{"id":1467,"date":"2014-06-13T15:01:41","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T15:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2014-06-13T15:01:41","modified_gmt":"2014-06-13T15:01:41","slug":"an-interview-with-xi-long-before-he-was-chinas-leader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/an-interview-with-xi-long-before-he-was-chinas-leader","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Xi, Long Before He Was China\u2019s Leader"},"content":{"rendered":"

By CHRIS BUCKLEY JUNE 12, 2014 4:41 AM<\/span>
\nChina\u2019s president, Xi Jinping, belongs to the \u201csent-down\u201d generation of urban youths assigned to labor in the countryside during the radical fervor of the Cultural Revolution, and while many of his peers rue that era as a lost decade,in a newly unearthed interview, Mr. Xi describes his seven rural years as a life-transforming immersion in poverty, hard work, spartan eating and bed fleas.<\/p>\n

In the 2004 interview, Mr. Xi recounted how as a 15-year-old in early 1969 he traveled to the austere \u201cyellow earth\u201d landscape of rural Shaanxi Province in northwestern China. Nearly everyone wept as the train prepared to pull out of Beijing, he said, according to the interview posted on Sina.com and other websites. But Mr. Xi said he felt elated to escape the political stresses of the capital, where his father had been a senior Communist Party official purged by Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone was crying, there wasn\u2019t anyone on the train who didn\u2019t cry,\u201d said Mr. Xi. \u201cBut I was smiling, the only one smiling. Of course, my relatives beside the train asked me, \u2018Why are you smiling?\u2019 I told them that if I had to stay then I\u2019d be crying, because I wouldn\u2019t even know if I\u2019d survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Mr. Xi\u2019s political fortunes rose, elevating him to provincial posts and eventually national leadership, his time as a sent-down youth was presented as a rite of passage that honed all his future leadership qualities. This interview, conducted by a team from Yan\u2019an for the Yan\u2019an Sent-Down Youth Cultural Research Society, does the same. But along the way, Mr. Xi discloses how difficult he found it to adjust to the rough ways and poor diet of the peasants who took in the coddled urban teenagers.<\/p>\n

The Chinese media offered no particular reason why it released the video now. But party propaganda officials have proved adept at promoting stories about Mr. Xi that emphasize his roots among ordinary people. At the time of the interview, Mr. Xi was party secretary of the eastern province of Zhejiang.<\/p>\n

Mr. Xi became the talk of the area soon after arriving in Liangjiahe Village in Yan\u2019an, a famed vicinity of Shaanxi that Mao Zedong made into his revolutionary base before 1949. Mr. Xi pulled a hunk of stale bread from his bag and fed it to a dog \u2014 a wasteful extravagance in the eyes of the poor residents, who lived on a monotonous diet based on bread and noodles made from coarse grains. Mr. Xi said that initially he shirked the hard work in the fields and, after three months, he fled back to Beijing, where he was locked up for six months.<\/p>\n

On being sent back to Liangjiahe Village, Mr. Xi said, he became determined to fit in and overcome his disdain for the peasants and their hard lives. One of the tests was getting used to living in the cave homes dug into the steep loess hillsides, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first test was the flea test,\u201d said Mr. Xi. \u201cWhen I first got there, I couldn\u2019t stand the fleas. I don\u2019t know if they still have them. My skin was very allergic to them, and they bit my skin into swathes of red sores that became blisters that burst. It was so painful you didn\u2019t want to live, but after three years my skin was as tough as ox meat and horse hide and wasn\u2019t afraid of being bitten.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1975, Mr. Xi said, he had won the respect and affection of the villagers. When he left that year to go to Tsinghua University in Beijing to study, the residents gave him a rousing farewell dinner and the next day waited silently outside his cave home to send him off. Mr. Xi said that was only the second time during his years in Liangjiahe that he cried. The first was when he received a letter telling him that an older sister had died.<\/p>\n

Mr. Xi speaks Mandarin Chinese like a Beijing native. But he said in the interview that he considered himself a native of the region where he was sent down, and that story of being redeemed politically by embracing sacrifice and work among the people remains a part of Mr. Xi\u2019s populist political persona.<\/p>\n

\u201cI truly see myself as a Yan\u2019an native,\u201d he said. \u201cEven now, many of the fundamental ideas and basic features that I\u2019ve formed were formed in Yan\u2019an.\u201d
\nFrom: http:\/\/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/06\/12\/an-interview-with-xi-long-before-he-was-chinas-leader\/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By CHRIS BUCKLEY JUNE 12, 2014 4:41 AM C … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[371,103],"views":1049,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1468,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/1468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}