what was happening to the world that they knew and were likely to lose.
Xi Jinping was right in the middle of the violence. We shouldn’t forget that in 1966 he was a school boy in the well-known 1st August School and was just 13 years old. There is no record that anyone was attacked by him. Under the circumstances it would be impossible to make such record, but his schoolmate Nie Wenping, one of the top Go-players in China, remembered that he was with him during that time.
One day they were out together with a group of fellow students for a spree of vandalism. Fortunately for them, they found out the other side had more youth in their gang, so they ran away. What developed between these teenagers was fight for life or death. One of their mates, Liu Weiping whose father was the Vice-commander of the Chinese Marines was hit on his head and suffered serious brain damage. So Xi Jinping most definitely had first-hand knowledge of the brutality happening between his classmates and others from less privileged backgrounds.
The young people of the 1st August School were well-known for their pride and aggression. But their days were numbered. On the 25th of January 1967 there was a turning point for the Red Guards. On that day the 1st August School was surrounded by 30,000 young supporters of Mao’s wife Jiang Qin. Hundreds of Red Guards from the 1st August School were arrested and put in jail for four months. They were not deemed to be revolutionary Red Guards any longer; these children of the government’s elite cadre were treated as the enemies of the proletariat dictatorship. In fact, they were proxies for their parents.
After that massive event, an exhibition was put on inside the 1st August School to showcase the crimes the students and their supporters allegedly committed. It showed that the school facilities were all destroyed; the students were accused of turning their school into an inquisition institution; anyone who was not so called “red” would be tortured, beaten and humiliated. The worst thing was they were accused of stealing from the people they attacked for their own gain. Golden bars or watches were allegedly found with them during the raid and shown as evidence of their unpatriotic motives.
The raid action and following exhibition at the 1st August School shocked Beijing. The Party newspapers denounced the whole school as a counter-revolutionary institution. One of the top leaders of the Committee of the Cultural Revolution, Che Boda said very clearly:
“The schools for officials’ children will not operate. This is something that Mao had already criticized after entering the cities. The schools for officials’ children is the poisonious trait of the old society that has been adopted .……looking at what kind of car, big one or small one, different ranks; all these are feudal ideas, left by the feudal society.”
If the children were under such a direct and brutal attack, so their parents wouldn’t be spared. The President Liu Shaoqi, his colleague Deng Xiaoping and other high ranking officials were summarily removed from their posts and humiliated in public along with their wives and children. Deng Xiaoping’s son was forced to jump out of a window and broke his neck. Seeing he was gravely injured, he was refused any medical treatment which caused him to be paralyzed for life.
Seeing who was in charge, the generals realized that Mao was after them as well, but it was too late to do anything. This kind of strategy was nothing new. The Chinese have had a saying for long time: “After the hunting, what use is the hound?”
The purging continued relentlessly, and in just one year’s time Mao, with the help of his wife Jiang Qin and her Red Guards, had brought power back into his hands. The 1st August School was dissolved. When it was open again years later, it was just an ordinary school for everyone. The former students were dismissed and sent to mix in with other ordinary schools. Young Xi Jinping was sent to Junior High School No. 25, close to where his family used to live and a far cry from his privileged former school. Such schools for privileged families disappeared forever in China. Even after the Cultural Revolution ended, they were not restored.
After a few months, the 1st August School Red Guards who had been arrested were released. The Premier Zhou Enlai summoned these students to the People’s Congress Hall and paid a visited to them there. The location was quite unique. The People’s Congress Hall was regarded as a holy place for many Chinese and they never had a chance to be in it. Obviously these children were different. They were still somebody because of their parents. When these young people saw Zhou Enlai, they all began crying. Zhou knew many of them and their parents personally. He had brought them together to the People’s Congress Hall to remind them of who they were and to teach them an important lesson. In reality, it was he and the instigators of this oppression who were about to learn something.
Comrade Jiang Qin was there also, but when she tried to speak, the young people started to sing a song to the memory of Mao’s former wife. They did not bother to hide their disgust towards her. They dared to say what the adults didn’t. They even dared to say that Lin Biao, one of a few military officers who openly helped Mao to start the Cultural Revolution and had been rewarded politically by replacing Liu Shaoqi as Party Deputy Chairman and heir-apparent to Mao, was nothing more than a big thug. The People’s Congress Hall had heard from the people through the voices of their children.
So far Mao had won the battle, but he had now lost the hearts of his generals. From the mouths of children had come the clear truth about this Cultural Revolution and the opportunism of one of their own, General Lin Biao. From now on Mao had to struggle on his own. The only person he could trust was his wife. But for all her strength, Jiang Qin lacked the depth of experience necessary for such a campaign. Mao’s revolution was doomed already.
During this chaotic time between 1966 and 1967, largely caused by Chairman Mao’s wife, the future First Lady, Peng Liyuan, was just 4 years old. Her family had two specific problems. First her mother had relatives in Taiwan which was still occupied by the Nationalists. The relationship itself was already regarded as a crime. She could be a spy! Just this suspicion was bad enough to bring her some trouble. Since the Mainland’s relationship with Taiwan had been cut off for two decades already, Peng Liyuan’s family did not have any contact with Taiwan, so nobody could prove her innocence.
The self-made local Red Guards in rural Shandong would not leave her in peace. They came to Peng’s family home, screaming and shouting revolutionary slogans, and questioned her mother about what kind of relationship she had with Taiwan. They tried to get her to confess that she a spy for the Nationalists. It was a very public interrogation. They searched the house trying to find any evidence of an ongoing relationship with Taiwan. They put revolutionary graffiti everywhere. Big red Chinese charaters decorated every corner of the small town, many denouncing Peng’s mother as a traitor. All these were scary for the four year-old Peng Liyuan.
The second problem for the Peng family was that Peng’s father was in charge of cultural issues and under his leadership the local cultural house brought in quite a few shows. Under the new regime of former actress and First Lady, Jiang Qin, all such forms of entertainment belonged to the old order of feudalism. Peng Longkun as the director was the so-called power holder; even though his position was minuscule by Beijing standards; in Jiang Qin’s eyes, he would belong to the people who should be overthrown. His Party membership could not help him as thousands of Party members were also under attack. The problem of his position was greatly compounded by his other crime: that he married a woman with Nationalist relationships in Taiwan.
As punishment Peng Liyuan’s father was forced to do physical labor, such as cleaning public toilets as the part of his humiliation. He was taken into custody and was not allowed to see his family for some time. The young family had to survive by very little means since both sources of income, the father’s small local government job and the mother’s small supplemental income by singing, were now both gone. On top of that, they had both been publicly humiliated and turned against by their neighbors for no good reason. Such was the craziness of the times.
Peng Liyuan was little, but still older than her sister. She often had the
