How Xi Jinping Reinterpreted Deng's Legacy
How China's current leader selectively embraced and dismantled the institutional framework Deng Xiaoping built, while claiming to fulfill his vision.
The Selective Inheritance
When Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012, he inherited a system largely designed by Deng Xiaoping. Collective leadership, term limits, mandatory retirement ages, a mixed economy with growing private sector autonomy, and a foreign policy of restraint — these were Deng's institutional legacies. Within a decade, Xi had dismantled or fundamentally altered most of them.
Yet Xi never explicitly repudiates Deng. He cannot, because Deng's reform era is the source of the Party's contemporary legitimacy. The economic miracle that made China a great power began with Deng's decisions in 1978. To reject Deng openly would be to question the foundation of everything the Party has achieved in the past four decades.
Instead, Xi practices selective inheritance: he claims Deng's mantle while reversing Deng's institutional innovations. Xi embraces Deng's insistence on Party supremacy and the Four Cardinal Principles while discarding the norms of collective leadership and orderly succession that Deng considered essential safeguards against another Mao.