“There was nobody who wasn’t crying on the train, but only I was laughing.” That is how Xi Jinping later described the day he left Beijing as a teenager. “I said I would cry if I didn’t go. If I stayed, I have no idea if I would have survived.”
He was 15. His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been a revolutionary fighter and, from 1959, China’s vice premier. In 1962 Mao’s side purged him, and he spent the next 16 years in the political wilderness, first at a remote tractor factory and then in jail once the Cultural Revolution began. In 1968 the son was sent to Liangjiahe, a village in the hills of Shaanxi province, hundreds of miles from the capital. NPR reported that he lived there for seven years in a cave scooped out of the yellow loess.
A boy who smiled on the way out
Tan Huwa, a historian at Yanan University, told NPR that other children were weeping as their parents saw them off. Xi was smiling. “Leaving was his only way out,” Tan said.
It did not stay easy. The Telegraph reported that Xi found the poverty of the village hard to bear and slipped away, back to Beijing. His mother told the authorities, and he was returned to Liangjiahe after what is believed to have been six months of “re-education.” Tan described the daily grind in blunt terms: Xi “slept badly because he had fleas” and was not used to climbing the mountain slopes.
Villagers remember a tall, pale teenager who pushed carts of sand, worked the crops by hand and helped build a dam. “Back then, life here was very tough. Nobody had enough food and he suffered a lot,” Shi Yuxin, who joined the party alongside Xi in 1974, told the Telegraph.
Joining the party, ten tries later
His family name worked against him. Gong Zhengfu, who was on the same work team, said the village could not approve Xi’s party application at first because of his father’s problems. The Telegraph reported that Xi was accepted only after applying 10 times, once the county government ruled that a father’s problems were not the son’s.
Xi was eventually named party secretary of Liangjiahe. NPR described him holding study sessions, directing communal labor and organizing villagers to dig 60 methane-generating pits. One still stands outside his old cave, with a sign calling it the first of its kind in the province.
The family’s trouble reached well beyond Xi himself. His aunt, Ding Fengqin, told NPR that her nephews were refused the recommendations needed for senior high school because of their link to Xi Zhongxun, though the boys were academically able.
What came after
Xi left the village in 1975 and went on to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing. A job with a former subordinate of his father at the Central Military Commission followed, then a 25-year climb through provincial politics that began with a post in Hebei in 1982.
He has credited Liangjiahe for shaping him. “Many ideas and characteristics of mine were formed” there, he told a television programme in 2004. He remembered the morning he left in 1975, when villagers gathered outside his cave and waited without waking him. “I cried at that time,” he said. “It was the second time I cried in the seven years.”
By 2015 the caves had become a tourist draw. The Telegraph counted more than 30,000 visitors paying 20 renminbi each during one week-long holiday to see the three caves where he lived. Xi himself said that when he left the village in person, his “heart remained” there.
Sources
- For China's Rising Leader, A Cave Was Once Home (NPR, Louisa Lim)
- The cave the Chinese president called home (The Telegraph, Neil Connor)
