If the children were under such a direct and brutal attack, so their parents wouldn’t be spared. The President Liu Shaoqi, his colleague Deng Xiaoping and other high ranking officials were summarily removed from their posts and humiliated in public along with their wives and children. Deng Xiaoping’s son was forced to jump out of a window and broke his neck. Seeing he was gravely injured, he was refused any medical treatment which caused him to be paralyzed for life.
Seeing who was in charge, the generals realized that Mao was after them as well, but it was too late to do anything. This kind of strategy was nothing new. The Chinese have had a saying for long time: “After the hunting, what use is the hound?”
The purging continued relentlessly, and in just one year’s time Mao, with the help of his wife Jiang Qin and her Red Guards, had brought power back into his hands. The 1st August School was dissolved. When it was open again years later, it was just an ordinary school for everyone. The former students were dismissed and sent to mix in with other ordinary schools. Young Xi Jinping was sent to Junior High School No. 25, close to where his family used to live and a far cry from his privileged former school. Such schools for privileged families disappeared forever in China. Even after the Cultural Revolution ended, they were not restored.
After a few months, the 1st August School Red Guards who had been arrested were released. The Premier Zhou Enlai summoned these students to the People’s Congress Hall and paid a visited to them there. The location was quite unique. The People’s Congress Hall was regarded as a holy place for many Chinese and they never had a chance to be in it. Obviously these children were different. They were still somebody because of their parents. When these young people saw Zhou Enlai, they all began crying. Zhou knew many of them and their parents personally. He had brought them together to the People’s Congress Hall to remind them of who they were and to teach them an important lesson. In reality, it was he and the instigators of this oppression who were about to learn something.
Comrade Jiang Qin was there also, but when she tried to speak, the young people started to sing a song to the memory of Mao’s former wife. They did not bother to hide their disgust towards her. They dared to say what the adults didn’t. They even dared to say that Lin Biao, one of a few military officers who openly helped Mao to start the Cultural Revolution and had been rewarded politically by replacing Liu Shaoqi as Party Deputy Chairman and heir-apparent to Mao, was nothing more than a big thug. The People’s Congress Hall had heard from the people through the voices of their children.
So far Mao had won the battle, but he had now lost the hearts of his generals. From the mouths of children had come the clear truth about this Cultural Revolution and the opportunism of one of their own, General Lin Biao. From now on Mao had to struggle on his own. The only person he could trust was his wife. But for all her strength, Jiang Qin lacked the depth of experience necessary for such a campaign. Mao’s revolution was doomed already.
During this chaotic time between 1966 and 1967, largely caused by Chairman Mao’s wife, the future First Lady, Peng Liyuan, was just 4 years old. Her family had two specific problems. First her mother had relatives in Taiwan which was still occupied by the Nationalists. The relationship itself was already regarded as a crime. She could be a spy! Just this suspicion was bad enough to bring her some trouble. Since the Mainland’s relationship with Taiwan had been cut off for two decades already, Peng Liyuan’s family did not have any contact with Taiwan, so nobody could prove her innocence.
The self-made local Red Guards in rural Shandong would not leave her in peace. They came to Peng’s family home, screaming and shouting revolutionary slogans, and questioned her mother about what kind of relationship she had with Taiwan. They tried to get her to confess that she a spy for the Nationalists. It was a very public interrogation. They searched the house trying to find any evidence of an ongoing relationship with Taiwan. They put revolutionary graffiti everywhere. Big red Chinese charaters decorated every corner of the small town, many denouncing Peng’s mother as a traitor. All these were scary for the four year-old Peng Liyuan.
The second problem for the Peng family was that Peng’s father was in charge of cultural issues and under his leadership the local cultural house brought in quite a few shows. Under the new regime of former actress and First Lady, Jiang Qin, all such forms of entertainment belonged to the old order of feudalism. Peng Longkun as the director was the so-called power holder; even though his position was minuscule by Beijing standards; in Jiang Qin’s eyes, he would belong to the people who should be overthrown. His Party membership could not help him as thousands of Party members were also under attack. The problem of his position was greatly compounded by his other crime: that he married a woman with Nationalist relationships in Taiwan.
As punishment Peng Liyuan’s father was forced to do physical labor, such as cleaning public toilets as the part of his humiliation. He was taken into custody and was not allowed to see his family for some time. The young family had to survive by very little means since both sources of income, the father’s small local government job and the mother’s small supplemental income by singing, were now both gone. On top of that, they had both been publicly humiliated and turned against by their neighbors for no good reason. Such was the craziness of the times.
Peng Liyuan was little, but still older than her sister. She often had the responsibility to look after the younger one. For a short time the Peng family had to leave the small county town and move to the countryside. Their misery compared with the Xi family in Beijing, was rather more material. When Peng Liyuan remembered her childhood, she described it as poor. She had to learn to do everything to try to help the family survive. One thing she remembered very well was that her family could not afford photos. There was only one photo made in 1966 with her younger sister. The only other photo was made in 1969 when she was seven. On the back of the photo was written: “This is the only photo of Peng Liyuan’s childhood.”
By 1969, three years into the Cultural Revolution, the chaos had calmed down slightly. That year Peng Liyuan got a new baby brother, the only son of the family, and a sign that normality and humanity had not completely been eradicated in China by Mao and Jiang Qin.
The Aftertaste
Of course, the short-sightedness of Mao’s free travel scheme eventually played itself out. It wasn’t free at all and cost the government of China a great deal. Soon or later it had to be stopped. As the winter of 1966 approached, the enthusiasm of the people ebbed as well and situations worsened for many. Xi Jinping and his young friends had to face this new reality that was temporarily masked by the excitement of exotic travel in the south of China.
Back in Beijing the situation was becoming worse for many families. Some of the veterans were evicted from their homes and relocated to much smaller quarters. Some families lost their accommodations altogether and were forced to move elsewhere, far from Beijing, as punishment. Xi’s family lost their home and his father’s salary was stopped completely. The family had already been moved temporarily to a small accommodation available to Qi Xin, Xi Jinping’s mother, who worked at the Central Party Academy.
Even as an employee of the Academy and a Communist Party member, Qi Xin didn’t hold any significant power to fend off the constant attacks. She was the wife of Xi Zhongxun and attracted the attention of the Red Guards. Her crime was that she didn’t draw a clear line between herself and her husband who had been branded a counter-revolutionary. So she was also critisized in public. All over the Academy were hanging posters written in black ink naming her as a traitor. She was paraded through the campus of the Academy in the typical humiliating style of the Red Guards, and the parade eventually became physical attacks as well.
The biggest part of the tragedy for Qi Xin was that her children had to witness it. The two youngest children didn’t fully understand what was going on, but her eldest daughter, Qi Qiaoqiao, was already twenty and read all those accusatory posters. She was shocked and challenged her mother:
“Mom, did you say some rubbish? You mustn’t be a traitor! Now it is different times. Although the masses are critisizing you, it still is down to whether you don’t say what you shouldn’t say, don’t be a traitor, adhere to the principles.”
As family members of Xi Zhongxun they had