These men were only released when Mao and the rest of the party leadership happened to arrive in the region. In 1935, Guo Hongtao and Zhu Lizhi led a purge in the region that culminated in the arrest of Xi, Liu, Gao Gang, and other prominent local Communists under the charge of “right-ism,” a term that referred to not adopting sufficiently radical policies. Xi joined the base camps shortly after the incident and became one of Liu’s favored proteges. At a rally in Sanjiayuan, Xie declared that Zhao was a bandit and that his unit’s weapons would be confiscated Zhao was shot dead as he started to realize what was happening. In February 1932, for instance, two prominent cadres, Xie Zichang and Yan Hongyan, secretly decided to execute Zhao Erwa, a close associate of Liu Zhidan, another legendary Shaanxi Communist. Subsequent uprisings and mutinies almost all ended in failure, and communication with the party center was poor. When the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), turned against the CCP in 1927 and began a bloody anti-communist purge, the party in Shaanxi was badly damaged. As for the internal turmoil and butchery that are unbearable to look back on, they were simply not brought up. … In party history propaganda, such a major historical event as the Northwest Issue was played down, skirted around, treated casually. The scars left behind by brutal killings within the revolutionary units left a deep mark on their hearts forever, hurting them for their whole lives. Wang Xiaozhong, who worked for the Central Advisory Council in the 1980s and helped manage those continuing debates over what happened 50 years earlier, wrote in his memoirs: Personal and party histories became deeply intertwined, and the battles of the 1930s would shape CCP politics for decades. The Long March of 1934-35 would eventually bring the central party leadership to Shaanxi, but before that Xi and other Communists from the northwest went through vicious factional infighting that left behind mutual antagonisms that lasted decades. Xi Zhongxun was from the northwest, where the local CCP movement was far distant from the Central Soviet, the party’s core leadership, in the southern provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. Xi uniquely understands why historical grudges and differing views about the past are so potentially explosive.
Although the resolution acknowledges an accumulation of problems during his predecessors’ eras that only Xi is allegedly capable of solving, the Cultural Revolution is still characterized as a mistake and Reform and Opening Up a triumph. But the actual content of the document prioritizes continuity, treats several controversial subjects vaguely, and avoids assigning blame. Now, his son has led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to a new “historical decision”-only the third in its hundred-year history-and one in which Xi junior is an extraordinarily prominent figure.Ī new history resolution allows Xi to implicitly compare himself to illustrious predecessors such as Mao and Deng Xiaoping and present the CCP as a historic force uniquely capable of modernizing China.
Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was persecuted for 16 years because of his support for a novel about party history. Chinese President Xi Jinping is the son of a revolutionary whose life was more shaped by the danger of competing narratives about party history than perhaps anyone else in his generation.
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