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.
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...
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.