism, in at his heart follower of Confucianism in disguise, according to Thomas Metzger.