TOGETHER THEY HOLD UP THE SKY. Martin Macmillan

to read the Party newspapers to the local peasants. Reading newspapers during the Cultural Revolution wasn’t just a casual pastime; it was a big thing since every newspaper was an official document of the Party and therefore regarded as ‘gospel’. As most of the peasants couldn’t read, direct access to Party newspapers through Xi Jinping was a big deal to them and elevated their life and status. This must have been personally fulfilling to Xi Jinping as well, even though he had to relay negative propaganda about his own father and other family friends. Imagine the irony of his situation.

      Sometime after he was elected as an “Activist of Educated Youth” in the local Communist Youth League, Xi Jinping was sent to join the campaign for so-called “Guideline-Studies”. This was the official campaign put in place by the Central Government after the suspicious death of Lin Biao to discredit him publicly as a traitor and discourage any further conspiracies against Mao.

      In a document sent out to the whole of China, Mao raised just three issues. He wanted his people to:

       Study Marxism

       Be united

       Don’t be involved in conspiracies

      That was all. The Great Leader didn’t demand that much, just three things. Even though the proclamation was rolled out across the country, it really didn’t speak to the vast majority of rural peasants or city workers. Mao knew very well that Chinese peasants or factory workers could not conduct any conspiracy against him. Obviously the people Mao wanted to reach were his generals. For him, if the military leaders just promised these three things, he would be happy with them. Although never admitting it, Mao’s sense the despair in his so-called national proclamation can be heard in the subtext.

      The new Guideline-Studies campaign consisted of reading the documents from Beijing and holding local discussion sessions. Since Xi Jinping came from the inner circles of Beijing, it was surmized by the local officials that he had much more inside information than any of them had, and they elevated his status accordingly. He could see the times had changed. Just a few years ago, he had come to the countryside as a naïve young boy; now he was sitting together with the local Party members and officials planning an important campaign. This was the first time he was somebody above the ordinary peasants. He didn’t need to work in the fields. Now his work was sitting somewhere and just talking in his refined Beijing Mandarin accent. Not bad for a young man with no title, no Party membership, no local connections; just a young man from Beijing who had a prominent father brought down from power by a scandalous campaign.