Cultural Prediction: Chinese Communist Party Survival Culture - Xi Jinping

Cultural Prediction Xi: Episode 3

Xi operates from the Chinese Communist Party survival culture. The world of the cadre who learned that the Party outlasts everyone. Xi was born in 1953 into the Communist elite. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary hero and a vice premier of China, until Mao’s circle purged him in 1962 over a novel they branded anti-Party, and he spent sixteen years out of power, part of it in detention. The Red Guard attacked the family, his half-sister killed herself, and at fifteen Xi was sent to Liangjiahe, a village in Shaanxi, where he lived seven years in a cave house carved into a hillside. A boy whose family the Party had destroyed did not turn against it. He applied to join it, but was rejected about ten times because of his father’s actions. He kept applying until a local commune secretary admitted him in 1974. That world programmed how he reacts, and it gives us insight into what he will do in almost any situation

In this cultural perspective, the basic unit is the Party. Not the individual, the market, or the family, only the Party and its survival. Value in this world is power: who holds which post, where the money goes, what the army and the courts do, what the public can read. When you have that power, you keep it. Winning is to still be in power years from now, with the Party still ruling and no one able to remove you.

Party survival culture runs on a few fixed rules: