youths could hardly understand their Shaanxi dialect either. At least Xi Jinping should understand the local dialect somewhat better than the others since his father spoke the same dialect. The locals’ high expectations about Beijingers were hardly met by this lot.
To describe Xi Jinping as shy is not completely accurate. He was likely rather confused. How could he and his teenage mates not be confused? Ten out of the fifteen young people had witnessed their parents being publicly criticized and suspended from their positions. They didn’t know how their families would cope, and Xi Jinping didn’t even know where his father was. They stepped off that bus into a totally different world, a world of dire poverty and frozen yellow mud. And they were totally on their own. The moment was not a happy one.
The bewildered girls and boys were then allocated to fifteen different peasant families who would look after them. They were going to live with them, not as guests exactly, but to learn from them how to be honest, hardworking and above all loyal socialists for the good of the country. In exchange for this privilege, the youths from Beijing would be expected to pull their weight by cooking for their host family, working in the fields and doing anything else required of them to ease the burden of their open-ended presence.
The Chinese countryside of the 1960s was definitely a shock for the sixteen year-old Xi Jinping and his schoolmates. All of the luxuries they had grown accustomed to in their previous lives had now vanished. There was no tap water, no electricity, no radio, no heating, no mother cooking for them, no meat or eggs. For those even more privileged like Xi Jinping, the list could be extended: no indoor flush toilet, no toilet paper, no telephone, no television, no bathtub, and certainly no private room.
Instead they lived in caves, the only housing in the region. These unique caves have been typical peasant shelter in Shaanxi province for centuries. They are usually cut out of the compacted yellow earth along south-facing hillsides. Five to seven meters long and three to four meters wide with an ‘open floor plan’, these caves still provide shelter for an entire family. There were no beds; instead they had a traditional Chinese “kang”, or “sleeping-stove” made of bricks that channels heat from a wood or coal fire under a sleeping platform. The heat was a creature comfort for fleas as well, and these were so common in the caves that Xi Jinping soon would experience their bites first-hand. The only light would be a kerosene lamp. When Mao arrived in Shaanxi in 1935 he lived in the same kind of cave. Today Mao’s cave is preserved as a museum.
Waiting his turn outside the commune headquarters, Xi Jinping was finally assigned to his host family. Years later the family remembered that he had two suitcases. One of the peasants thought they were small and light, and hospitably offered to carry them for him to their waiting donkey cart. But it turned out that the suitcases were very heavy. About all they contained were books. Two cases of books are what Xi Jinping brought with him. A privilege of course, as most of the peasants could not even read, so reading material would be few and far between during his stay.
The local people respected Xi Jinping as they knew who his father was. Though they had never met Xi Zhongxun personally in this village, his local legacy in the Shaanxi area was still alive. Far from the political intrigues going on in Beijing, they didn’t know exactly what had happened to his father. They had to be cautious and not offending.
The cold winter’s ride in an open donkey cart to the family’s cave was the final leg of the long journey from Beijing for Xi Jinping and his fellow teenagers. The relative warmth of the cave and the hospitality of the host peasant family must have suggested a hint of security at long last. Seated inside on the warm kang that served as bed and dining room, Xi Jinping’s first welcoming meal would have been noodles, no meat or eggs, with a few drops of oil. But in honor of their young guests, the peasant families were given pure flour to make their noodles for this meal. Usually they would mix flour with bran. But following the propaganda, Mao’s great instruction brought the young people to the countryside, and this should be celebrated. So they did their best. Seldom did they have this kind of noodle without bran. As for meat, Xi Jinping would have to wait a long time as meat was on the table only once a year during the Spring Festival.
It’s a modern global phenomenon that the economic and social differences between cities and the countryside tend to be substantial. This was certainly true in China in the 1960s as it also is today. Certainly the living standard in Chinese cities in the decade of the 1960s was not great, but it was still much better than the abject poverty of most of the countryside. Despite coming into power in 1948 on the back of the country’s peasants, the Communist Party had failed to raise the living standard in the countryside for the past two decades. In fact, with the commune system in place as the main land and agricultural reform, people living off the land could barely eke out a subsistence livelihood.
We can imagine that the young people forcibly sent to the countryside must have been feeling quite miserable spending their first night in the darkness of their caves, over a thousand kilometers away from their families. Add to this that they had no knowledge of when their re-education would be over or even when they could go home for a visit. Yet this was just the start.
China’s future leader Xi Jinping had not prepared to see this turn of events in his young life. He might not be able to fully comprehend or explain it, but he could certainly tell there was something wrong in this so-called socialist country. Nobody could feel easy seeing Chinese peasants, so loyal to Mao and the Communist Party, living under such wretched conditions. It might be easy for a naïve and privileged teen from Beijing to look down upon the locals, but he could not deny that he was the same Han Chinese as them. How had the Communist Party made the peasants so poor or at least not lifted them up after decades of so-called land reforms? Now thousands of privileged young Chinese people would start to think one thing for sure; they wouldn’t have much positive to say about Mao’s campaign. This wasn’t exactly the re-education Mao had in mind in sending them away from Beijing and the other cities in the first place. But these seeds of doubt had now been planted in the rural landscapes across China in thousands of bright young minds, and they would bear a thousand different fruit in the years to come.
Of course the city people needed to know the reality of the Chinese countryside; it was just the harsh and knee-jerk it was implemented that made the way they saw it very unpleasant for the youngsters and their families. And of course it was Mao himself who forced them to go; they had no way to escape. So the reality was that they were here in this small rural, impoverished village of cave dwellers. They had to make a living for themselves by sheer hard, backbreaking labor. Of course they were angry. These sons and daughters of high ranking military and political inner-circle families had no intention of becoming peasants as Mao had told them. They were determined to leave as soon as they could find a way out.
These kids weren’t the only ones perplexed by their situation. In fact the local peasants were surprised as well. Suddenly city kids had been sent to them. They didn’t know what to do with them. Unfortunately, Mao’s rhetoric and the Beijing youths didn’t come with any instruction manual. Not that the peasants could read it even if one had been provided. Their life was totally defined by living off the land. The land they relied on was limited enough; now more people were added. That meant they had to share their meager subsistence with even less to go around for their own families. Tensions were bound to erupt.
Also, most of the families who took the Beijing youth into their small single room caves had no facilities to look after them. Not just food, but space and basic necessities were already stretched to the limit. A far cry from the initial excitement of hosting exotic Beijing visitors, the youth turned to be burdensome for them. As time went by with no hope for improvement or any end in sight, the situation in many villages become very nasty. Especially when the hungry young people had nothing to eat, they would grab what they could. Very soon the few chickens and dogs were not safe anymore.
1969 was a catastrophic year for all Chinese teens and especially anyone who was above 16 years old. Once graduated from the three years of high school studies, they were left with no choice but going to
