Anyone know who the professor is that sourced this? His father was China's "first Minister of Labor" and the professor became an American.
> Despite Communist Party rhetoric regarding the
creation of a "classless" society, the professor described,
the pre-Cultural Revolution society and leadership compounds
in which he and Xi Jinping grew up were, ironically, the
"most precisely class-based mini-society ever constructed."
Always an interesting observation. I've read is a constant source of conflict in many modern socialist groups is that ideological purity tests often damages their ability to maintain cohesion, recruit among the actual 'working class' since the party is usually middle class university kids, and infighting over petty details of organization has been satirized to death. While the historical success stories of (obviously authoritarian) socialist parties always had rigid hierarchies, clear leaders, and ruthless pragmatism.
Politics always dilutes ideology, you just can't say that part out loud.
What I find interesting about Xi is his father who was instrumental in introducing free market to China through the province he was in charge of Guandong or Guangzhou (?) who wanted to create self-reliant city governance by inviting limited test run of foreign capital in return for labor produce.
Deng Xiaoping quickly recognized its potential and essentially took credit for this model that allowed China to catapult itself onto the world stage.
I can only imagine his ambitions growing up, he's family suffered under the cultural revolution, he's father was sidelined and others took credit for what essentially transformed China.
He was originally chosen as a candidate to replace Hu, after the March 2012 coup d'etat that led to the imprisonment of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang. He was picked because he was predicted to be a lame duck but what transpired as you see was the political war launched to remove/reduce Ziang Zemin's grip on power.
The internal struggles of the CCP and Xi's family history is very interesting but what I find even more interesting is how much the American media attacks Xi because Jiang Zemin has lot of friends in this area.
> he's father was sidelined and others took credit for what essentially transformed China.
Yeah it was probably easy to see Xi as just another party leader but this back story shows how he sees himself as both coming from and representing the very best that China has to offer and a bunch of his friends are very comfortable with such a singular strong man elitist taking over.
He’s got the credentials for such a thing.
It’s just too bad he went ‘redder than red’ in the critical years his father was in jail. But I guess his success was partly because he wasn’t a Deng Xiaoping acolyte that grew up being pro-West.
Yes precisely to your point of pro-West and isolationist factions that are splitting up the leadership. It does seem that from Xi's travels that he clearly feels secure enough to meet foreign leaders and leave beijing unattended.
Jiang Zemin's people are throwing everything they got to hold on to essentially unlimited power and wealth. We can see that they also have their fans in the West who have benefited from this system setup by Deng.
It's unlikely that Xi will compromise, I can see that he was able to hide his ambition very well, enough to fool other CCP princelings that tried to wrestle away control. ie) bo xilai
