Why have so many of us been wrong about Xi and the direction China is heading? The most straightforward answer is the difficulty of accurate prediction (the reason why, for example, I didn’t buy Amazon stock in 2008 and earn a return 22 times over). In arguably the most-analyzed presidential election in history, Donald Trump shocked millions of people, including himself, by winning. If we couldn’t predict any of that, how could we possibly cobble together the scant public facts about Xi’s life, past, and worldview, and expect those to predict his future?
Simplistic thinking also deserves some share of the blame. Kristof claimed reform is in Xi’s “genes,” because Xi Zhongxun, his father, “was a pioneer of economic restructuring and publicly denounced” the Tiananmen massacre, and because his mother “chooses to live” in the capitalistic southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. “You can make the case that Xi has reformist impulses,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2011. “His father, once a comrade of Mao Zedong’s, was purged three times.” Zakaria’s father Rafiq was an Islamic theologian and politician who supported the ban of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. How silly would it be to expect the younger Zakaria to advocate for the same ban? There is no gene for political views.
Similarly, despite dozens of prominent examples, including Kim Jong Un, who studied in Switzerland, people wrongly assume that an exposure or openness to places considered liberal places correlates with liberal views. Xi sent his only daughter to Harvard; therefore, he must have admired the Western-style education, with its emphasis on free thought, Zakaria, Kristof, and others implied. But there are more convincing explanations for why he may have sent his daughter to a school considered the pinnacle of Western education—the possibility, for example, that she actually just wanted to study there, or that Xi thought it would be valuable for her to understand how that world worked. The son of the late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi earned a PhD at the London School of Economics, while the increasingly authoritarian Cambodian leader Hun Sen sent his son to West Point. There is no indication that any of that ideological openness reformed the parents or their children.
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