These days, the training centre for Communist Party officials is spread between the Central Party School in the north-east of Beijing and what used to be called the School for Governance and Administration. In 2015, I was staying in the hotel in the School as part of an Australian government delegation sent to learn more about how China operated. I wandered around the calm and relaxing gardens, past the empty Olympic-sized swimming pool and through the restaurant. On the surface, it resembled any other convention centre. But the dense Chinese-language slogans in the reception area and the images on the LCD displays were a little more indicative of the true function of the buildings and what the usual visitors were there to do. The main inhabitants were those in the Chinese cadre system rather than us ‘honorary residents’. ‘Tell the China story,’ they were instructed by these notices, almost ad nauseum. Back in my spartan room, I looked at the 38 reading material left for the residents. A book sat at the front of the shelf entitled Xi Jinping Stories. In a break with precedent, a cartoon of the benignly smiling party secretary stared from the cover page. That a cartoonist who had rendered an image of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, in a newspaper a few years earlier had received a prison sentence for disrespect showed how times had changed.
In the third decade of the 21st century China is in the era of storytelling. In 2017, the Party official newspaper, The People’s Daily, produced a follow-up to the book mentioned above: Xi Jinping Tells Stories. Soon after his elevation as supreme office holder in the party and the state in 2013, Xi told his fellow Politburo members and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they needed to tell stories. By this he meant that they needed to do a better job of controlling how the narrative of their country was presented, and to combat the often negative images of China that were spread through the world – its human rights issues, its environmental problems, its social and economic inequality and the corruption of its officials. Xi insisted on ‘objectivity’ in these declarations – and of proactively telling people the many stories of China’s success over the past few decades.
Xi’s own story has been a key part of this exercise. His pathway in life serves as an analogy for the recent history of China – from his early years as the son of a privileged, high-ranking family in Beijing in the 1950s, to the disgrace of his 39 father’s house arrest in 1962, to the hardship he suffered after being exiled from Beijing in the latter part of that decade and the subsequent toil as he climbed back into social respectability and political success. Like that of the country itself, this is a tale of renaissance, prevailing over tough challenges and conditions and ending up in a place of vindication. Xi is the everyman of modern China in many ways – someone who persisted, learning each step of the way as he carried on his career, driven by an inner sense of mission and destiny. That, at least, is the official version.
Xi’s immediate predecessor Hu Jintao was famously silent about his own autobiography. In his public declarations, and in official material about him, Hu was the man from nowhere. It was not known exactly where he had been born, when his parents had died or how he had managed to end up an elite leader after long years in provincial positions, such as in the south-western province of Guangxi, Gansu in the north and finally Tibet. Hu’s oratory was robotic, driven largely by statistics, with a strong air of impersonality. Conversely, Xi used more emotional and personal language, with something of the pithiness and the willingness to speak in the first person that Mao Zedong had shown a fondness for. Almost from the moment he was announced as the top leader of the Communist Party in November 2012, the propaganda apparatus spoke a lot about Xi as a person – who he was, who his father had been, 40 what he had done before becoming ultimate boss. They also spoke about his interests in literature, sport and other cultural matters. For a political environment in which the dominant attitude in recent decades had been to downplay the personal, and stress the collective, this in itself was a radical departure. Xi’s story is part of the Xi political offer. The mode of its telling, the elements that are picked out for particular attention, and the ways these are used, are all important.
There are perfectly valid questions about how the story of Xi’s pathway to power has been presented by him and the Communist Party he now heads, parts of which can be accepted as true, parts of which have been elaborated and adorned and, most frustratingly of course, parts of which have been conveniently forgotten or actively repressed. These issues hamper the efforts of scholars to write authoritative and complete accounts of figures such as Mao and Deng Xiaoping, for whom far more records exist, and for whom there is a greater understanding of their background and their subsequent career. The party guards secrets well. Those seeking to dig deeper into Xi’s background, like the Bloomberg and New York Times reports which asked questions about his family and their wealth in 2011 and 2012, would not have been surprised by the sharp reprisals they received. Both New York Times and Bloomberg had their websites immediately blocked. 41
Despite this, the kind of story that is told of Xi, and the themes it encapsulates, tells us something important; it is indicative of the way that the party regards power, and what a politician should be doing. Many stories could have been told, some of which, as in the Hu era, would have downplayed the role of the central leader and of the institution of leadership. We now know that the choice was made, either by Xi or those in his closest network, to invest in a particular narrative – a Chinese political version of the ‘hero tested by adverse circumstances’. Central to this is the period of seven years that Xi spent in his adolescence and early adulthood in Shaanxi province, at that time an undeveloped area that typified much about the poverty of rural China during the Mao era.
Xi was born in June 1953 in Beijing. His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been a military leader through the 1930s and 1940s, during the Sino-Japanese War, and then the Civil War from 1945 to 1949. He worked as deputy director of the Communist Party’s organisation department (in charge of its personnel appointments) and then as a political commissar for the whole north-west of the country prior to 1949. For much of this time he was working in Yan’an. This was the place that Mao and the Communist Party had chosen as their remote base in 1936. A small settlement in the northern part of Shaanxi province, it was known for its primitive conditions, with local peasants living in caves, and its arid, 42 tough agricultural climate. That Xi’s son, Jinping, over two decades later and in utterly different circumstances, would be exiled there, a place with such deep emotional and symbolic meaning to the party, is important. It gives an extra layer of authenticity to Xi’s current story. Like Mao, and the other elite leaders at the time of the party’s greatest troubles, Xi Jinping himself also had his Yan’an time, in the very place where the party had established itself and, despite the most testing conditions, survived and finally prevailed.
Xi Zhongxun moved to Beijing when the new state was established in 1949. He was appointed to lead the party’s propaganda department.* Elected as a member of the top-level leadership body of the Communist Party, the Central Committee, in 1956, he was further promoted in 1959 to become one of several vice-premiers working in the parallel government system of the State Council, the Chinese equivalent of the cabinet in the US or British system. All was going well. Xi Zhongxun had an important role in formulating policy and overseeing cultural issues. But unexpected dangers awaited in the turbulent period that began in the late 1950s. China broke with its most important ally and patron, the Soviet Union, in 1960, largely over the de-Stalinisation process that 43 the country was implementing under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Mao’s style of rule, which had initially been more collegial, became increasingly assertive and autocratic. The Great Leap Forward was introduced in 1958 to strengthen China’s self-dependency, industrialisation and manufacturing but caused resources to be dramatically overstretched. Most devastating of all, in 1960, a combination of official mistakes and poor weather caused the country’s harvests to fail. In the tragic famine that followed, between 20 and 50 million people starved to death, although it is impossible to know the true figure.1
In the midst of this, Mao became embroiled in a number of arguments with his colleagues, including Xi senior. Attracting the attention of Mao’s feared security supremo, Kang Sheng, he was accused of having permitted the publication of a novel which was regarded as offering a critical view of Mao under the guise of a piece of fiction. Such use of indirect means to criticise real people in Chinese politics is a long-standing one, largely because of the high costs incurred by direct criticism. Xi senior was placed under investigation, stripped of his positions and put under house arrest. The impact of this on Xi Jinping, then nine years old, and his two brothers and two sisters was huge. Almost immediately, they went from being the cossetted offspring of a powerful central leader to a household with a deeply uncertain fate. The sole source of stability was 44 Qi Xin, their mother, who continued to work at the Central Party School (then called the Marx School of Communism).
There was more uncertainty to come when the Cultural Revolution started in May 1966. Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Cultural Proletariat Revolution’ was one of the most complex, important events in modern Chinese history. It lasted for a decade in one guise or another and shaped the mindset of a generation. What began as a power struggle in Beijing between Mao and many of his long-term colleagues soon grew to become a vast attempt to remake society according to utopian ideals. The effects were highly unpredictable, and often violent. Schools and colleges closed. Students were encouraged to wage revolution by joining the Red Guards, revolutionary groups that were springing up across the country. People were labelled by class, meaning that those who were regarded as problematic because of their links to the Nationalist Party, which had opposed the Communist Party in the past, or who were classified as either landlords or intellectuals, or had links with them, often endured humiliation and denunciation. All too often, even far worse things happened, with hundreds of thousands of individuals tortured, wounded and in many cases murdered.
That Xi Zhongxun was judged a politically problematic case meant that Jinping and his siblings were in a vulnerable position from the start. For the first few years of the new 45 revolution, however, their lives continued largely as normal, despite the rising uncertainty around them. But in December 1968, Mao Zedong issued one of his decisive, God-like edicts, commanding through an editorial in the party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily newspaper, that ‘educated youth from the cities need to go to the countryside, to be re-educated by the farmers’. Almost immediately, a great wave of people similar to Xi – high school teenagers living in cities – had to uproot themselves and be assigned a new place to live in the countryside. Their schooling stopped and a wholly new life among complete strangers began. Xi remained in this rural exile for an unusually extended period. From the early 1970s, as the intensity and focus of the Cultural Revolution changed, many of the original ‘sent-down youth’ (as they came to be called) returned to their native cities, but Xi would not do so until 1975. By that time, he had finally, after nine previous attempts, succeeded in joining the Communist Party, despite the massive shadow that hung over his father (who remained under house arrest until after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976) and had become the leader of a small commune – the first of his official positions.
Xi’s time in rural Yan’an is presented in contemporary Chinese propaganda as providing signs of his authentic links to the countryside. He is a peasant emperor – a phrase which was used, perhaps with more conviction, about Mao. Unlike 46 previous leaders whose careers and lives were rooted in more urban contexts, Xi’s depth and breadth of lived experience in rural China is posited as being unique and important. This was the era during which, by some accounts, he worked as a pig farmer and, by others, lived in a cave.
The testimonies of those who were sent down with Xi from Beijing give a better image of what life was like. Aged barely fifteen, he was among the youngest of the cohort. In early January 1969, just a few weeks after the Mao command was given, Xi and around twenty other students were put on a train from Beijing to the Yan’an area. Yan’an itself is a prefecture, the third of five levels of governmental administration in modern China – national, provincial, prefectural, county and town. That meant it covered a huge area, containing ten counties, two districts and a city. Once Xi arrived in the main city of Zichang, he was transferred to Yanchuan district in the eastern part of the prefecture. But his journey was not over. He and about ten other youths were taken by bus for several hours along increasingly primitive roads from the county town to the village of Liangjiahe.
Contemporaries paint a mixed picture of Xi’s new home.2 Subsequent research on the sent-down youth presents a pattern of callow, sometimes idealistic and frequently untested young people being sent into communities that regarded them as burdens. In some cases, students were bullied and exploited. 47 There are records of young women being abused and raped. Even in the more benign environment of Xi’s village, the new cohort of arrivals were a strain on local resources – from the allocation of food to their accommodation. They also needed proper agricultural training to be useful. One of Xi’s peers talked of arriving after their long journey and spending their first night far from home sleeping on stone platforms called kangs, one for women, one for men. It was bitterly cold. But worse than this was the large number of bugs and insects that infested the sleeping area. The food was unfamiliar and wholly different to their diets in Beijing. Shaanxi food was more based on fatty pork and different kinds of vegetables. Each morning people were expected to rise literally with the calling of the cockerel, something that might happen around 3 or 4am.3
The work was soul destroying and back-breaking – digging and preparing farmland, harvesting crops and tending animals. On top of this, there was an inevitable cultural and social divide between the youth and the villagers. Despite the aims of the revolution to create an egalitarian society, the fact was that two decades after the Communists had come to power, a place like Liangjiahe lacked such basic amenities as hot running water, sanitation and the provision of electric or gas power. Ironically, it was Xi’s efforts to address the energy issue when he became a local party official in 1974 that set him out, in the eyes of locals, as an effective leader and champion 48 of their cause. For city people, Liangjiahe was like another planet, where the locals spoke a different dialect, had a highly insular mindset and were largely consumed by their need to simply survive in a harsh environment with very limited assets. For Xi, as for the future leader Deng Xiaoping and the well-known dissident Wei Jingsheng, both of whom were exiled at a similar time to Xi (with the latter taking part in the same sent-down movement), the question was simple: how exactly has the Communist revolution made any material difference to the living standards of ordinary Chinese people – the very people whose efforts had brought the party to power? The answer was not obvious.
What impression did Xi make on those who were sent to Liangjiahe with him? He was regarded as bookish, bringing a heavy satchel of works with him from Beijing. He is said to have read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War while in the village, as well as an early book by Henry Kissinger. He had a particular interest in modern history and the Chinese classics. He used a light to read deep into the night, while others, exhausted, slept nearby, ready for the next day of hard labour. Xi was regarded as polite, with a sense of purpose, but someone who did not speak a huge amount unless he had to. It seems he made a decent impression on the farmers, who were largely unaware of his famous father and, therefore, of the complexities of his background. 49
When Xi first attempted to join the party around 1973, he was seen as being problematic by the local party apparatus. He had a good work record, an excellent attitude and evident loyalty to the party. The problem was his family background, and the fact that his father remained incarcerated, spending time either under house arrest, or in prison. During the instability of the Cultural Revolution, allowing the son of a disgraced leader like Xi Zhongxun to join the party was the type of sign of disloyalty that more zealous leaders might target, and hold local cadres accountable for. Xi certainly had the support of the officials in his village, and the brigades around it. The problem was that a key person in the local township refused to budge, rejecting Xi’s attempts to join a number of times. Their removal to another post in late 1973 meant that Xi was finally allowed to join in 1974, which, in turn, meant that he could then be appointed to local administrative positions. He then became the party boss of the small village, with the consent of the villagers. The party seems to have forgotten its initial chariness quickly, and local papers applauded him as a model party worker in 1974 and 1975.4
It is hard to assess the accuracy of the reports that exist about Xi’s brief period as a village official. Much of this information has been framed by what happened afterwards, as though it inevitably prefigured the great events that happened decades in the future. Xi is shown as being someone utterly 50 focussed on the needs of the local people, someone who was keen on actions rather than words, and who did not mind getting involved in the most basic tasks. By this account, he sounds like the model figures in Chinese Communist lore like ‘Iron Man’ Wang Jinxi or Lei Feng of a decade before. These were selfless individuals whose lives were wholly committed to the good of the party, and who figured in subsequent propaganda to mobilise and incentivise the Chinese people. The Xi myth has an element of this archetype, painting him as a diligent party leader, one who resisted arrogance, corruption and incompetence. Interestingly, in 1998, Xi himself wrote of his initial life in Shaanxi in far more negative terms in an autobiographical fragment, ‘Son of the Yellow Earth’. The fleas, dirt and poverty hugely affected him. ‘When I first came to the Yellow Earth as a fifteen-year-old, I was perplexed and lost,’ he explained. ‘I was compelled by circumstances to go to the countryside when I was very young. I did not pay attention to the issue of unity because I did not plan to stay for long. Every day, others went to work in the mountains but I was very casual about work. The folks did not make a good impression on me. I went back to Beijing after a few months and was then sent to the old revolutionary base in Taihang Mountain.’5 Even in this more subdued account, however, the moral message Xi drew from his experiences was clear: ‘When I left at 22, I had firmly established my life’s purpose and was full of confidence. 51 As a servant of the people, my root is in the plateau of northern Shaanxi. For it planted a firm belief in me: to do practical things for the people.’ The experience, in his own words, ‘built up my self-confidence. As the saying goes, the knife is sharpened on a grinding stone and a man is made through hardships.’6
In 1975, with a call for people to attend the recently reopened universities and colleges, Xi successfully applied to study engineering at the elite Beijing Tsinghua University. He left the village but maintained contact with the villagers over the coming decades. Village leaders went to see him when he attained higher office in Fujian province in the 1990s. They also tracked him down in the 2000s when he had moved on to Zhejiang. Each time, according to the official account at least, Xi helped them with their problems. Finally, as leader of the country in the 2010s, he returned to the place he had lived for seven years, which, in many ways, supplied his core political education, and was given an almost regal reception by those who remembered his life there decades before.
When Xi rose to ultimate power, former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew was prompted to say that he was ‘Asia’s Mandela’, because of the hardship he had suffered during his Liangjiahe years.7 The truth, even from the scant records that are available today, is a little more nuanced. Despite the hardship, in many ways, Xi ended up having a relatively unproblematic Cultural Revolution. He managed to survive 52 the stigma of being his father’s son, became a party member and gained experience which, in practical and symbolic terms, has subsequently given him rich returns. Nor is there any evidence he was involved in some of the more violent actions that took place then, claims of which have come back to haunt certain former colleagues of his such as Bo Xilai, a competitor in the 2000s, who was accused of beating his own father during this period to prove his radical status. Xi was dealt a difficult hand over this period – as were many others – but not a wholly terrible one. His greatest achievement was that he survived. Many others at this time didn’t, including, tragically, his half-sister from his father’s first marriage, Heping, who reportedly ended her life in the early 1970s because of the suffering she had endured. It is also striking that for all the claims made by others about his sent-down years, Xi himself has referred to this time only rarely, and almost always with criticism. He does not seem remotely nostalgic about the Shaanxi years, as his autobiography of 1998 shows. ‘Later in life, whenever I ran into difficulties,’ he wrote, ‘I would think of that period. How could I not carry on now when I could work under those extremely difficult conditions? The difficulties now are no comparison to the difficulties then.’8
After three years’ study at university, Xi’s family circumstances changed. A photo from around 1977 shows him as a young man, walking behind his father who had recently been 53 freed from house arrest. Xi senior was one of the many whose cases were reviewed once Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution ended; he was quickly restored to important positions, the most historically significant of which was as party first secretary in Guangdong province where he served from 1979 into the 1980s. Xi junior initially worked in the military, serving as the assistant to Geng Biao, a major People’s Liberation Army leader. The Xis had rejoined the political elite. Had he continued in this sector, perhaps today he would be the head of the Chinese army, navy or air force. But in another of those crucial moments in his life path, around 1982, Xi decided to transfer to the civilian side of governance. He moved to Zhending county, in Hebei province, about 240 kilometres south of Beijing. From there, in 1985, he would move to Fujian, the huge, dynamic coastal province facing Taiwan in the south-east of the country, which would serve as his home until 2002.
The year 1982 marked another change in Xi’s life: it was also the year his brief first marriage to Ke Lingling ended, only three years after they had eloped together while in Beijing. Ke was the daughter of a senior diplomat, Ke Hua, who was sent to be ambassador to Britain in 1978, where he played a crucial role in the early negotiations for the return of Hong Kong. The couple’s marriage failed because Ke had followed her father to Britain. Ke Hua died in 2019 at the age of 103 but, according 54 to rumour, she remains in London, a somewhat shadowy figure who has been linked to Huawei and Imperial College.
Xi’s second wife was also a member of the elite, one of the most popular singers from the 1980s, Peng Liyuan, whom he married in 1987. Peng came from a family in Shandong. Under the patronage of powerful backers, she entered the People’s Liberation Army. Clips of her regaling the loyal soldiers who repressed the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising are still easily available online – although not, of course, from within China. Until the late 2000s, Peng was far more famous than her husband, pursuing her career in Beijing while he remained in Fujian in the south, working his way up the ranks. Chinese marriages at this level of political life are often treated almost as business deals. And yet the position of the person closest to the key leader is not without political influence, at least insofar as Peng has access to Xi in ways no one else does. Mao’s fourth wife, the formidable Jiang Qing, became an infamously radical political demagogue in the last decade of the Chairman’s time in power. Once he died, however, all vestiges of her influence vanished. Perhaps because of that unfortunate precedent, since then, political wives have remained in their husbands’ shade, their influence largely unknown.† Peng has broken this model, taking formal positions for 55 the United Nations and other bodies and speaking abroad; her English is good, unlike that of her husband. The couple’s daughter, Xi Mingze, was born in 1992. Her father was apparently not at her birth because he was busy working. She went on to study at Harvard and, since her graduation and return to China, has sometimes served as a translator for her father.
Moving to Fujian in 1985 meant that Xi was in one of the most dynamic, trade-orientated places in China at exactly the same time as the economic experimentation, recently sanctioned by the central government, was starting to bear fruit. Xi’s father, Zhongxun, while holding a senior position in Guangzhou, a neighbouring province, had been instrumental in bringing about these reforms, supporting the establishment of special economic zones licensed to make manufactured goods for export markets. Hong Kong and Taiwanese hi-tech and manufacturing companies took advantage of the plentiful land, tax breaks, favourable access to loans and almost unlimited cheap labour to move their plants into the People’s Republic. For Fujian, with ports like that in the city of Xiamen facing Taiwan, the synergies were natural. Soon, large numbers of Taiwanese were working in the province, particularly from 1992 when a new wave of liberalisation and more reciprocal support from the Taiwanese government started. 56
Over this period, Xi witnessed reforms on the ground, and the impact they had on people’s daily lives. The major city of Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province, where he worked much of the time before moving to the coastal port of Xiamen, was symptomatic of many of the other main urban centres in China. On a visit there in 1998, around the time Xi was based in the city, I remember the new airports, roads and skyscrapers that filled the metropolis, and the sense that most of the people living and working there had moved in from the surrounding countryside. Motorways took me further south, into one of the supposedly rural areas. But what was impressive was that even here the houses looked new and prosperous, and there was an air of almost tangible energy and entrepreneurial zeal. Xi no doubt saw the downsides of this rampant growth: rising inequality, the obvious signs of environmental degradation through the breakneck speed of industrialisation and, within the party at least, the deadly issues of corruption and malfeasance. Lai Changxing was the most famous example of this, a businessman who through his infamous ‘red mansion’, the villa that contained his headquarters, built up a network of corrupt officials induced through backhanders, sex and other temptations to support a vast smuggling ring. Billions of dollars were filtered away, with reports of Mercedes cars stuffed with cash being landed underwater on the Fujian coast, completely bypassing 57 the customs officials. Lai seemed to have had his tentacles in every area of the province, running it like a shadow administration. In a clampdown in the late 1990s, however, his luck ran out. He fled to Canada, but after a long court case he was extradited back to China in 2011, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Despite the many names that figured in the Lai network, Xi’s was not one of them. That may have been luck, or maybe it was because the future leader was careful to steer clear of the offers made by Lai and his agents. In any case, it meant that Xi was one of the few senior local officials who emerged from the turmoil of this vast case largely untouched. However, corruption was not the only issue facing the province’s governance. In the 1990s, Fujian gained a reputation as a major location for human trafficking. The majority of illegal Chinese arrivals in the UK in the late part of the decade were from Fujian, something that seemed puzzling because of the high levels of growth and prosperity the area was starting to experience. Why, when there were good opportunities for quick enrichment back home, would people still take the risk of attempting to move abroad to try their luck elsewhere? The consensus was that an initial taste of a different life only made some keener to try to experience something even better. The tragic incident in 2000 where 60 Chinese people – many of whom were from the Fujian area – were found hidden in a Dutch lorry embarking at 58 the port of Dover, 58 of them already dead, all of them seeking a happier life than they believed they had in China and willing to take such huge risks, underlined just how deadly this issue could prove.
In the interviews that Xi gave over this period, one theme recurs – the need to maintain the boundaries between the political and business worlds. As an outsider, he was not surrounded by family members living locally who expected favourable treatment. This was a constant issue for officials who were working in their home territory, and the main reason why historically, even before the Communists came to power, the principal leaders of provincial areas appointed from the centre were almost always outsiders. Even so, the sheer speed of growth in the two decades since 1980 created perpetual imbalances, where everyone seemed to be able to ‘jump into the sea’, a phrase used about going into business. For Fujian, this was amplified by the fact that the area had a large number of foreign enterprises. There were money-making opportunities everywhere, either through people acting as intermediaries, suppliers, wholesalers or setting up small shops and businesses. Construction was booming and money was plentiful. Officials with the power to decide where, and when, to approve major projects were frequently subject to persuasive approaches. All of this happened while wages and conditions for public officials remained modest. 59
Quite why Xi took such a purist position is unclear. But it was something that remained with him on his move to the equally entrepreneurial coastal province of Zhejiang in 2002. There are rumours that his mother, the steely Qi Xin, summoned the family at some point in the 2000s and ordered them to keep firm boundaries between their private interests and public lives. But perhaps it was the looming influence of Xi’s father. In the 1970s, during his years in the countryside, Xi junior had worked hard to prove to the people in his village that he could be a worthy party member and a good cadre, despite having what was then considered a controversial family background. Xi Zhongxun’s rehabilitation in the late 1970s removed this stain, but only temporarily: on retirement in the late 1980s, he seemed to grow irritated with the party elite, reportedly exploding in rage at the hard-line Premier Li Peng at a meeting in 1990 for mismanaging the government response to the Tiananmen Square protests the year before. From this time, he lived in Shenzhen, and was never based in the capital again. Events like this may have instilled in his son, pursuing his own political career at the time, a sense of insecurity and a need to prove that his own party loyalty was rock solid. Zhongxun died in 2002, at the end of Xi’s Fujian years.9
Fujian gave Xi plenty of experience, at county, prefecture and finally provincial levels of government. He served as governor of the whole area, the most senior administrative 60 position, for his final two years. Over this period, remarkably, he was also able to complete a doctorate at his alma mater, Tsinghua University, in the area of Marxist legal theory. Questions remain about precisely how an extremely busy leader was able to allocate enough time to undertake study like this in only four years. That a former Fuzhou colleague, Chen Xi, had by that time become a senior leader in the university, ultimately becoming its party boss from 2002, only spiked the curiosity of observers further. The doctorate has been published online in Chinese and is a work of dense analysis, and firm Marxist orthodoxy. All one can conclude from this is that however Xi gained his degree, he obviously felt it was important to display an aptitude to learn.
Another facet of the Fujian years that was to bear fruit in Xi’s future was the opportunity it gave him to engage with Taiwanese and other international businesses and to be exposed to the outside world. We don’t know if Xi accompanied Geng Biao, his first boss in the army, when Geng went to the US in 1981. But certainly, soon after his arrival in Fujian, Xi went as part of a mission to visit Iowa in 1985. Much has been made of this, with some claiming that he ‘studied’ or ‘lived’ in America. In fact, he spent only a fortnight there. Even so, he resided in a typical house as a guest for a part of that time, revisiting it in 2015 on a state visit and recalling pleasant memories of his time there. Xi took part in other overseas trips 61 throughout his time both in Fujian, and afterwards. This was all good preparation for the mammoth series of global travels he undertook from 2012 as leader – over 65 countries visited up to 2020, the most by any single leader of China.
Xi’s transition to Zhejiang was a major promotion. In his five years there, he served as the party secretary, the most powerful political position in the province. It is to this period that we now turn. 62
Notes
1. While the Chinese government in the past have officially recognised that up to 20 million died, scholar Yang Jisheng in his epic Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962 (Ed. Edward Friedman, trans Guo Jian and Stacy Mosher, London and New York: Penguin, 2013) has an estimate of 36 million upwards. The disparity is as much about how lack of adequate food, while not being the ultimate cause of deaths, certainly exacerbates existing conditions.
2. These are given in a Chinese language collection of eyewitness accounts issued in 2017: Xi Jinping de Qi Nian Zhiqing Suiyue (Xi Jinping’s Seven Years as a Sent Down Youth) (Beijing: Central Party School Publishing House, 2017).
3. The material here is taken from Xi Jinping de Qi Nian Zhiqing Suiyue (Xi Jinping’s Seven Years as a Sent Down Youth) (Beijing: Central Party School Publishing House, 2017).
4. Covell Meyskens, ‘Document about model worker Xi Jinping from 1975’, Everyday Life in Mao’s China, https://everydaylifeinmaoistchina.org/2021/09/14/document-about-model-worker-xi-jinping-from-1975/
5. Lance Gore, Chinese Politics Illustrated: The Cultural, Social and Historical Context (Singapore: World Scientific, 2014), pp. 10–11.
6. Ibid., p. 18.
7. J.T. Quigley, ‘Lee Kuan Yew Compares Xi Jinping to Nelson Mandela in New Book’, Diplomat, 8 August 2013, https://thediplomat.com/2013/08/lee-kuan-yew-compares-xi-jinping-to-nelson-mandela-in-new-book/.
8. Gore, Chinese Politics Illustrated, p. 19.
9. Joseph Torigian, ‘Xi Jinping’s Tiananmen Family Lessons’, Foreign Policy, 4 June 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/04/xi-jinping-tiananmen-lessons-chinese-communist-party/. 228