If the majority of urban young people were naïve enough not to know their fate, their parents certainly were not. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing originally came from the countryside. They knew exactly what the countryside meant, but they had no choice and they could not say a critical word against Mao’s ‘great idea’ for fear of further retribution. Any wrong word could cause a huge catastrophe for their families, as they had witnessed for so many of their comrades. So they packed suitcases quietly and sadly for their children and saw them off like millions of other ordinary families. Privately they cried bitter tears for their children, and the home atmosphere could not be more depressing. This tearing apart of families and fracturing generations on a mass scale was perhaps the worst part of the Cultural Revolution.
When Mao’s new policy of re-educating urban youth in the countryside was released, Xi Jinping had just finished his the third year at the Number 25 Middle School. He had to go. So did his sister. His sister Xi Qiaoqiao was sent to Inner Mongolia to work at a military farm. Xi Jinping was being sent to Shaanxi province. Now the Xi family was splintered into several parts like many families in China, from Shaanxi province to Mongolia, Henan and Beijing. Each person, adult and child, was on his or her own. Mao didn’t just hurt Xi’s family, but all his countrymen for whom family values were so deeply treasured.
The trip to Shaanxi from Beijing lasted more than 24 hours by train, then several more hours by bus to reach the remote village where he was to live. The place he was going to had one of the worst reputations in China for poverty and backwardness. The reason Xi Jinping ‘volunteered’ to go there was because he had relatives in Shaanxi province. His father had a previous marriage, and his father’s former wife, Hao Mingzhu, lived there with his half-brother and another step-daughter, Hao Ping. Potentially he had some tentative connections to rely on in the region, and his mother thought perhaps he might be treated better there than in some place where he didn’t know anybody.
Shaanxi countryside was well known for its poverty and harsh environment. The landscape is surrealistically yellow, being covered by yellow earth. The Yellow River runs through it bringing tons of soil into the ocean and causing perennial flooding and devastating misery as it has done for thousands of years of Chinese history. Today the riverbed of the Yellow River is meters higher than the land along the river and the flooding continues perennially.
The other reason for Shaanxi’s poverty was absolutely man-made. The Cultural Revolution forbade peasants to own anything. No one owned a pig, chicken, or even a vegetable. Any private belongings were regarded as capitalist and anti-revolutionary. Things were only owned communally. The result was disastrous in that the whole countryside could not even provide enough eggs for their own people once state-imposed quotas were met; nobody had tasted a chicken for a decade or more. Xi Jinping soon would see and taste for himself the harsh life thrust upon the peasants.
Fifteen young people from Beijing were due to arrive on the 13th of January 1969. The news made the small village of Liangjia River very excited. The village’s name was sadly ironic as it had no river at all. Only during the summer runoff would some muddy water come rushing down from the hillsides, flooding the whole area.
Early that cold winter morning the whole village dressed up in their best clothes and drove their donkey carts to the commune headquarters to collect Xi Jinping and his mates. There was no private land anymore; all the peasants had been organized into so-called people’s communes. The state was now the landlord.
The peasants were excitedly curious that morning as they had never seen anyone from Beijing, that far-away place of mystery and power, home of The Forbidden City. Everyone was anxious to see what these city people looked like. They had never seen people from Beijing before, and now they were coming to live among them.
Now the bus was coming and pulled up outside the commune headquarters. The peasant families gathered around and waited. Soon the door opened and the passengers started to disembark. To the peasants’ surprise, the young people stepping off the bus looked very white and very young and were very shy compared to the sunburned and weather-beaten faced peasants. When they did speak they spoke perfect Mandarin which the local people could hardly understand, and in return the city youths could hardly understand their Shaanxi dialect either. At least Xi Jinping should understand the local dialect somewhat better than the others since his father spoke the same dialect. The locals’ high expectations about Beijingers were hardly met by this lot.
To describe Xi Jinping as shy is not completely accurate. He was likely rather confused. How could he and his teenage mates not be confused? Ten out of the fifteen young people had witnessed their parents being publicly criticized and suspended from their positions. They didn’t know how their families would cope, and Xi Jinping didn’t even know where his father was. They stepped off that bus into a totally different world, a world of dire poverty and frozen yellow mud. And they were totally on their own. The moment was not a happy one.
The bewildered girls and boys were then allocated to fifteen different peasant families who would look after them. They were going to live with them, not as guests exactly, but to learn from them how to be honest, hardworking and above all loyal socialists for the good of the country. In exchange for this privilege, the youths from Beijing would be expected to pull their weight by cooking for their host family, working in the fields and doing anything else required of them to ease the burden of their open-ended presence.
The Chinese countryside of the 1960s was definitely a shock for the sixteen year-old Xi Jinping and his schoolmates. All of the luxuries they had grown accustomed to in their previous lives had now vanished. There was no tap water, no electricity, no radio, no heating, no mother cooking for them, no meat or eggs. For those even more privileged like Xi Jinping, the list could be extended: no indoor flush toilet, no toilet paper, no telephone, no television, no bathtub, and certainly no private room.
Instead they lived in caves, the only housing in the region. These unique caves have been typical peasant shelter in Shaanxi province for centuries. They are usually cut out of the compacted yellow earth along south-facing hillsides. Five to seven meters long and three to four meters wide with an ‘open floor plan’, these caves still provide shelter for an entire family. There were no beds; instead they had a traditional Chinese “kang”, or “sleeping-stove” made of bricks that channels heat from a wood or coal fire under a sleeping platform. The heat was a creature comfort for fleas as well, and these were so common in the caves that Xi Jinping soon would experience their bites first-hand. The only light would be a kerosene lamp. When Mao arrived in Shaanxi in 1935 he lived in the same kind of cave. Today Mao’s cave is preserved as a museum.
Waiting his turn outside the commune headquarters, Xi Jinping was finally assigned to his host family. Years later the family remembered that he had two suitcases. One of the peasants thought they were small and light, and hospitably offered to carry them for him to their waiting donkey cart. But it turned out that the suitcases were very heavy. About all they contained were books. Two cases of books are what Xi Jinping brought with him. A privilege of course, as most of the peasants could not even read, so reading material would be few and far between during his stay.
The local people respected Xi Jinping as they knew who his father was. Though they had never met Xi Zhongxun personally in this village, his local legacy in the Shaanxi area was still alive. Far from the political intrigues going on in Beijing, they didn’t know exactly what had happened to his father. They had to be cautious and not offending.
The cold winter’s ride in an open donkey cart to the family’s cave was the final leg of the long journey from Beijing for Xi Jinping and his fellow teenagers. The relative warmth of the cave and the hospitality of the host peasant family must have suggested a hint of security at long last. Seated inside on the warm kang that served as bed and dining room, Xi Jinping’s first welcoming meal would have been noodles, no meat or eggs, with a few drops of oil. But in honor of their young guests, the peasant families were given pure flour to make their noodles for this meal. Usually they would mix flour with bran. But following the propaganda, Mao’s great instruction brought the young people to the countryside, and this should be celebrated. So they did their best. Seldom did they have this kind of noodle without bran. As for meat, Xi Jinping would have to wait a long time as meat was on the table only once a year