Xi Jinping's Bizarre Family History

Life in the People's Republic is not easy

On the eve of President Trump’s meeting in Beijing with Xi Jinping, it is worth reminding ourselves of something not often discussed—the Chinese president's family background.

Xi’s is so radically different from almost all Americans that it's extremely difficult for most of us to understand exactly who he is.

I first ran into this some years ago, when, at the beginning of writing columns for The Epoch Times, I was informed by their then-publisher (now deceased) to “go easy” on Xi because their objective was to encourage the Chinese leader to liberalize. That seemed naive. But I went along, assuming they knew more than I did. Much of their staff came from China.

That same publisher was later surprised when I discovered and informed him that Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002), had been a victim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and Xi himself had been exiled as a teenager. (The paper’s point of view has since changed, but not because of me.)

According to multiple sources, Xi Zhongxun, an early supporter of the revolution and once a vice premier, ran afoul of Mao in 1962 when he praised a novel, Liu Zhidan, a positive biographical treatment of one of Xi Senior’s revolutionary mentors who had fallen out of favor in one of their intraparty rivalries. The father was accused of “revisionism” and being a leader of the “Xi-Jia-Liu Anti-Party Clique” in Chinese Communist Party parlance and was brutally ostracized.

It got considerably worse during the Cultural Revolution. According to Grok and other sources, “Xi Zhongxun was paraded in public ‘struggle sessions’ (e.g., in September 1967 in Xi’an, where he was labeled a ‘traitor’ and humiliated), imprisoned in isolation for years (including in a tiny room from 1968 to 1975), and subjected to manual labor and repeated denunciations. His family suffered greatly: his wife and children (including a teenage Xi Jinping) were attacked, and Xi Jinping was sent down to the countryside for years of hard labor.”

Above is Xi’s father being ridiculed at a “Struggle Session” at an agricultural college in Shaanxi (1967). The sign around his neck reads: “Anti-Party element Xi Zhongxun”.

Many American politicians, Donald Trump among them, have been subjected to considerable ridicule, but nothing remotely like this, not being marched around in public, humiliated (often with dunce caps on their heads), forced to denounce themselves and their friends and relatives, stripped of their livelihoods, not allowed to practice their occupations, and incarcerated for years, if not killed.

Mao Zedong instigated all this. It was his doing, and he was by far the greatest mass murderer in world history, with estimates of his victims from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution running from 40 to 70 million. And yet he still lies in state in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square with crowds lined up to admire his corpse.

Many rebelled against the man, of course, and still do, but Xi Jinping, despite the horrendous treatment of his family and himself, was not one of them. He did the opposite.

After Deng Xiaoping took the helm of China after Mao’s death (1976), communist extremism was abandoned in favor of the fascist oligarchy the country is today. (Deng, in charge during the Tiananmen Massacre, reinstated the “capitalist road,” as long as it adhered to the most rigid party loyalty.)

At that point, Xi Zhongxun was more or less rehabilitated. But meanwhile, his son has been gradually bringing back much of the iron fist of Maoism, much of it through indirect technological means, such as Skynet, social credit scores, and the government-run “data fusion” system known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). Other aspects of more direct evil Xi oversees are the oppression of the approximately 12 million Uyghurs, the Christians of China (as many as 100 million), and the Falun Gong, also a large group, most of whom have already fled the country due to the forced organ transplants, as well as virtually any dissident. Beyond that, Xi has allied with totalitarians around the globe, including Iran’s mullahs, against the freedom-loving people of that country who have been regularly slaughtered since 1979.

All this is under the rubric of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” To a great degree, Xi has become the contemporary mirror of the evil dictator, Chairman Mao, who destroyed his own family. Besides his father being incarcerated for years, his mother and sisters living in penury, and he being exiled, his half-sister hanged herself during the Cultural Revolution, from a shower at a military academy, according to one report.

Donald Trump did have a sister who criticized him, the federal appellate court judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who died in 2023, but to imply a similarity in the backgrounds of the two leaders is absurd. Few Westerners, arguably none, have gone through what Xi Jinping has and, of all things, lived to come out the longtime dictator of one of the two most populous nations on Earth. What would Sigmund Freud have made of that? Or Shakesperare>. Or Sophocles?

Trump undoubtedly knows much of this about Xi. How our president uses this knowledge is unclear. But he does have experience dealing with autocrats, Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong-un. He has been accused of cozying up to them. But is that really what he is doing? It appears to be a deliberate strategy, more likely a negotiating technique to make your opponent/partner feel comfortable. What good does it do to go to China to call Xi a horrible dictator, accurate as that may be? It’s what you do that counts, not what you say, in the final analysis anyway.

It should be remembered—and no doubt Xi does— that when the Chinese leader came to Mar-a-Lago in 2017, Trump informed him in the midst of their discussions and entertainments that the US was attacking his then-ally Syria.

Will history repeat itself? If it does, it is likely to be far more fraught. We are at a turning point. Everything from the Iran War to modern life, the global economy itself is at play. I don’t have to tell anybody to stay tuned.

UPDATE

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