[The emergence of Liangjiahe as a popular tourist site attests to Mr. Xi’s speed in propelling himself to the center of Chinese politics. He is poised to entrench his power at a Communist Party congress this month. In the run up, party newspapers and a new book have promoted the official line that Mr. Xi is a strong leader with close ties to the common people because of his time in Liangjiahe.]
By
Chris Buckley
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Liangjiahe,
where President Xi Jinping of China spent a formative period of his
youth
during the Cultural Revolution, has been converted into a tourist
attraction
that attempts to show how the village helped forge his
strongman
style. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
|
LIANGJIAHE,
China — Almost 50 years
after Xi Jinping first trudged into this village as a cold, bewildered
teenager, hundreds of political pilgrims retrace his footsteps every day.
They follow a well-trod course designed to
show how the seven years that the young Mr. Xi spent in this hardscrabble
village in China’s barren northwest forged the strongman style that he now uses
to rule the world’s most populous nation. Visitors peer down a well that Mr. Xi
helped to dig, admire a storage pit that he built to turn manure into methane
gas for stoves and lamps, and sit for inspirational lectures outside the cave
homes where he sheltered from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
“When he first arrived in Liangjiahe, he
wasn’t prepared for the hardship,” a guide told a tour group of officials, who
listened attentively under a drizzling rain. The message, conveyed by the
guides and the village’s carefully tended buildings and artifacts, is that Mr.
Xi left Liangjiahe steeled for the leadership roles that he would one day
assume.
Turning a leader’s former home into a tableau
for propagating his political-creation myth has a venerable precedent in the
People’s Republic. Back in the 1960s, Mao’s birthplace, Shaoshan, was turned
into a secular shrine for slogan-chanting Red Guards who looked on modern
China’s founder as a nearly godlike figure.
The devotion at Liangjiahe falls far short of
the fervent cult of personality that Mao ignited. Even so, Mr. Xi stands out
for turning his own biography into an object of adoration, and zeal. Neither of
Mr. Xi’s recent predecessors as leader, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, could tout a
similarly dramatic tale of coming of age in a dim, flea-infested cave.
Cultural Revolution Shaped Xi Jinping, From
Schoolboy to Survivor SEPT. 24, 2015
But more than that, Mr. Xi’s story embodies
the authoritarian values he wants to restore in China — a “red-brown” melding
of Communist revivalism and earthy nationalism rooted in a glorified rendering
of China’s ancient past. Liberal-minded members of China’s middle class bridle
at that ideology. But others, including farmers and blue-collar workers, find a
lot to like in Mr. Xi’s appeals to patriotic pride and homespun populism.
“Xi has the perfect résumé. He’s a son of the
revolution, but not a child of privilege,” said Trey McArver, a political
analyst and co-founder of Trivium/China, which advises companies working in
China. “What Xi’s story says clearly is: He is a Communist born and bred, but
he also understands the common people.”
This story line resonates with many of the
nearly 18 million Chinese who were also sent to the countryside by Mao in a
mass effort to re-educate urban youth in the rustic virtues of China’s peasant
majority, while defusing the fanaticism of the Red Guards. This so-called
sent-down generation now holds the reins of the Communist Party, including four
spots on the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s highest rung of power.
Members of that generation said Mr. Xi shared
not only their experiences, but also their values of frugality and
perseverance. They said that these had been lost in younger Chinese, especially
those in urban centers like Beijing, who grew up after their nation’s economic
takeoff.
“Beijingers who weren’t sent to the
countryside can’t handle nearly as much hardship as those of us who did,” said
Xia Baoqing, 66, who was also sent to work near Liangjiahe. “Of course,
President Xi has some similar characteristics. He encourages thrift and
avoiding waste, and he’s very self-disciplined.”
The emergence of Liangjiahe as a popular
tourist site attests to Mr. Xi’s speed in propelling himself to the center of
Chinese politics. He is poised to entrench his power at a Communist Party
congress this month. In the run up, party newspapers and a new book have
promoted the official line that Mr. Xi is a strong leader with close ties to
the common people because of his time in Liangjiahe.
“Finding high purpose in suffering always
makes a good story. This is one such case,” said Guobin Yang, a professor at
the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the Cultural Revolution
generation. “Like Mao, he is from the people, so the future legend might go.”
But even with the worshipful official
biography, it remains unclear how far Mr. Xi can go in consolidating power.
While Mr. Xi is expected to use the congress
to fill more of the party’s top tier with his backers, he could face stiff
opposition, especially if he tries to keep his top ally and anticorruption
overseer, Wang Qishan, in office despite reaching the usual retirement age.
Still, no other recent Chinese leader has
amassed as much power as Mr. Xi, 64. And no leader since Mao has used his
personal biography to this extent in asserting his right to lead.
“There has been that sea change, and his
style of leadership is much more personalist,” said Patricia Thornton, a
professor of Chinese politics at Oxford.
Just as Shaoshan did for Mao, Liangjiahe has
come to figure prominently in Mr. Xi’s official biography. When he arrived at
the age of 15 in early 1969, as one of millions of Chinese youth sent to the
countryside by Mao, the village’s 360 residents lived in caves dug into the
dry, ocher-colored hillsides, and eked a meager existence out of the dusty
soil. According to the current narrative, Mr. Xi showed his first signs of
greatness in the then-penniless village, rising to a position of local party
leadership.
“The experience of being steeled by being
sent to rural Liangjiahe was the wellspring of Xi Jinping’s thinking, mind-set
and feelings,” Lei Pingsheng, another student from Beijing who was sent to work
in the village, says in a new Chinese-language book, “Xi Jinping’s Seven Years
as a Sent-Down Youth.” The book has been heavily promoted by the party-run
media before the congress.
These days, Liangjiahe, which is about 380
miles southwest of Beijing, is thronged by officials, many of whom have been
ordered to study Mr. Xi’s life.
About 2,500 people visit Liangjiahe each day,
People’s Daily reported, and many of them are ferried in on minibuses after
paying a $3 ticket. (I was allowed to look around only after registering at the
village police station, and was accompanied by a guard who whispered to
villagers not to say anything.)
Visitors are given a carefully airbrushed
version of China’s recent history. The propaganda about Mr. Xi’s time here
offers only hints of the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution that drove him and
the other sent-down youth to villages like Liangjiahe in the first place. Mr.
Xi has demanded reverence for Mao and banned historians from exploring dark
episodes of starvation and persecution that could tarnish the party’s image.
“It’s a selective memory that is about the
glories of collective sacrifice for the revolutionary cause,” Suisheng Zhao, a
professor at the University of Denver, who was also sent to work in the
countryside under Mao.
Mr. Xi’s time in Liangjiahe was also more
turbulent than portrayed in these sanitized versions of history, according to
less-guarded accounts that Mr. Xi gave before he became national leader.
He was born into political aristocracy, the
son of a revolutionary who followed Mao into Beijing after the Communist Party
took power. But in 1962, Mao turned against his father, and Mr. Xi’s family was
hounded and torn apart during the Cultural Revolution from 1966, when Mao let
Red Guards attack his ex-allies. One of Mr. Xi’s sisters died in the mayhem,
possibly by taking her own life.
Mr. Xi has also contradicted some key parts
of the official story. In a 2004 interview, given when Mr. Xi was still an
obscure provincial official, he recalled being glad to go to Liangjiahe because
Beijing was more dangerous.
“On the entire train everyone was crying, but
I was smiling,” he said. “If I didn’t leave, I didn’t even know if I’d
survive.”
After three days of travel by train, truck
and foot, Mr. Xi and 14 other youths reached the village, where they were
shocked by the levels of poverty. They also suffered an infestation of fleas
that left their bodies covered in sores. Mr. Xi said that after a few months he
could not cope and returned to Beijing, which the official narrative neglects
to mention.
He eventually returned to the village,
staying until the Cultural Revolution’s waning days in 1975, when he was
allowed to attend university in Beijing. “Liangjiahe gave me everything,” Mr.
Xi said as he prepared to leave the village for university, according to the
new book, “and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
Adam Wu contributed research.
Follow Chris Buckley on Twitter:
@ChuBailiang.
