and politically.
During the time Xi Jinping was in Beijing, it happened to coincide with the 1st of October, China’s National Day when security in the capital was extensive and movement became even more restricted than usual. Decades later Xi Jinping mentioned this episode, how he was arrested in Beijing during that visit and locked up for half a year. He mentioned his aunt and her husband, both veterans of the revolution. They were the ones who brought Xi Jinping’s mother to the revolution. As he said, they persuaded him to go back to the countryside. It was a very unique persuasion of his veteran relatives. They said, when they were joining the revolution they would go to the country, to the people, to the poor; why then were today’s young people afraid of going there?
He should learn to trust the peasants and believe in them. His aunt allegedly told him the Chinese revolution had relied upon these peasants and that without them there would be no modern revolutionary China. Why should he have problems with them? These words must have sounded very strange. How could his relatives talk sound so much like Mao’s instruction, after all his family had been through? We have to keep reserved about what Xi Jinping has said about that time.
Xi Jinping said he followed their advice and went voluntarily to his previous placement with the peasants at Liangjia River. Who knows the real reason Xi left Beijing again at such a time of personal and political tumult? It might be that he felt he was not welcome in Beijing; after all he was just a very young and vulnerable teenager who was nobody; he had no family, no home, no food rations, no legal status, and no money. Just to survive he had to go back. There was no other choice, really. He had to think of his own survival first.
The late 1960s was not a time to think of the future in China for anyone. First of all people had to survive. Xi Jinping learnt this lesson of harsh reality at a tender age. He might survive if he went back to the village. If he didn’t he would surely ruin himself. He went back.
It’s interesting to know that on the Party’s official website on Xi Jinping, 1969 is marked as the year he started to work, which means at least for common Chinese citizens, their pension will be calculated from that year. In an odd way the sad memory of the time when they were sent to the countryside will stay with them for their entire life as their time spent in rural re-education labor is credited towards the calculation of their pensions.
Family Reunion
Millions of urban Chinese young people sent to the far-flung countryside were similarly wondering when they could go back to their parents. As months turned into years, the situation looked more and more hopeless. So their parents, the generals and high-ranking officials, started to act. They didn’t say Mao’s campaign was wrong or challenge it in any way publicly; instead they just quietly started bringing their children out of the countryside. As with any top-down nationwide bureaucratic policy, there were bound to be loopholes to be exploited. The best way to bring their sons and daughters out of their desperate placements with the peasants was to let them join the military. After all, to be a soldier was as patriotic as being a peasant in the ideology of the times.
Military positions were much coveted as a way to better the lives of many in China, and it was not as easy as walking into a recruitment office and signing up. But for this group of top echelon and well-connected parents, it was a much easier job. The generals used their power to recruit their own children and the children of their friends wherever and whenever they could. Mao’s generals knew how to look after each other’s children without bringing any negative attention to them.
To join the military ranks in China meant one didn’t need any food ration card or even any personal files; the military would look after everything, from clothing to pocket money while the local authorities had nothing to say. A whole new identity, in a way, could be constructed by joining the military, not entirely unlike the French Foreign Legion. And nearly all young people who had been sent off to the countryside were old enough to enlist. It was a perfect solution to this dilemma. The old yellow uniform became out of fashion and the new green military uniform replacing it quickly became the favorite outfit of young people lucky enough to wear one.
Seeing that other young people were now discretely joining the military with the help of their family connections, Xi Zhongxun’s wife didn’t stay idle. Her influence was not enough to bring Xi Jinping or his elder sister back from the Shaanxi or Inner Mongolia countryside via the military route, and her youngest son still with her in Henan was too young to enlist. But she was able to use her connections to get her younger son allocated to factory work in Beijing at the age of sixteen. After all, peasants, soldiers and workers were the three prongs of the revolution, and better to be a sweatshop laborer to avoid going to the countryside like his older siblings.
Mao seemed not to know what was going on with his campaign. He might have pretended he didn’t know. So far his wish to educate China’s urban youth in the countryside, the cradle of the revolution, turned out to only affect those who were unable to leave; mostly the children of the cities’ working classes. These hapless youth, who already knew the hardships of their factory-working parents, were going to stay in the countryside for seven or eight years and a few of them would stay there for ever.
The situation at the village where Xi Jinping stayed was becoming unbearable; all his mates from Beijing disappeared one after another, as Chinese would say, through the back door. No surprise there. Most of their parents had high military backgrounds. Xi Jinping was the only one left behind. It wouldn’t have been a good feeling, demoralizing to say the least, especially after his abortive attempt to leave on his own resulted in his returning to Liangjia River in Shaanxi province. Everyone else had managed to escape. Now he would truly have to survive among these strangers, his fellow Chinese countrymen.
Xi Jinping didn’t get someone to help him leave the countryside like his mates. There was no one in any position to do so. Being abandoned, we’d reckon, made him even stronger. Without these experiences he probably couldn’t have put himself on the ladder to the top position in the country. He might not have learned what Mao had envisioned, but he had learned a great deal about himself and his country.
We have to keep in mind that Xi Jinping’s mother, Qi Xin, was not just a housewife who happened to be well-married. Her own family roots were not those of an ordinary family either. Her father graduated from Peking University at the beginning of the century and went on to serve a number of different warlords in north China as well as taking on several local political positions. Compared to her husband, the former Vice-premier, she had an even more privileged background.
As a schoolgirl in Beijing, she followed her older sister to Yenan after the Japanese occupation. At that time she was just thirteen. At the age of fifteen she had already joined the Communist Party, quite a feat. Though she had not taken any important position she had been very active in the Party, and after 1949 she worked in the prestigious Communist Party’s Central Academy, where Mao himself used to be the Director. She had seen first-hand the war with Japan, the civil war with the Nationalists, and the building of the nation from the inside. She was a loyal and committed Party member in good standing. She didn’t have much to fear. No one could say anything against her, and she knew that.
In 1972 Qi Xin turned forty-four. She was determined to defend her family no matter what. She had to. Now her husband had been under arrest and she had not seen him for over six years. Her eldest son, Xi Jinping, worked on his own in Shaanxi Province, her daughter was still working on a military farm in Inner Mongolia. She had to abandon Beijing and move to Henan with her youngest daughter, while her younger son was doing hard labor in a factory. Her family didn’t look like the close-knit Chinese family it had been at all. She had nothing to lose.
As it happened, in 1972 Qi Xin’s mother, a female revolutionary veteran fell ill in Beijing. Qi Xin had found an opportunity. In order to see her ailing mother, she would need permission to travel to Beijing. She wrote a letter directly to the Chinese Premier
