![]() ![]() “I antagonised the radicals, and they blamed me for everything that went wrong.” “I had a stubborn streak in me and I couldn’t stand being bullied,” Xi recalled in an essay published in 2002. The atmosphere was so volatile that when Xi once fled detention and ran home, his mother promptly reported him to authorities to avoid being accused of shielding him and bringing further trouble to the family, according to an account by Yang Ping, a friend of his father. Xi Jinping’s half-sister is thought to have killed herself after intense persecution.Īt one point the future national leader was in a small group ambushed by club-wielding red guards at school and had to literally run for his life. His downfall meant the next generation of his family became targets too. He spent most of the following decade in prison. At its peak, the elder Xi was beaten, publicly interrogated and paraded through the streets. Then came the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when violent gangs of ideologically crazed teenage “red guards” held all of China ransom. Accused of leading an “anti-party clique” – in the obscure world of elite Chinese politics part of the case against him was support for an obliquely critical novel – the elder Xi was sent into internal exile, managing a tractor factory hundreds of miles away. In 1962, when Xi was nine, his father had a spectacular fall from grace. Photograph: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Xi Jinping (left) with his father, Xi Zhongxun, in 1958. But there had been earlier warnings of horrors to come. The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966 as part of an internal power struggle, shattered that world permanently. ![]() He was educated in the elite August 1st School, a cradle of future leaders. His earliest years were a gilded, gated existence as a child of a senior party leader. Xi was born a “red princeling”, a child of the Communist party elite, in 1953, four years after Mao declared the establishment of the new People’s Republic. A ‘red princeling’ shaped by Maoist indoctrination He is all but certain to end this week confirmed as national leader for a historic third term, and with his approach, which combines repression and surveillance at home with aggression abroad, cemented in place for at least five more years. He swept away norms of collective rule instituted after Mao died to concentrate power in his own hands, and fostered a personality cult to bolster his strongman approach. Instead, the younger Xi has bolstered the party and its networks of surveillance and control over individuals and business. For years, reformers inside and outside China hoped his son might have inherited his politics along with a strong physical resemblance. His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been a respected party elder and a former vice-premier known for a relatively liberal outlook. He fought his way to the top over decades, but with such discretion that when he took over in 2012, almost no one knew what type of leader he would be.
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