Lin Biao and his family thought they might have enough support in the military to flee to south China and engage Mao loyalists militarily with support from the Soviet Union. But when they heard that Zhou Enlai had discovered their intention and was investigating it, Lin Biao abandoned this plan and knew he now had to escape. His plane crashed, the official documents stated, because it ran out of fuel before it could reach the Soviet Union, killing all on board. Forensic tests conducted by the Russians at the crash site confirmed that Lin Biao and his family had died in the crash.
Further, Beijing decreed that Lin Biao’s photos should be taken down immediately and all references to him, written or spoken, should cease. Anything associated with Lin Biao became taboo and forbidden.
The Central Party’s document stated Lin Biao was driven by a morbid ambition for power and that he tried to assassinate Mao. Mao saw through his plan and so he cowardly ran away and died trying to reach China’s enemy, the Soviet Union. A very bizarre story! But at that time most people believed it. They didn’t dare to ask many probing questions such as Mao’s seeming lack of wisdom and insight in promoting such a person to the top of power in the first place. Such questions were never raised. Most people believed every word coming from Beijing, and these words were few and well chosen by the Party’s propaganda team. The local people in Liangjia River village must have had a thousand questions, many not voiced, for Xi Jinping. He certainly could not answer all of them, but as a person with special connections to the inner circle of power, the young Xi Jinping stood out much clearer; he was someone now, and his demeanor was different as well. But just who was he?
Having come back from Beijing, Xi Jinping started to change. The first thing he did was apply for membership in the local Communist Youth League. His application was rejected. Membership wasn’t automatic, even in this remote area of China. Supposedly the reason for his rejection was because of his father’s fallen status. But it could have been for a different reason related to Xi Jinping himself. Did the local people trust him?
Xi Jinping did not give up and applied for a second time. And a second time he was rejected again. Determined, he continued to try. As Xi Jinping has said later in his career, he then had a long conversation with one of the local Youth League members. This conversation began the build-up of a close relationship with this leader, and being impressed, he decided to help the young man. He told Xi Jinping that the trouble with his Youth League application was not just his father; it was also because his files sent from Beijing were very damaging.
Included in his files were details of Xi Jinping’s arrest by the Beijing police and spending some months in the youth re-education facility when he had tried to leave Liangjia River and illegally fled back to Beijing. What additional details may have been in his files are unknown. According to an interview given years later, Xi Jinping persuaded this man to destroy his files by burning them. His friend in the local Communist Youth League burned them for him. A piece of history went up in flames and stays mysterious till today.
Such was the persuasive ability of the young Xi Jinping. With the damning records gone and obvious high level local support, the local Communist Youth League decided to take him in at last. Xi Jinping was very proud of his action and the fact that he had persuasive powers over those supposedly above him, and he has told this story to the public without hesitation.
Having achieved the first step of Youth League membership, Xi Jinping was next chosen as “Activist of Educated Youth”. Loosely translated, the title “Activist” meant that he worked hard and talked loudly to others about what the Party newspapers were saying, primarily a lot of Marxist jargon.
Xi also worked hard as a laborer in his village alongside the peasants. At least he tried. He was assigned to work on the infrastructure of the commune’s fields, one of the hardest jobs in the countryside. The local peasants still remember that for a year he wasn’t able to carry two buckets on a yoke across his shoulders. He often slipped and fell going downhill, spilling out all the water or grain contents in his buckets to the chagrin and amusement of his co-workers.
But for what Xi Jinping lacked in physical skill he more than made up for in determination. He was determined to prove himself. As the village peasants recalled, in one year’s time he could carry a one hundred kilogram sack of grain while walking five kilometers at one go. In winter time he joined the peasants to build a canal. He was the first one to jump into the icy, muddy water to empty the canal.
He was trying to blend in with the peasants, but his privileges never left him and now followed him here. The corn flour he got was pure flour, while the peasants got flour with bran. He now lived independently. He had his books and read often till late into the night using an oil lamp in his cave. He read and re-read Marx, Lenin, Mao’ works and some scientific school books he had brought with him from Beijing. The books made him very different from the illiterate villagers around him. And he was very protective of his precious books. The locals recalled that Xi Jinping could become very angry if anyone dared to touch his books.
Xi Jinping knew by instinct how to please the local people. He entertained them with his story-telling prowess, though what he said to them, we don’t know. According to his own claims, the local people liked him and respected him. He was regarded as an able young man. The local officials would even consult with him if they had some conundrum to sort out. Indeed he had a lot to offer, coming from Beijing with his very high-level family background. His family once hosted all of the leading political and societal celebrities of Beijing, a world apart from the one he now inhabited in rural Shaanxi, but the social skills he observed from his parents, he could now practice and apply for himself with the peasants of Shaanxi.
Another ingratiating thing Xi Jinping did was to read the Party newspapers to the local peasants. Reading newspapers during the Cultural Revolution wasn’t just a casual pastime; it was a big thing since every newspaper was an official document of the Party and therefore regarded as ‘gospel’. As most of the peasants couldn’t read, direct access to Party newspapers through Xi Jinping was a big deal to them and elevated their life and status. This must have been personally fulfilling to Xi Jinping as well, even though he had to relay negative propaganda about his own father and other family friends. Imagine the irony of his situation.
Sometime after he was elected as an “Activist of Educated Youth” in the local Communist Youth League, Xi Jinping was sent to join the campaign for so-called “Guideline-Studies”. This was the official campaign put in place by the Central Government after the suspicious death of Lin Biao to discredit him publicly as a traitor and discourage any further conspiracies against Mao.
In a document sent out to the whole of China, Mao raised just three issues. He wanted his people to:
Study Marxism
Be united
Don’t be involved in conspiracies
That was all. The Great Leader didn’t demand that much, just three things. Even though the proclamation was rolled out across the country, it really didn’t speak to the vast majority of rural peasants or city workers. Mao knew very well that Chinese peasants or factory workers could not conduct any conspiracy against him. Obviously the people Mao wanted to reach were his generals. For him, if the military leaders just promised these three things, he would be happy with them. Although never admitting it, Mao’s sense the despair in his so-called national proclamation can be heard in the subtext.
The new Guideline-Studies campaign consisted of reading the documents from Beijing and holding local discussion sessions. Since Xi Jinping came from the inner circles of Beijing, it was surmized by the local officials that he had much more inside information than any of them had, and they elevated his status accordingly. He could see the times had changed. Just a few years ago, he had come to the countryside as a naïve young boy; now he was sitting together with the local
