When President Xi Jinping took office in March 2013, hopes were high that he would set out on a new, liberal course. The feats of his father Xi Zhongxun strengthened these expectations. As Party Secretary in the late 1970s of the southern province of Guangdong, the elder Xi had played an important role in setting up the ‘Special Economic Zones’ where foreign businesses were allowed to invest in China for the first time since 1949. Xi Sr was not only a reformer, but reputedly also a humanist. During the 1950s he was responsible in Qinghai province for relations between the Han Chinese and Tibetans. The land reforms introduced by the Communists had thrown the local economy into disarray and incited hatred towards the Chinese occupier, but Xi did not respond repressively. He mitigated the worst excesses, and even after the Tibetan uprising against these measures was beaten down, he showed a conciliatory attitude. His flexibility made an impression upon the young Dalai Lama, who in 1954 was staying in Beijing for a few months. The spiritual leader called the elder Xi ‘very friendly, comparatively open-minded and very nice’. He even gave the elder Xi a wristwatch as a present. According to the Dalai Lama's brother, who met Xi Zhongxun at the beginning of the 1980s, he was still wearing the watch at that time.

Xi Jr is reportedly cut from the same cloth, and would like to use the office of paramount leader to realise the dream of his father: A liberal and reform-minded China. For various reasons this argument amounts to wishful thinking. First, it is debatable whether the elder Xi was indeed as liberal as the annals would have us believe. The Sinologist Frank Dikötter has uncovered how at the beginning of the 1950s Xi Zhongxun overtook Mao ‘on the left’ by pointing out to him that the number of victims of the anti-corruption campaign at that time was too low: In the northwest of the country alone, there should not be 340,000, but more than one million people detained.