China’s leader stamped out his credentials as a world leader during the APEC summit

Irish people will be more familiar with Xi Jinping as an avuncular figure kicking a football in Croke Park during his ground-breaking visit to Ireland in 2012, bonding with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and ready to make friends.

In those heady days in Croker, he was still vice-president, about to assume the leadership of the world’s most populous nation and its second biggest economy, and making a call on what kind of leader he would be was impossible.

Since then he has assumed all three key leadership posts – Communist Party general secretary, president and head of the army. He has fended off numerous challenges to his authority and establish himself as the most powerful leader in China since Chairman Mao Zedong, as he seems not to be as reliant on support from other factions within the Party, outside his own power base, as his predecessors. He has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption and appears popular among Chinese.

That kick meant a lot to him, as the photograph was on the wall behind him when he gave his first presidential address after assuming power in November 2012. Perhaps he now has fresh goals in mind.

The Xi Jinping that emerged from the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) meeting in Beijing was a confident world leader much more in the mode of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While many in the West hope for Mr Xi to find inspiration in the democratic models offered by President Barack Obama or Chancellor Angela Merkel, for him Mr Putin is a much more realistic role model.

Many Chinese, particularly among the leadership, feel democracy has been badly tarnished by the wheeler-dealing and apparent deadlock in America’s legislative system, by the revelations about National Security Agency spying and by Europe’s timidity on dealing with economic woes.

Mr Putin, however, stands up to the United States, his rule has a vivid authoritarian stamp and he wants his country to be perceived as strong and influential. And he never asks about China’s human rights record or path to democracy.

At the APEC meeting, it was Mr Putin who placed a warming coat around the shoulders of Mr Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan. Relations between Russia and China are often fraught, but for the time-being at least, there is warmth.

Between the US and China, it is a different matter. Both are fighting for influence in the Asia Pacific, and China wants its remarkable economic rise to be matched by diplomatic influence in the region, feeling itself thwarted by policies such as Washington’s “Asia Pivot” which seeks to extend US influence in the area.

Despite these tensions, early signs looked good, as China and the US came up with a tentative agreement to strengthen their co-operation on cutting emissions, raising the possibility of a deal on climate change at UN talks in Paris next year.

There were photos of a relaxed Mr Obama sipping white wine, as a red-wine sipping Mr Xi looked on.

Then, during a rare news conference, certainly the first unscripted one Mr Xi has given since he came to office, the Chinese leader was asked about why certain foreign journalists were not given visas after they had written articles about the financial dealings of the families of the Communist Party elite, including the Xi family.

Each side had been given one question each, and the New York Times, which has had visas blocked for several of its correspondents since it wrote about the financial affairs of former Premier Wen Jiabao, was given the question.

The correspondent asked if Beijing would give equal rights to journalists covering China, after a new rule from Washington extending visas for Chinese businesspeople and tourists.

The man who answered the question was not the polite, hard-to-read Hu Jintao, Mr Xi’s predecessor. This was not the garrulous, sly Jiang Zemin who preceded him.

This was not even the Xi Jinping of Croke Park, more it was the leader who in 2009 had launched a diatribe against Western leaders “with full bellies” who criticise China.

“The Chinese have a saying – let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off,” he said, clearly irate, a proverb which implies it was the news organisations’ own fault for not obeying the rules in China. He told foreign governments to keep their noses out of Hong Kong’s democracy demonstrations, a clear dig at Washington, saying the Occupy Central group was “illegal”.

When Xi Jinping kicked a football in Croke Park, it was read in Ireland as a sign of friendly intentions and good nature. In China it was seen as evidence of his physical vitality, just like Chairman Mao’s annual swims in the Yangtze were evidence the Great Helmsman remained a formidable physical presence.

Mr Xi – who is known as “Chairman Xi” in Chinese – stamped out his credentials as a world leader during the APEC summit, and for him, a strong and unified China able to let its feelings be known, regionally and globally, is the goal for which he is kicking.

Clifford Coonan is Beijing Correspondent