Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns about what is really going on in the opaque world of Chinese Communist party (CCP) politics. China-watchers live on scraps.
Xi Zhongxun was a big cheese in his own right. Born in the north-west’s Shaanxi province, he was an early member of the youth league of the CCP. After meeting Mao Zedong at the conclusion of the Long March, which ended up in his home province, he quickly rose through the party ranks. After making a success of his governorship of Guangdong Province, where he set up one of the first of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Special Economic Zones’, Xi Zhongxun was promoted to the politburo in 1982. His official obituary describes him as ‘an outstanding proletarian revolutionary’, who was ‘one of the main founders and leaders of the revolutionary base areas in the Shanxi-Gansu border region’.
In short, Xi Zhongxun was an early hero and ‘big beast’ of the CCP. He passed his ‘red genes’ on to Xi Jinping, the primus inter pares of the ‘princelings’ who have come to dominate China’s politics over the past decade. As such, it was no surprise that at the recent inauguration of the Revolutionary Memorial Hall in Shaanxi, it was planned to name it after Xi Zhongxun. But it didn’t happen. At the last minute, in a low-key ceremony, his name was not only expunged from the title but omitted entirely from the memorial.
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