With the recent round up of rights lawyers, critics have voiced their concerns over whether leftist hardliners have been gaining the upper hand in Beijing’s decision making circles. Xi Yuanping, the younger brother of China’s top leader Xi Jinping, gave a speech last week in which he stated that, throughout his life, their father had never made a leftist mistake.
On July 27, 2015, The Study Times, a newspaper that the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) publishes, carried the full transcript of Xi Yuanping’s speech. In addition, China’s major Internet portals have publicized it widely.
Xi pointed out that, even during the "fanatic Great Leap Forward movement," the Xi brothers’ father Xi Zhongxun remained cool-minded and voiced opposing views.
Citing a participant who attended the meeting with Deng Xiaoping and Xi Zhongxun, Xi Yuanping gave a detailed description of how the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was formed. Deng told Xi Zhongxun, when Xi proposed the establishment of a special economic zone in the coastal province of Guangdong, that the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia area which Xi was in charge of before 1949 was itself a special zone. In a subsequent meeting with the then leader of the State Council, Deng again reiterated his affirmation by using the term "special economic zone."
Source: The Study Times, July 27, 2015
http://www.studytimes.cn/shtml/xxsb/20150727/13357.shtml