To understand Xi Jinping, look at his father’s life
Xi Zhongxun was purged by the Communist Party he served and went on to help reform Chinese politics. His son is the most authoritarian leader since Mao.
A 1958 photograph of a five-year-old Xi Jinping (left) with his brother Yuanping and father Xi Zhongxun. Getty
One June evening in 1976, when a neighbour visited Xi Zhongxun, a former vice premier who had been exiled to a factory in central China, he found the old man drinking cheap liquor and crying alone in the dark. Xi Zhongxun explained that it was his son Xi Jinping’s birthday. The old man felt guilty that Jinping and the family suffered so much during the Cultural Revolution.
A month later, Xi Jinping, who had just turned 23, visited his father, who made him recite two of Mao Zedong’s famous speeches from memory: “On Contradiction” and “On Practice”.
