What? No wonder you are so ignorant on anything China-related. Xi is neither from poor family nor an ethnic minority. His father is one big big CCP elder and he is Han. Use google or wikipedia first before comment? I thought Internet allows people access to easily available information.
At the age of Eight he was kept in poor conditions ,
it is you who are ignorant here. Chinese do not know about their leaders ...... , no wonder you follow CCP blindly.
XI JINPING, THE NEW LEADER OF CHINA
Xi Jinping was officially anointed as the new leader of China, succeeding Hu Jintao as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at its 18th Congress in November 2012. He officially takes the position in early 2013.
Xi is a Member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, and secretary of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee. According to China.org, the Beijing government website: Xi Jinping is an ethnic Han and native of Fuping, Shaanxi Province, born in June 1953. He joined the CPC in January 1974 and began working in January 1969. He graduated from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tsinghua University, majoring in Marxist theory and ideological education. With an on-the-job postgraduate education. [Source: China.org]
Regarded as a princeling, Xi is the son of a former reformist vice premier and husband of a famous singer. He attended elite Tsinghua University in Beijing and spent much of his career in Fujian Province. He was promoted to governor Fujian in 1999 after a number of provincial officials were implicated in a corruption scandal. In March 2008, Xi was appointed as Vice President at the National People’s Congress. [Source: Jonathan Fenby, The Guardian, November 7 2010; Michael Wines, New York Times, October 18, 2010; Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield, New York Times, January 23, 2011]
Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun was a powerful and long-time Communist. A Long March hero banished during the Cultural Revolution, Xi Zhongxun emerged as a reformer in the deng Xiaoping era and was the architect of China’s Special Economic Zones that were integral in kick starting the Chinese economy under Deng.
Xi Jinping ( pronounced Shee Jin-ping) was selected as one the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2009. In the magazine’s profile Joshua Ramo of Kissinger Associates wrote, “You can already feel the Chinese system starting to flex as it prepares to make way for him...Xi’s own experiences as a provincial leader and his firm politicians instinct suggest that he is trying to knot the interest groups of China’s ruling Communist Party into something capable of executing difficult political and economic reforms that have become essential. The running joke in Beijing is that anytime there is a potentially nasty task, Xi gets it: the Olympics...and now an urgent new working group on social stability.”
Xi is tall and stockily built in the view of some and portly in the eyes of others. He turned 57 in 2010. Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Ye said, "I would put him in the Nelson Mandela class of persons. A person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment. In other words, he is impressive." After meeting Xi influential American consultant and China expert Sidney Rittenberg Jr. said, “I thought, This person is a brilliant politician.” When asked in 2002 if he was likely to become leader of China within the next decade, Xi said, "Are you trying to give me a fright?"
Xi Jinping’s Early Life
Xi Jinping (the family name is pronounced Shee) was born June 1, 1953, the son of revolutionary war hero and Long March veteran Xi Zhongxun. He was the third of four children born to the elder Xi's second wife. When he was a young child, his father was named vice premier, and the family moved into Zhongnanhai, the vermilion-walled Communist Party compound next to the Forbidden City, home of the late emperors. [Source: Barbara Demick and David Pierson, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2012]
As son of one-time Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, the younger Xi grew up in Beijing in the 1950s in a comfortable home when most Chinese were desperately poor. He went to China's premier military-run high school. Xi's family had their own cook and nannies, a driver and a Russian-made car, a telephone, a special supply of food earmarked for the leadership. Fearful of spoiling the children, the elder Xi made his son wear his sisters' hand-me-down clothing and shoes, which the family dyed so they wouldn't be in girlish colors, according to a biography published last year.
But in 1962, Xi's father had a falling out with Mao and went to prison. The family was booted from their compound, forced to move around Beijing. "You grow up in an environment where everything is provided, and suddenly you're stripped naked and left in the cold," said a friend from Xi's younger days. The friend, who did not want to be quoted by name when discussing the leadership, described a world in which suddenly adrift teenagers would collect books left unguarded in libraries or discarded by people who feared persecution as intellectuals. "We had nothing to do to comfort ourselves but read," said the friend.
When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966 the whole Xi family was punished for their father's alleged sins. Xi's mother was sent to a work camp in the countryside and Xi' Jinping's school was closed down and he was "sent down" to the countryside. Xi has described Mao's orders that intellectual youths be sent to the countryside as a welcome relief. He was sent to Liangjiahe, hundreds of miles southwest of Beijing and in Shaanxi province, his father's base in revolutionary days.
Xi Jinping’s Cave Home Years
In 1969 Xi was sent with 15 other teenagers from military families to in the yellow hills of Shaanxi Province as part of Mao’s campaign to toughen up educated urban youth during the chaotic Cultural Revolution. The area was remote and bleak, but had the advantage of being a region where his father had helped to establish a base for Communist forces in the 1930s. Xi was one of millions of Chinese youths driven into the countryside by Mao Tse-tung in those years. When Xi was caught returning to Beijing, he was sent to a labor camp for six months.
Barbara Demick and David Pierson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “In 1969, a pale, gangly 15-year-old walked down a dirt road flanked by desiccated yellow cliffs from which generations of Chinese farmers had eked out a subsistence living. The path led to Liangjiahe, a village in in Shanxi Province in central China where the Communist Party was sending city youths to do hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. For nearly seven years, Xi Jinping lived there, making a cave his home. A thin quilt spread on bricks was his bed, a bucket was his toilet. Dinners were a porridge of millet and raw grain. "He ate bitterness like the rest of us," said one of the Liangjiahe farmers, Shi Yujiong, who was 25 years old when the teenager arrived. [Source: Barbara Demick and David Pierson, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2012]
Liangjiahe is a tiny community of cave dwellings dug into arid hills and fronted by dried mud walls with wooden lattice entryways. He toiled alongside villagers, helping to build irrigation ditches and slept on bricks at night. He lived in a cave home for three years. "I ate a lot more bitterness than most people," Xi said in a rare 2001 interview with a Chinese magazine. “Knives are sharpened on the stone. People are refined through hardship. Whenever I later encountered trouble, I’d just think of how hard it had been to get things done back then and nothing would then seem difficult.” [Source: Jonathan Fenby, The Guardian, November 7 2010; Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press, November 15, 2012]
The Liangjiahe years are one of the most detailed accounts of Xi’s life and personality partly because he himself chronicled them as a formative experience. In a 1998 essay titled "Son of the Yellow Earth," Xi acknowledged early difficulties: "I was rather casual at first. The villagers had an impression of me as a guy who doesn't like to work hard." He wrote that he couldn't stand the fleas, the poor was food, the farm work hard. After a few months, he said, he ran away to Beijing. He was arrested during a crackdown on deserters from the countryside and sent to a work camp to dig ditches. Xi later returned to the village, and this time threw himself into his work. His pale complexion and white hands darkened; he learned to farm and carried heavy buckets of water from the well. He devised a biogas pit that converted waste into energy. "Xi has an advantage," said Zhang Musheng, a former government official and has met the vice president several times. "He lived at the bottom for a long period. It makes him understand the current conditions in China very well."
Xi's time in the village is key to the image the Communist Party has spun of a tireless, selfless volunteer. Leo Lewis wrote in The Times, “Liangjiahe, with its life of hard labour, remains a vital part of the official image-building: he arrived with the "princeling" credentials of the elite, as the son of one of Chairman Mao's closest revolutionary colleagues. But, by villagers' accounts, he stoically "ate bitterness" with the peasantry. "Of course we never guessed he would lead China, but from what we know of him in Liangjiahe, I think he could be a good leader," one villager said. [Source: Leo Lewis, The Times, November 3, 2012]
Villagers Recall Xi Jinping’s Cave Home Years
Liangjiahe villagers recall Xi as a tall bookworm who eventually earned their respect. They said Xi spent his days working in the dusty fields and his evenings reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. They said he was a passionate reader who became annoyed if anyone touched his books. Leo Lewis wrote in The Times, “Most villagers recall a teen workaholic, digging ditches in trousers held up with blasting fuse, his pale skin slowly tanning in the sun. During his Liangjiahe years, Mr Xi adapted to the loneliness of life in a cave, read books on Marxism, chemistry and mathematics late into the night and built the province's first biogas tank. His cave home, still occupied by a farming family, became the village meeting spot. His experiments with biogas - run from pig manure - were replicated across the area and produced cooking fuel for scores of homes. When he left, said one villager, everyone wanted to invite him to their caves to host his final dinner in Liangjiahe. [Source: Leo Lewis, The Times, November 3, 2012]
Chai Chunyi, a 63-year-old villager with tobacco-stained teeth, described Xi to the Los Angeles Times as a clueless city boy who arrived lugging a heavy suitcase full of books. "At first, we couldn't understand his accent and he couldn't understand us," Chai said. "But he worked really hard. He didn't complain like some of the others from the city." "When he first arrived, he wasn't that impressive," a villager who gave his name as Gong, told The Times. Recalling Xi's arrival, Gong said, "He once taught us how to grow tobacco, but it wasn't very successful at all. Nobody grows tobacco here now. We just raise pigs." “He was always very sincere and worked hard alongside us. He was also a big reader of really thick books,” Shi Chunyang, then a friend of Xi and now a local official, told AP.
Xi Jinping’s Early Displays of Leadership During Cave Home Years
Even at that early age, though his conciliatory leadership style was evident. “When people had a conflict with each other, they would go to him, and he’d say, Come back in two days,’” Lu Nengzhong, the patriarch of a cave home where Mr. Xi lived for three years,” told the New York Times. “By then, the problem had solved itself.” Xi came to hate ideological struggles. In an essay published in 2003, he wrote, “Much of my pragmatic thinking took root back then, and still exerts a constant influence on me.”
Xi was rejected for Communist Party membership nine times due to his father’s political problems. Barbara Demick and David Pierson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Despite the years of persecution, Xi still sought out the Communist Party's approval. He applied eight times to join its youth league, but nobody would accept his paperwork until he invited a young man who served as the local party secretary for a fried egg and steamed bread in the cave and pleaded his case. Xi finally gained party membership in 1974 after the an order was given not to penalize people for their parents misdeed. [Source: Barbara Demick and David Pierson, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2012]
Leo Lewis wrote in The Times, By the time he was recommended in 1975 for a place to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Mr Xi had established himself as a key figure in the village and a young man of considerable charisma. "His performance was outstanding," said one Liangjiahe resident. "He went to nearby villages to organise meetings and study sessions. Before long, he became our village party secretary." His entry into the party was not straightforward. He was turned down many times and accepted only when he won endorsement by the township secretary of the Communist Youth League. [Source: Leo Lewis, The Times, November 3, 2012]
Xi Jinping's Cave Hometown Today
Xi returned to Liangjiahe only once, in 1992, when he gave an alarm clock to each household. In Liangjiahe today, the older people who knew Xi are proud and hopeful about his ascension. The village remains poor, but with many new comforts: electricity, running water and a road that residents say was paved because of Xi's intercession. He had remained in touch with some of the villagers, helping the disabled son of one of his hosts get an operation on his leg. In 1993, he came back to visit, bringing with him a gift of watches. "He had enough watches for each household to get one," said villager Chai. "But the party secretary in the village took some of them, so many houses didn't get them."
On Liangjiahe today, Leo Lewis wrote in The Times, “In the remote hamlet of Liangjiahe, tucked among the parched mountains of China's northwest Shaanxi province, the corn harvest is in, firewood has been gathered for winter and the lanes are usually quiet. But on the winding approach road, activity is frenetic. Five work parties are laying a new surface and a huge bridge is being built to bear the future stream of traffic. When the Communist Party appoints China's new leader, Liangjiahe will be known as the village where Xi Jinping’s character was honed by rural hardship. Residents are expecting tourists. [Source: Leo Lewis, The Times, November 3, 2012]
Christopher Bodeen of Associated Press wrote: Local Communist Party officials and police in Liangjiahe followed reporters on a visit and asked them to leave, showing how the party wants to control information about Xi’s past. But they did allow brief interviews, including with Shi, described by villagers as Xi’s former “iron buddy.” Shi stood across from the now-abandoned, one-room home where Xi lived with a local family, and recalled the day Xi departed at age 22. “No one wanted to see him go,” Shi said. [Source: Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press, November 15, 2012]
Xi Jinping’s Rise After His Father’s Rehabilitation
Xi relied on family ties and party's recommendation to enter Tsinghua University, a top Beijing university and the same one Hu Jintao attended. The party selected his major, chemical engineering. He graduated from the school of humanities and social sciences but he never worked in the field. He later picked up a doctorate in Marxist theory and ideological education, making him one of the few Chinese leader educated in the arts rather than engineering. [Source: Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield, New York Times, January 23, 2011; Jonathan Fenby, The Guardian]
By the time Mao died in 1976 Xi's father had been restored to office. After graduating from Tsinghua Xi secured a plum position as secretary to Defense Minister Geng Biao, one of his father’s old comrades, working in the general office of the state council—the equivalent of the government—and the central military commission. Geng Biao was a powerful military bureaucrat allied with Mr. Xi’s father. Xi worked for three years as Geng’s private secretary when Geng was Minister of Defense. [Ibid]
Xi's father was politically rehabilitated in 1978 and later appointed by Deng Xiaoping as party secretary for Guangdong province, implementing economic reforms in an area that was to become the engine of the new China. No longer a liability, his father used his connections to get Xi a plum job as an assistant to Geng Biao, a fellow revolutionary who headed the powerful Central Military Commission.
The young man married an elegant, well-connected woman, Ke Lingling, whose father was China's ambassador to Britain.
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