abrasive, caustic and traumatised. In many elite
homes nightmares, drug dependency and abuse,
camouflaged as traditional discipline, were normal.
When Xi Zhongxun died in 2002 after years of
dementia there was honour but not much mourning.
Before his father’s fall, the young Xi Jinping went to
a school reserved for the children of the elite. The
Americans later found an informant, a former close
friend of Xi who grew up with him, who called their
childhood world “the most precisely class-based
mini-society ever constructed”. Everything was set
by a person’s internal party status — the choice of
kindergarten, access to shops and the type of car
available, at a time when hundreds of millions aspired
only to own a bicycle. All such privileges descended
from one’s party rank. Xi was known as a little
peacemaker in the playground rough-and-tumble.
The informant, who was known as the Professor,
had moved to the US, become an American citizen
and taught political science at an American
university. The Americans found his testimony so
telling that it was quoted in a 2009 cable from the US
embassy in Beijing, subsequently published by
WikiLeaks in 2011: “The children of this
revolutionary elite were told that they, too, would
someday take their rightful place in the Chinese
leadership ... consciousness of membership in an
entitled, elite generation of future rulers has
remained among most of the members of this class.”
Xi absorbed this sense of entitlement. The shock
was all the greater, then, when his father fell from
grace and he had to join millions of young Chinese
who were, in Mao’s mystical phrase, “sent down” to
the countryside to learn from the peasants. “He
suffered public humiliation and hunger, experienced
homelessness and was even held in custody,” Xi’s
official biography, published by Xinhua, says.
Bitten by fleas, the young Xi hardly slept in
whatever rude dwelling he found. According to the
propaganda he volunteered at 16 to live as an
“educated youth” in a remote village in northwest
China’s Shaanxi province. It stood on the Loess
Plateau, a place of windblown, fine-grained sandy
soil, famed as a wartime refuge for the Red Army.
Nobody disputes that life was hard, but the tale of
young Xi’s progress is more socialist parable than
socialist realism. It is said that he carried manure,hauled cartloads of coal, tilled the fields and built
water tanks. Then he naturally matured into a village
leader. He brought in machinery, stopped soil
erosion and won the people’s admiration. His
mother’s ideological rigour led him to join the
Communist Party while his father was still, in effect,
its political prisoner.
The mythmaking deepens on his return to urban
China in the late 1970s. He “never stopped reading
books” and in due course got a place at Tsinghua
University in Beijing, one of China’s best, in 1975. His
degree in chemistry was awarded to him as a “worker-
peasant-soldier” student, a special category. It was
affirmative action rewarding political reliability over
academic achievement, intended to boost those, like
Xi, who had lost out in their education during the
Cultural Revolution. According to Chinese academics
such degrees had comparatively low prestige.THE ILL-SUITED FIRST WIFE
By the time Xi graduated in 1979, Mao was dead and
Xi’s father was back. Thanks to his family’s influence,
Xi got a post working for the minister of defence.
While other youngsters turned to drink, drugs and
partying, he was an example of sober ambition.
Women were said to find him “boring”, according to
the Professor, who saw a lot of him at the time.
His next step was to secure a suitable bride. The
families found one in the shape of Ke Xiaoming, also
known as Ke Lingling, the daughter of Ke Hua, who
was the Chinese ambassador to Britain and one of
Mao’s most faithful diplomatic mouthpieces. The
couple married in 1979, while Xi was working in
Beijing, but it did not last. Her family were cultivated
intellectuals and she had career ambitions. Her
friends spread gossip that Xi rarely read a book,
often didn’t brush his teeth and bathed infrequently,
a habit acquired among the peasants. His friends put
it about that she was plain and too bookish.
The Professor watched the two drift apart. He
thought Xi’s “distant” character contributed to the
break-up. Eventually Ke Xiaoming took advantage of
her father’s position to move to Britain for good. The
couple divorced in 1982. There were no children.
Ke Xiaoming keeps a low profile and is presumed
to be still living in Britain under Chinese surveillance.
EYEVINE “As long as we were together we quarrelled
His first
wife keeps
a low
profile
and is
presumed
to be still
living in
Britain —
under the
watch of
China
From left: Xi with his first
wife, Ke Xiaoping; in 1987 he
married Peng Liyuan, a
well-known singer; with his
young daughter, MingzeThe Sunday Times Magazine • 27