"when Xi was fifteen, his father was sent to prison and Xi was one of the nearly thirty million ‘sent-down youth’ who were forced to work in the Chinese countryside for ‘re-education’ as part of Mao’s ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement. He ended up in a remote village of the Shaanxi province where, Chinese state media often claims, he lived in a cave dwelling for nearly seven years. According to Xi himself, these seven years were transformative. ‘When I arrived at the Yellow Earth at fifteen, I was anxious and confused,’ wrote Xi in 1998, by which time he was a rising star in the Communist Party. ‘When I left the Yellow Earth at twenty-two, my life goals were firm and I was filled with confidence.’"

From another article:

"Xi Jinping was the son of Xi Zhongxun, who once served as deputy prime minister of China and was an early comrade-in-arms of Mao Zedong. The elder Xi, however, was often out of favour with his party and government, especially before and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and after he openly criticized the government’s actions during the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident."

Articles are worth a read and gives you a feel for why he may have flipped. For him it all appears rather personal.

Sauces:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Xi-Jinping https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/how-xi-jinping-whose-dad-was-sacked-from-communist-party-became-dada-xi/319744/