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 Zhou Enlai, her husband’s former boss, asking for his permission to come back to Beijing. As the wife of the former Vice-premier she still had privileges to contact the top leadership. How her letter reached the Premier, however, is unknown, and again it might be through her revolutionary veteran sister who was safe and sound in Beijing. It was definitely not through the China postal service. If she had just posted the letter into any letter box, it would definitely end up at a police station and likely not be delivered. It must have been entrusted into the hand of a sympathetic go-between with direct access to Zhou Enlai himself.
Since Mao had never said that her husband was an enemy of the people directly, there was room for some hope. In fact, for both Qi Xin and Xi Zhongxun their Party membership was never revoked. Still it was a surprise and huge relief when word was received that permission was granted for her request. In addition to Qi Xin being allowed to travel to Beijing to see her sick mother, she could also arrange for all of her children to also come back to Beijing and gather at her sister’s home.
Emboldened by this success, Qi Xin did the unthinkable. She raised three more wishes to the Central Party.
She wanted to see her husband
She wanted a home in Beijing
Her husband’s salary should be paid, at least partly
How extraordinary that someone would dare to raise these conditions to the Central Government during the Cultural Revolution! Xi Jinping’s family, through the bravery and sheer tenacity of his mother, proved that they were still a force to be reckoned with.
Soon all her three wishes materialized. It was supposed that Zhou Enlai arranged everything personally. Xi’s family may thank Zhou Enlai as they certainly should, but their case was very special. Over the years of his persecution a number of high-profiled people put in nice words for Xi Zhongxun, but Mao ignored all of them, choosing to leave Xi Zhongxun in the dark, in limbo. Nobody could reason with Mao. All that could be done was just to accept what it was and wait for the chance to use something or someone in the system at an opportune moment. Such a plan had to be under Mao’s radar and had to be rationalized away as orthodoxy to anyone questioning it.
Before the year was out, the Xi family happily reunited in Beijing. All the family members were allowed to visit their father at an undisclosed location somewhere in Beijing where he had been incarcerated since 1966. Xi Jinping never mentioned that he was at this reunion with his father. But in his mother’s memoir she recorded the event. When her husband saw the children, he cried and said he could not recognize them anymore.
Xi Jinping was now a nineteen year-old young man. Years of harsh countryside life had changed him considerably; as had his other siblings’ experiences changed them. They had grown up quite a lot due to their circumstances, and not just the passage of time.
“Have you joined the Party?” This would have been the essential question Xi Jinping’s father would want to ask his eldest son. His father had joined the Communist Youth League at the young age of twelve, and then joined the Party at fourteen. His mother joined the Party at the age of fifteen. Their whole political careers were thanks to their Party membership. Whatever the circumstances Party membership was essential. That was the only passport to any success in China.
Xi Jinping’s answer to his father would have to be “No”. At age nineteen he was certainly old enough to join the Party but he hadn’t even joined the Communist Youth League, the preliminary organization leading to potential Communist Party membership. His father, the former Vice-premier of China must have been dumbfounded.
It certainly didn’t very look good for a young man who was trapped in the countryside not even applying for Party membership. Where was Xi Jinping’s future, if he didn’t join the Party? To achieve anything at that time the first thing to do was to be part of the political system. There was no way around it. In fact all descendants of the old veterans had applied for Communist Party membership, nearly one hundred per cent. Xi Jinping must have been totally naïve to not do anything about it. Obviously, he didn’t fully understand or accept that reality, at least not yet.
To document this miraculous family reunion, Qi Xin, along with her two daughters and two sons went to a photography studio to have a family photo made. Unfortunately her husband, Xi Zhongxun, was still under detention, and his absence in that family photo spoke volumes. But for his wife and children to all be together after so long and such a fierce struggle was truly amazing and needed to be recorded. The five of them looked delighted, happy, even glorious. Other than the silent absence of the head of the family, there was no sign of depression in this remarkable photo.
In the absence of her husband it was Qi Xin, their mother, holding the family together. What she had achieved in bringing them all together in Beijing, even temporarily, was just the start. With her husband in jail, she now had to play a big part in her children’s careers. She brought fresh hope to her family by her demonstration of personal courage, and she got results. From then on, throughout their lives, Qi Xin continued to provide valuable guidance, support and a strong