7 Comments
User's avatar
Eric Engle's avatar

My own opinion is: Xi Jinping is desperately trying to redeem his father and thus his family as his father was party purged, no?

Expand full comment
WideFountain's avatar

You have good thought there. Xi Zhongxun was the best the CCP had to offer - he forged relations with China’s neighbors in Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet in the 1950s and later created the strategy for investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan to engaged with China in the early 1980s. But Xi Jinping never showed his father’s grand quality of mutual respect for others. I believe he was part damaged goods from the Cultural Revolution and part caught up in the covert strategies of the Ye-Xi clique. I think the chaos inside the CCP helped Xi Jinping lose his way and powerful red princelings who also had reason for grievance created a covert strategy that Xi Jinping rode to power and that is all coming to an end.

Expand full comment
Eric Engle's avatar

It's entirely possible XJP is shrewd enough to ride a deep faction of the CCP into power and then disempower or even destroy it.

Expand full comment
WideFountain's avatar

However, since Ye Xuanning passed, Xi has been hard pressed to hold onto power let along accumulate more of it. Wang Huning is only a reclusive college professor.

Expand full comment
Eric Engle's avatar

the former leader of the communist youth party faction was unavailable for comment

Expand full comment
WideFountain's avatar

very good Mr. Engle! If you know Bill Bishop I'd be interested to chat with him

Expand full comment
Eric Engle's avatar

I only know him from substack however he is the lead public intellectual on China I'm just military/strategy/political theory not economics. People like me are exactly why the great leap forward failed fml.

Expand full comment