exiles--3/4/25

04 Mar 2025

exiles--3/4/25

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Today's selection--from The Red Emperor by Michael Sheridan. Xi Jiping’s journey to Shaanxi Province.

“The journey took Xi and his fellow travellers to Shaanxi Province in the impoverished heart of China. To many of them it was as remote as the moon. But for Xi, this was a return to his heritage, for his father was a well-known figure in Shaanxi and its main town, Yan'an, was a hallowed name in party lore. He would stay in the area for seven years.

“They gazed out at dusty plains and hamlets as their train trundled south from Beijing to the walled city of Xi'an, then it was a scramble onto buses or trucks to travel along well worn roads into the fastness where Mao and his guerrillas had once found refuge and where the name of Xi Zhongxun still commanded respect.

“On arrival at Yan'an, they did not linger. The road wound on through stark valleys to Wenchuan County, more than 60 miles (96 km) to the northeast. The youngsters got off at the people's commune buildings at Wenanyi, a small town. There was a perfunctory welcoming ceremony while the 'production brigades', groups of workers from each village, waited.

Xi joined a group of fourteen others for the last ride up to a sloping hamlet called Liangjiahe, a cluster of rude dwellings, terraced fields and homes carved out of the mountainside. This was the end of the line after all the heady idealism, the slogans and the belief (sincerely held by some) in Chairman Mao's mission to unite the masses from the cities and the country. It was a shock.

“They were de facto prisoners. Xi says as much, without using the word, in his selective and elegiac memoir of the time, I Am a Son of Yellow Earth, published in 2002. The telltale words in Chinese appear at the very start: 'I moved with my hukou to Liangjiahe.'

Hua Shan China

“The hukou was the local residence document without which no Chinese citizen dwelling in a city could get food, clothes or a house, go to school or get married. The privileges did not apply to people who lived in the countryside but the obligations were universal. It was a bond, not an entitlement. It meant that, once registered in Liangjiahe, the young people could not leave without permission. Mao had devised a trap.

“Decades later, Xi toyed with abolishing the hukou altogether, but decided it was too useful an instrument of social organization to do away with. The concept dated to remote antiquity in Chinese society and had been developed by early dynasties to raise taxes and keep order.

'As a mere fifteen-year-old, I felt lonely,' Xi recalled. He was already known to his comrades from Beijing as a 'gangster child', a bit of an outcast. To the peasants, all of them looked like aliens. The city boys and girls were smooth skinned, pale and often spindly, though Xi stood out for his solid build. He was tall, ruddy-cheeked and well-fed. The rural people in Shaanxi looked different, weathered. They spoke an almost incomprehensible dialect. They toiled in a world of hardship that had barely changed in a century. They thought the new arrivals were spoiled.

“For their part, the more ideological students divided their hosts into 'good' poor peasants and 'bad' well-off peasants, an absurd classification of relative states of poverty. It led to awkward social encounters and made for bad feeling from the start.

“The village production team escorted Xi and a few others to their allotted cave. Today this has been spruced up as a propaganda showpiece but it is still evidently the real thing. It has a concave roof, smooth walls, an earthen floor and a brick stove, and is furnished with plain wooden chairs and a table. Each person had a straw mat and a thin blanket. They shared a reeking wooden barrel as a toilet, collecting their own 'nightsoil' for fertilizer, a habit that Mao was wont to eulogize as a symbol of down-to-earth peasant values. The sexes were segregated. There was no electricity.

“In Xi's own words, he had to overcome four challenges in his new home. His description is an example of the memoir-as-homily beloved of party propagandists, but it is nonetheless illuminating for the way in which he turns each anecdote into a political lesson.

“Xi's first challenge was discomfort. As spring turned to summer in Liangjiahe, swarms of fleas infested the place. He literally had to sleep on heaps of them, he said. They kept on biting and he kept scratching. Soon his body was swollen. Yet even this ordeal was turned into a Xi homily, for, as he observed, luckily a person can get used to such conditions after a couple of years. After that, 'no matter how much they bit, they couldn't wake me from a sound sleep'.

“His second test was the food. 'Back in the city we had milled wheat and flour,' he recalled. These were the staples of the north Chinese diet he had been raised on. Northerners ate noodles, dumplings and buns, while southern Chinese depended on rice. As all rulers of China learned, the fate of dynasties could turn on these staple crops.

“In the village, each person got a monthly ration of 22 lb (10 kg) of what Xi called 'roughly shelled grain'. Everything else came from the peasants' resourcefulness. Some ate husks and wild vegetables to survive but the city kids may have done better because Xi still professes to like the cuisine. 'I have a soft spot for food from northern Shaanxi to this day,' he wrote. Take the pickled cabbage, for example. I really miss it if I haven't had it for a while.'

“'Number Three Barrier', as Xi put it, was hard labour. While Marx might have exalted it, few theoreticians of Communism had actually performed such work. The grind itself was hard but perhaps even harder to grasp was that the toilers were not paid. Instead they earned credits or 'work points' according to their performance. These were exchanged with the commune officials for food and basic goods.

“When Xi joined the ranks of shocked young labourers to wield hoes and shovels on the dry, barren terraces above the village, he was at first so worn out by the climb that he earned less than the local women. Like most men at the time, Xi was a smoker, at one point getting through two packs a day. 'I only earned six work points in the first days,' he wrote. Yet within two years he was an able-bodied farm hand earning the full ten points.

“Not all the city youths made it. Memoirs by those sent to the same area make stark reading: one student recalled his shock at seeing three of the six children of a brigade leader playing naked in the dirt, another memoirist said more than thirty young people died doing hard labour while dozens more perished of disease or 'unnatural causes'. Stories of beatings, sexual harassment and rape were rife.

“But the future leader of China saw exaltation in the struggle to overcome his 'fourth barrier'. 'This was my way of thinking,' he confessed. 'I had to learn from the peasants their spirit of hard work and their commonsense approach to everything. Eventually the villagers accepted me as one of their own.'

“This improving account would not be complete without a dose of adversity. Xi glosses over it but, in short, he ran away.

“After a few months, the teenager could no longer stand the hardship. He made his way down to the valley and rode buses and trains back to Beijing. But there was nowhere to stay in the capital. The police and security officials were on the lookout for recidivists like him. He was caught and sent to a juvenile detention centre. The details are scant, but it seems that he managed to reach out to his family for help.

“On his release, he was allowed to go and stay with his maternal aunt and her husband in the Taihang Mountains, a picturesque range running through three provinces to the northwest of Beijing. In his account, he called it 'a former guerrilla base' but by 1969 it was a comfortable retreat. His mother, Qi Xin, had extracted a bargain for her son: Xi's own relatives would carry out his re-education.”