Redder than red

In 2012, a couple of months before Xi Jinping became China's leader, he disappeared. China is refusing to comment on a mystery surrounding the man who's expected to be the next president. Fifty-nine-year-old Xi Jinping has not been seen publicly since September first. Government censors are blocking search results for Xi's name. See Council meetings with foreign dignitaries, including the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

Was he the target of an assassination attempt? Did he hurt his back playing football? Ball. Has he fallen out of favor? Is he ill? Is he in prison? Is he dead? A frustrated reporter tried asking a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman about the rumors. Can you at least confirm Xi Jinping is still alive? The spokesman scoffed. 我希望你提出严肃的 Thank you. I hope you can ask a serious question. And then, after 14 days, as quickly and as mysteriously as he'd gone away, Sea resurfaced.

There was an American delegation, I was part of it, that traveled to China and was given a meeting with Xi Jinping in September of 2012. Eva Medeiros was the top China advisor in the White House at the time, and an unwitting extra in a piece of political theatre. And he did something he never usually does, which is at the end of the meeting, he said, Hey everybody.

let's all, you know, stand at the back of the room and take a picture, which of course was promptly plastered all over Peoples Daily The People's Daily is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and the place for someone like Si to make a big statement. So clearly something was going on at that time. He used the meeting to indicate that he is vibrant, and he made a point to basically say, I'm back.

And then, as if nothing at all weird had happened, that autumn, Xi Jinping went on to become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the top job. That made him the leader of China, and still, to this day, nobody knows what all that was about. All we have are rumors and sketchy theories. And the thing is, Xi Jinping's whole life is like this. I'm Sulin Wong, China correspondent for The Economist. about Xi Jinping, China's leader. Barring any big surprises.

He's breaking a Since the long and savage reign of Mausodonk, The party chief does his decade or so at the top, then makes way for the next guy. Always. But this guy isn't like the others. In the 10 years CG to gather enormous Chinese officials say he needs it to come back. Many Chinese agree. The catch is that now the future of China's 1.4 billion people and maybe Peace. And finding out what's going on inside that mind, that hasn't gotten any easier.

If anything, it's become even more difficult and more dangerous as I found out myself. But I'm lucky, I'm Australian. A local journalist in China couldn't even make a podcast. Without risking j. So I'm on the hunt for the real sea. I want to unearth Of Chinese politics, and to find out how he's used those lessons to change China and reshape the world. Story of power. How it's won, how it's wielded. Taken away. Redder than red. Why did he keep faith in the Chinese Communist Party?

At the centre of Beijing, the Chinese government's headquarters are built in a former Imperial Palace Garden, walled off from the rest of the city. The compound is called Jongnanhai. It's the Communist Party's version of the Kremlin, a grand complex of homes and offices for the country's leaders. I went inside of a jungle hai just a while. Nan Yang Li grew up in Beijing in the nineteen fifties. She was young when she got to see inside, maybe eight years old. Uh there's a detail of theater.

uh in Jungnanghai. So we went to see Peking Opera and I saw Modedong and I was so excited. I just thought I was pure luck. What Nanyang didn't realize is that this wasn't some chance encounter with China's revered leader, Mao Zedong. My father never mentioned his job to me. I had no clue. My father was secretary of Mao Zedong. Her dad was Li Rei, Chairman Mao's Secretary for Industrial Affairs. That was a big job. But not quite in the inner circle.

Because my father was from the government ministry. We just lived in the regular apartment complex. Uh Xi Jinping's family they lived in a military yard called Vigyard. US. Xi Jinping's dad worked for Mao too. Nan Yang says the Si family lived in one of the big yards, housing compounds near Jongnan Hai, reserved for top leaders and military bosses. He would have socialized with kids of similar status while their fathers travelled to Communist Party HQ for work.

Their life is totally different from our life. There is a security guard in the entrance. and the people cannot get in without the correct ID. and their family has not only the nanny and also housekeeper paid by the government. When Xi Jinping was born in Beijing in nineteen fifty three, he was practically royalty. His dad, Xi Jong Shun, was a founding father of modern China.

Sijongsun had fought alongside Mao during China's Civil War. He's been featured regularly in party propaganda about that period. 发生以善感变为根据的,以这个为宗生,发展又困固。 And his life story's been dramatized too. He was one of the heroes in a TV series that came out in 2021 called Decisive War. Bye. The Sea Jong Trump character is shouting orders. 这么大 A villager asks C if they'll be going to Warsaw. Yes, says C, we must protect the party. We must protect Chairman Mao.

After the war was won, Mao Zedong declared a new people's republic. This was the dawn of a new China. Since the mid-1800s, China had been ripped apart by rebellions, civil conflicts, Imperial invasions, and for long stretches, the total collapse of political order across huge parts of the country. Chinese history books have a name for that period, Bainyan Guo Chu, the century of humiliation. When Mao took charge of the country in 1949, he promised to restore China to its former greatness.

Zi Zhongshun became one of Mao's right-hand guides in government

At home, he was a brutal disciplinarian. And he was famous even within the elite, which tended to be strict towards their children as a family that was very, very, very, very serious about discipline. Joseph Tarigin is working on a book about the life of Sijong Shun. It's really almost like Greek tragedy in some ways. It's almost kind of amazing. He's a professor at American University in Washington and an expert on Chinese and Russian politics.

The red second generation were a real political liability. And Mao referred to them on one occasion as a disaster. Xi Jinping and the offspring of other elites came to be known as Hong Ardai, the Red Second Generation, or Taizedang, Princelings. And the issue was that if you grow up being told that you're the successor to the revolution and your family helped create the new regime, it's easy for that to kind of go to your head a little bit, right?

So this idea that you needed to be strict on your kids to overcome this sort of anti-egalitarian sensibility that some of these princelings had, I think motivates a little bit why Xi Jong Xun was so tough. The influence of Xi Jinping's mother, Qi Sin, is less well known. She doesn't figure so strongly in the official narrative. As a child, it's hard to argue that a mother is not influential, isn't it? Lucy Hornby is studying Xi Jinping's China as a visiting scholar at Harvard's Fairbanks Center.

We used to work together as reporters, and we've spent many hours trying to figure out how to prise open the black box of elite Chinese politics. Chinese political culture is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a powerful woman. And so you have this situation where basically in that revolutionary generation, you know, you had a lot of powerful women there, but almost none of them had a public role.

Xi Jinping's mother is partly responsible for this. She seems to have gone out of her way to stoke the kind of legend of the father and to obscure what she might have done. But even in obscurity, Qi Sin has been an important figure in Xi Jinping's career. She was no less committed to China's Communist Revolution and fought in the Chinese Civil War, and she worked at the Central Party School, which trains officials. As of this recording, she's still alive, well into her 90s.

A picture of her walking with Xi Jinping has been spotted behind his desk in official broadcasts. She's been described as a quiet counselor, warning the C family against potential pitfalls as her son advanced through the Communist Party. As a child, Xi Jinping probably didn't see too much of either parent. He went to an exclusive boarding school. But this comfortable life as a member of one of China's top political families was about to turn upside down.

By the time Si was a schoolboy in the late 1950s, communist China was in crisis. and its leader, Mao Zedong, was under pressure. His disastrous plan to collectivize China's agriculture and fast track its industrialization, which he called the Great Leap Forward, was causing mass starvation in the countryside. Tens of millions of people died through the late 50s and early sixties. Even the kids of Communist Party royalty felt the effect.

Xi Jinping has spoken about having too little to eat at his boarding school. Oh, I was always hungry. One of the few ways to understand what C's life was like is to talk to people whose lives overlapped with his. Nan Young, the daughter of one of Mao's personal secretaries, was also in a school for kids of party leaders and had the same experiences of food shortages there. And one day one North student Just to pull off the curtain.

The separate teachers and uh We found the teacher had really wonderful food. Yeah and the wheel. And some kids reported it to their parents. And their parents had some pool. It is all the ministry send a working gear. come over to research what what's going on. And then after that I remember our food, the cafeteria food become better than before. Yeah. But the worst was still to come. How old were you when your dad got in trouble with Mal?

I was nine years old, exactly the same age, like uh his father got trouble. Mao was digging in and getting paranoid. He was jailing advisors who he suspected of plotting against him. Nanyang's father would be shipped off to a prison camp for criticizing the Great Leap Forward. He'd spend much of the following nine years in solitary confinement. My mom said your dad made a mistake. But so many people made mistakes. It's not too bad to me, but until one day.

I always played with boys, boys game. I didn't play too much the girls' game. And one day I went to them and they said, no, no, we didn't want to play with you. So I cried. That's the first time. Fine. I felt something. Xi Jinping has also described getting picked on at school for his father's mistake. But what did C's dad do to get on Mao's bad side? He was purged from the leadership in nineteen sixty two because of a novel.

Joseph Terrigian, Si Jong Shun's biographer, says they fell out over a book that retold the story of the Civil War. To Mao loyalists, it gave a little too much credit to Si Jong Shen's faction of the party. In the Chinese political context, where competing interpretations of history have such political implications. something like that could really have devastating outcome for someone like Xi Jinping's father. Sijong Shun was banished from the leadership. He was effectively under house arrest.

His family would later remember seeing their patriarch at home, sitting silently, alone, and in darkness. In Xi Jinping's case, he and his family really experienced very directly the consequences of losing. Lucy Hornby believes this was a formative time for young Xi Jinping. He went through all the trials and tribulations of belonging to a family that was a loser in the Chinese political system. And in the Chinese system, of course, losing power is the zero sum game.

Sijong Shun would soon after be sent away to a distant factory, and later to complete the humiliation to a labor camp. 没有罪,则指他犯错误 Xi Jinping's younger brother, Si Yan Ping, was six when their father got in trouble, and nine when he was sent away. 对我的影响完全变成一个 We didn't see him for seven years, he says in one documentary. My father became a figment of my imagination. Uh Megan and you made it in the sound for. Each one of us had our own idea about the first thing we'd say to him when we saw him.

When we see our father, none of us should cry. We'll do it. But Mausedon's purge. China's leadership had merely come early for Xijong Shun. By 1966, it came for almost everything. So I'm pausing the story here for a few seconds just to say that if you're not yet a subscriber to The Economist, it's really worth signing up. I might be biased, but I genuinely believe I work with the best China correspondents in the world.

They've been this podcast's brain trust, and they do an incredible job reporting on China every week in very difficult circumstances. To read their coverage, in print and online, you'll need a subscription to The Economist. It's easy to sign up and I promise you you won't regret it. We'll help you understand how China is changing and what that means for the rest of the world. Visit economist.com slash Chinapod for our best offer. The link is in the notes for this episode. Now, on with the story.

The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s upended Chinese society. Mao was calling on students to attack bourgeois intellectuals and officials deemed insufficiently dedicated to China's socialist revolution. Young street mobs loyal to Mao, called Red Guards, terrorized cities. They shamed their teachers in public assemblies called struggle sessions. Red Guards beat, tortured and killed people.

My dad was hauled onto a platform, says C Sister, on an in a state TV documentary. They blinded him with a spotlight and they screamed in his ears through a megaphone. 这种 我爸爸晕了 fainted. Xi Jinping suffered for his father's reputation. Red guards brought him and five others to a courtyard in Beijing to shame them. C's own mother was forced to participate, shouting slogans at her son along with the crowd.

Redguard stormed C's fancy school and dragged out the teachers. They locked people up in makeshift prisons. Facing similar treatment, Si's older half-sister, Si her ping, kills herself. When he's spoken about that time, C has said he feared he might die too. He was fourteen when the Red Guards captured him and told him he had five minutes left to live. In another tragic moment, C ran away one night from a detention centre and showed up at his mother's door, shivering. I'm hungry, he told her.

But instead of feeding her son, Chi Sin turned him away and reported him to the authorities. She couldn't risk her own safety by covering for her son. She cried and ran back out into the rainy night, still hungry. I think a lot of Chinese people are very convinced by this narrative that he suffered as a child. No subject is more sensitive in China than the lives of the country's leaders. But Lucy says this story of childhood suffering is one Xi Jinping seems happy to have told.

I've heard it brought up to me by many Chinese of many different walks of life and it seems to be something that appears plausible to people. And of course ties into the sense that they have also suffered when they were children and as young people, and that China as a nation suffered. It's not did you suffer or not, it's what did you make of it? What conclusions did you draw? There's this narrative of suffering and there's a narrative of and then I found the party and I found my way in life.

Liangjiao was where Xi Jinping found his way. It was a farming village in China's northwest, not far from his father's hometown. It's a tourist attraction now, with its own songs, like this one, to celebrate the years China's leader toiled among the people. Xi Jinping was sent to Liangjiahe from Beijing when he was 15 years old. From the late 1960s to the late 70s, millions of young Chinese were sent down from the cities to the countryside.

That served a couple of purposes for Mao. First, it broke up the chaos the Cultural Revolution had brought to cities. Second, it would force urban youth to learn the virtues of hard labor from the peasants. 去了以后爬到山上我累了就气喘吁吁了我不干活 This is how the man himself describes his time in Liangja. Xi Jinping reminisced about it for a two thousand and four State TV documentary. 一个一个标志的一个界定的

Being sent down was an incredibly formative experience in my life, he says, one of growth and purification. It was a rebirth. 个人是一种确实是一种脱胎换骨的感觉 去延安的粘列上 He says on that first day, everyone on the train ride from Beijing was crying, but he was smiling. 就是我在笑 He was happy to be leaving. If I'd stayed in Beijing, he says, I'm not sure I would have survived. 有命没命我都不知道了我这遭不是好事吗 C didn't take well to farm life in the countryside at first. I was completely out of my element when I arrived, he said.

腰洞在半身上 His bedroom was a shared dwelling inside a cave. 那种劳动强度是使我感到震动 C says the amount of hard labor shocked him. 当时那个跳河我这个皮肤很过敏 His skin was swelling up with flea bites. 那个红包啊最后红包就变成水泡水泡就烂掉 He was so desperate to eat some meat that when he finally came across some 接下来就这么做就生肉都吃了 你看我们呢也不太 The locals didn't much like him either. 所以说我们抽烟就是这么学会的 I was lazy, he says. 他干着活了说咱们抽烟抽烟就可以休息一会 He took up smoking so he'd have an excuse to take breaks. 没有半年吧三个月以后我又回北京

He bolted back to Beijing after just a few months. He was arrested and made to join a hard labor gang laying sewer pipes. 试图着去跟他融入接近了解他们 Returning to Liangjiahu a year later, he was determined to make a better go of it with the villagers. The next years weren't entirely without incident. 大气管啊 C remembers setting up a small biogas extractor. 出开啊就见了我满脸喷粪的满脸是粪 The sputtering machine spewed muck at him. My face was covered in manure, he says. 最后形成了就是 大家和群众对我的这种依稀别

But as his work improved, so did his responsibilities. C's written about providing rudimentary health care for the village. He helped dig wells, build dams, and repair roads. He said local elders began to seek his advice. He was a city boy after all, an avid reader with some education. Si finally left Liang Zha He at the age of twenty two, a changed man. I cried on the day I left, he says. It was the first time he'd cried since he'd learned of his sister's death.

This is an important period in Xi Jinping mythology. In the official narrative, it forged C from an entitled little princeling to a capable adult, attuned to the concerns of the commoners. Looking back on his time in Yangjahe, Si later wrote, I had firmly established my life's purpose and was full of confidence.

When Mao died in 1976, the cultural revolution ended with him. Most of those leaders he'd purged, the ones who were rehabilitated, released, forgiven, and welcomed back into the fold. That included Si Jongsun. The Si family was restored and reunited. Nanyang Li's dad also returned to a position of influence in the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. The day when my father cleaned his name I went to the CCP leader of my workshop.

Nanyang had been working in a car factory through the Culture Revolution. Yeah. Long time ago I know your father Not only that, but her boss had even admired her dad. he'd just never felt safe in admitting it while her dad was on the outs with the chairman. I was really shocked. I thought, you know my father is a good guy. All through the Cultural Revolution, she'd been denied opportunities because of her family's reputation. For nothing, apparently. That is really total changing my mind.

I thought I was cheating. For so long. She got a job in the government, in a ministry her father ran for a while. Her boss would say to her, Hey, why don't you consider applying for party membership? You'll have more opportunities to progress here. And in the very beginning I said, oh no, I don't think I'm that good, no. But her boss kept pushing. Eventually she had to level with him. I'm going to tell you the truth. I hate CCP. They totally destroyed my childhood. I'd really hate it.

I I will never raise that question. What aspects of your childhood do you think the C C P most destroyed? First I'm I was really smart. Bright. I was on top of every class, but I couldn't get any chance. to study in the university. I had to learn everything by myself. I thought I had no future. Her future was outside China. She lives in America now. Nanyang Li's father, Li Rei, he stuck around.

Li Rei was an agitator, a sort of outsider on the inside. His willingness to speak his mind was both what got him noticed by Mao and what got him in trouble. In later years, he campaigned for a more free and democratic China. And once Jin Ping became the number one, my father was so happy. And my father told me, Now it's good, it's good time. And the son of Jung Jin became the number one and we have hope from our political system.

Voice of America interviewed Li Ray in 2018 in his hospital bed. He lived to be a very old man, 101. Li Rei said he'd met with Xi Jinping on Si's way up through the ranks. Hoje diana zé, depois. Li Rei had known Si's father, Si Jong Shun, to be a moderate voice in the party, and hoped Xi Jinping might have similar tendencies. He'd encouraged C to be more outspoken, to call openly for reform. But C put him off.

I might agree with what you're saying, but I'm still a nobody, he said. I've got to keep quiet. Bide my time. My father told this story to everybody. He said he had The same idea with us, like us. But Nan Yang didn't share her father's faith in C. And I said, Calm down, Dad. I don't believe it. And it wasn't until his final years of life that he gave up hope that Xi Jinping might make China more free. 随便讲我的厉害文字 In the Voice of America interview, Lee Ray joked about an expression credited to him.

毛病不改饥饿成熙 It's a pun on Mao and Si. It means something like Mao's mistakes aren't corrected, and Si accumulates his evil. The people, my friends, visited him in the hospital and then they Told me the only word your father keeps saying is what we are going to do? It's not a button. 怎么办怎么办这个岛 咱们拜拜 Because he's a member of the party until he dies. Li Ray passed away in 2019. He was buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, where other top officials are interred.

Hanyang boycotted the funeral This wasn't how he'd want to be memorialized, she said, as a hero of a party in which he'd lost faith. It wasn't how Nanyang remembered him anyway. She'd had a very similar childhood to Xi Jinping. First, a privileged kid of red royalty. Then it went wrong. Dad purged at nine years old, schooling interrupted, traumatized by the culture revolution. And then a family rehabilitated, on a recovered, But her reaction was very different.

The party ruined her life, and she wanted out.

So why didn't C want out too? WikiLeaks has published an American diplomatic cable from 2009. Someone at the US Embassy in Beijing had spoken to an unnamed friend of the C family. The source said that after the Culture Revolution, with the Red Families back in the political elite, most princelings partied. They drank and dated, lapped up Western movies and books. But not CGMP. According to the cable, he chose to survive by becoming redder than the other.

Rather than turn away from Mao's Communist Party, he dedicated himself to its cause. It can you imagine growing up in a house? Your father was one of the individuals who of us who had brought a new regime to power and regaled you with stories of the revolution. Joseph Terrigan says that for C, the party is the family business. But at the same time you had seen your father suffer so much and never lose that devotion.

You yourself suffer so much that Decide that to overcome that period of disillusionment. You wanted to dedicate yourself to the party. is someone who doesn't want to see As a young person returned to China. Early on, before the height of the early Nan Yang Li also believed in the past. I really, really want to be the member of the CCP.

Sure, I was a daughter of the CCP. I was not a daughter of my father. I really showed so hard to them. I just won't follow the Your way to follow China Mao and to be the really true true revolutionary. Why was that? Like what was it that made you so desperately want to be a daughter of the CCP? It's very hard for the kids from the really bad family. You have to try so hard.

You should understand now your time even in China, you could be everything and you could be teacher, you could be actress, actor, you could dream what you want, right? our time 1950s to be a revolutionary That's the only way. 成为革命者, become a revolutionary, that's it, only your future People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see it as mysterious and novel, X Jinping once said.

But what I see is not just the superficial things the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the jails and the hypocrisy of the world. All Xi Jinping could trust was the power of the Communist Party. The party was the only game in town. And maybe what made Si different is that he'd worked out how to play that game. But in Mao's China, no one was really safe except for Mao himself. So C wouldn't just have to play the game. He'd have to win. That's next time.

The Prince is produced by Sam Colbert, Claire Reed, Barkley Bram, and me. Our sound designer is Wei Donglin, with original music by Darren Ung. Our executive producer is John Shield. We couldn't have made this without the help of some very brave people we can't name. For more of the Economist China coverage, get the best offer on a subscription at economist.com slash Chinapod.