The school was established during the civil war time in Yenan. It had the duty to look after the children while their parents were fighting at the front. There was no smell of privileges at that time. Later with the victory of the Communists all over China such schools moved into the cities. To the memory of the triumph of the People’s Liberation Army, which was established on the 1st August 1927, the school Xi Jinping attended was named after it. Each year on the 1st of August the whole of China still celebrates ‘PLA Day’.
As Vice-premier, Xi Zhongxun belonged to a cadre of high officials whose children were all entitled to attend the 1st August School, together with the other children of all the top leaders of China. Their huge privilege was taken for granted as a matter of course.
During the civil war time such privileges could not be possible, but after the Communists won the war, more and more privileges became possible. It could even be pinned down exactly when it all started: in 1955. In that year an event took place which reshaped Chinese history. On the 8th of February 1955 a new ranking system imitating the Soviet Union was introduced into the Chinese army.
In its past the Chinese PLA had never had ranking. According to the orthodox Communist doctrine, soldiers and officers were both equal; as reflected in their uniforms, they were all theoretically the same. Before 1955 it was hard to tell who was high, who was low in the military. Now all this had to change. All military officers would get their ranking; marshals, generals, colonels were created and officers were assessed and assigned their rank by their individual merits.
Just as the army got their ranking, so did the civil servants, government ministers, department directors and so on. As Vice-premier, Xi Zhongxun’s salary was nearly as high as that of Mao, the Chairmen of the Communist Party. Set at 400 RMB monthly, this was more than 10 times the wages of Mr. Peng, the lowly local Party official in rural Juncheng who would one day become his Little Dragon’s future father-in-law.
Typically different ranking had different privileges, such as housing, service cars, and uniforms and so on. The children were young, but they picked up on the differences of the ranking very quickly. The impact of the parents’ ranking was to follow onto their children. The ranks of their parents made them not ordinary children any more. They were children of the ministers, generals and all kinds of highly ranked office-holders, and they knew it. In another word a new aristocracy was born, complete with heirs.
At the time, of course, nobody thought that they were creating a new aristocracy; they still call themselves the people’s servants but the fact is they were not. The intention sounds nice, but in practice it just makes the situation more confusing and eventually hypocritical. Copying the Soviet Union seemed to be the correct Communist thing to do for the young Chinese government.
Even though Xi Zhongxun lost his position, it didn’t mean his privileges had completely vanished. Yes, he was suspended, but his privileges were not ripped away, including the elitist education of his children. His friends and old comrades, a social network built during the years of war-time was still there as well. This network would play a large and instrumental part in his yet-to-be determined future. Without this network there would be no future story of either the father or son’s political career to be told.
Far away from Beijing that newly born Tiger baby girl did not share any of these privileges. Her father, Peng Longkun, the humble director of the local culture house eared a maximum monthly salary of just 40 RMB, hardly enough to raise his family without the small supplemental income earned by his singing wife.
The two families had nothing in common except one thing: both the families’ heads were Party members albeit at totally different ends of the ranking spectrum. Still, there was a tie of sorts, as fine and delicate as gossamer threads.
Years of Chaos
After three years of being totally side-lined in Beijing, and with no further resolution of his situation, the former Vice-premier, Xi Zhongxun, grew weary and impatient. He had been a man of action all his life, and having nothing meaningful to do, no contribution to make, day after day for several years was something he could no longer tolerate. He took the bold step of putting forth a request to the Central Committee of the Party to be allowed to work again, anywhere and doing anything the Party would allow.
Xi’s request was responded to positively by the Central Committee. At age 52, he was moved out of Beijing and sent to Henan province to be a deputy director of a small manufacturing firm. Imagine the Vice-premier of China now working as a deputy director in a small factory 900 kilometers away from the seat of power in Henan, south of the Yellow River. He had indeed been banished, but at his own behest. Old comrades in Beijing might have pity on him, but there was nothing to be done. Very soon hundreds of them would suffer the same or even worst fates as falsely implicated top ranking Party leaders were purged in the ensuing ‘investigations’ leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
In 1965, one year ahead of the Cultural Revolution, a curious thing happened in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After ten years of the imported soviet-style ranking system being used throughout China, the entire ranking system was abolished on the 1st of July 1965. Symbolically, July 1st is the official celebration of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and marked by large military parades and displays in Beijing and elsewhere in the country.
In those military parades, and from that day forward, all Chinese military service men and women started to wear the exact same military uniform again. The only decorations permitted were two red buttons on their collars and a red star on their caps. Democratic? Maybe. But it meant that all top military officers were now no different than, and just as exposed politically, as the rest of the infantry’s ‘canon-fodder’.
It was not just the changing of military uniforms that signalled what was to lie ahead. The tone of the propaganda language in the state-controlled media became more and more radical. Many officials and their sectors were directly and publicly attacked for being anti-Party and revisionist. Soon most common Chinese could sense ominous dark clouds gathering over the land. But nobody could have totally expected that they were on the eve of an unprecedented calamity, the worst man-made or natural disaster in Chinese history.
In one year’s time, the storm clouds were ready to burst. The first of the student Red Guards appeared in Tsinghua University Middle School and the movement quickly spread across the capital. On the 18th of August 1966 Mao met with Red Guard students in Tiananmen Square and donned a Red Guard armband to signal his support of the movement and its objectives to criticize the intellectual establishment in China.
The Red Guards came to Tiananmen Square literally by bicycle. By the mid 1960s bicycles were the major means of transportation in Beijing. For ordinary people bicycles were convenient, but not cheap. To have one they needed to save for months and even years. Most families could afford only one, and that bicycle was used primarily by the family bread-winner.
So in the summer of 1966 all those young teenagers were riding around on bicycles. But most of them probably were not the children of single-bicycle families whose head of household had to use their one precious bicycle to go to work. The families who could afford second or third bicycles for their children were not ordinary people. These Red Guards were the children of high-ranking officials and officers. Many of their parents probably had service cars provided so their children could ride the bicycles. You might not think that riding a bicycle as a teenager is anything special, but at that time, it indicated the high status of your family and a privileged and elitist background.
The children of such high-ranking families were the first ones who smelled the wind of something important about to be happening. China was now the powerhouse building the Communist world revolution. These restless teenagers wanted to be part of it. Their emerging in Tiananmen Square and gaining such a public show of support from Mao himself announced that there was now a new power on the Chinese political stage. The Red Guard