The head of state of the People's Republic. The office was vacant from 1975 to 1982.
1st? ? ?
2nd? ? ?
Acting? ? ?
3rd? ? ?
4th? ? ?
5th? ? ?
6th? ? ?
7th? ? ?
Photo credits
- Portraits come from Wikimedia Commons. The photographers are:
- Kremlin.ru / Roman Kubanskiy (Jiang Zemin) · CC BY 4.0
- Dilma Rousseff (Hu Jintao) · CC BY-SA 2.0
- The other 6 portraits are in the public domain.
Rules & what counts
Presidents of China Quiz: Rules & What Counts
The president of China is the head of state of the People's Republic. Only eight men have held the office, and this quiz shows a portrait of each one.
The grid has 8 cards, in order. Each card wears its number up front, and solving it reveals the name and the years in office.
Everyone lands Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping. The run-killer is the middle: three leaders between 1959 and 1993 that most of the world never learned.
How to play
- Just start typing. The quiz checks your answer at every keystroke. There is no submit button.
- Chinese names put the family name first. The family name alone works where it names one man: "mao", "xi", "hu" and "jiang" all solve a card.
- Older spellings count. "Mao Tse-tung", "Hu Chin-tao" and "Tung Pi-wu" are accepted alongside the modern pinyin.
- The timer starts at your first keystroke and counts up. Give Up ends the run and shows every portrait you missed. Progress saves automatically.
What counts in this quiz
- All 8 people who have held the office of president, from Mao Zedong in 1954 to Xi Jinping today.
- Dong Biwu has a card. He was the acting head of state from 1968 to 1975, a seven-year stretch when nobody held the office.
- Portraits are freely licensed Wikimedia Commons files. Free pictures of the Maoist-era leaders are rare, so the portrait of Dong Biwu is small and soft.
What's not included, and why
- The office was abolished from 1975 to 1982, so no card covers those years.
- Leaders who ran China without the presidency have no card. Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader for a decade and never held the office; nor did Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang.
- Presidents of the Republic of China, such as Chiang Kai-shek, led a different state and have no card.
Good to know
- The presidency is a ceremonial post on paper. Real power sits with the general secretary of the Communist Party, which every president since 1993 has also been.
- Liu Shaoqi was purged in the Cultural Revolution and died in prison in 1969. He was still the president.
- Li Xiannian was 74 when he took the restored office in 1983. He is the oldest man to become president.
- In 2018 the two-term limit was removed from the constitution, so Xi Jinping can hold the office for as long as he is chosen.