[backspin]

This. At least in my family most of my older Chinese relatives prefer order and peace to American democracy, for their income increased dramatically over the past 5 years. But I guess after family income gets to certain threshold, people will start weighting more on freedom.

[seanmcdirmid]

But if you get to any Chinese over 60, they still remember the chaotic cultural revolution very clearly, they definitely don’t want a return to strongman cult of personality Maoism where Xi seems to be going.

Xi is the last vestige of Maoism, the last president who grew up under Mao’s shadow. The next generation of leadership is surely going to be much more modern than any before it. That they are delaying it for something in china’s past is a travesty.

[phyller]

Or maybe he is the first of the next generation of leaders that has forgotten the lessons learned under Mao.

[seanmcdirmid]

Xi came of age during the cultural revolution, which means he participated as a red guard, was sent down to the country side, went to college late, and much of his college education was ideological rather than practical. He is the first leader who is a career politician (has an engineering degree but never used it) and the first whose appointment is clearly about nepotism rather than merit. So...interesting guy.

[Slansitartop]

> Xi came of age during the cultural revolution, which means he participated as a red guard

No, he did not "participate" as a Red Guard, he and his family were persecuted by them.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/world/asia/xi-jinping-car...

[Slansitartop]

> But if you get to any Chinese over 60, they still remember the chaotic cultural revolution very clearly, they definitely don’t want a return to strongman cult of personality Maoism where Xi seems to be going.

It's interesting that to note that Xi Jinping is from that exact same generation, and both he and his family were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/world/asia/xi-jinping-chi...:

> When the pandemonium of the Cultural Revolution erupted, he was a slight, softly spoken 13-year-old who loved classical Chinese poetry. Two years later, adrift in a city torn apart by warring Red Guards, Xi Jinping had hardened into a combative street survivor.

> His father, a senior Communist Party official who had been purged a few years earlier, was seized and repeatedly beaten. Student militants ransacked his family’s home, forcing the family to flee, and one of his sisters died in the mayhem. Paraded before a crowd as an enemy of the revolution and denounced by his own mother, the future president of China was on the edge of being thrown into a prison for delinquent children of the party elite.

> ...

> Unlike some youths from elite backgrounds, Mr. Xi did not turn against the party or Mao, but learned to revere strict order and abhor challenges to hierarchy, said Yongyi Song, a historian and librarian in Los Angeles who has long studied the Cultural Revolution.

> “He suffered much under Mao,” Mr. Song said, “but I think that actually increased his belief that those who are ‘born red,’ those children of the party elite, earned the right to inherit Mao’s place at the center.”

Here's a short biography of Xi by the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/world/asia/xi-jinping-car...

> Xi is the last vestige of Maoism, the last president who grew up under Mao’s shadow. The next generation of leadership is surely going to be much more modern than any before it.

Experts were saying that China was slowly but steadily marching on the path to liberalization, but now we have Xi and that that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I fear those predictions, like yours, are fallacious and overoptimistic.

[backspin]

Not sure how to explain this best, but let's just say cultural revolution's most devastating impact was on culture. If you ask any elderly with good upbringing, you'll probably hear the answers you expect, but I'm from a working class family, and the only bad thing my relatives experienced was unable to go to college.