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Xi Jinping with villagers in Liangjiahe. Photo: SCMP

Xi Jinping makes rare visit to Yanan, China's revolutionary base where he lived as young man

The president lived in a cave in Liangjiahe village, in Yanan, for seven years from 1969 to 1975

Xi Jinping

China's first family made a rare visit together to a remote village near Yanan, the symbolic base of the revolution and also where President Xi Jinping began his political career.

Observers said the trip was aimed at further projecting Xi's image as inheritor of the Communist Party's "red roots" and his connection to Mao Zedong and other early leaders. But the visit was also apparently an informal family affair, and came just ahead of today's Valentine's Day.

Xi Jinping with Liangjiahe locals. Photo: SCMP
Photographs posted online showed Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan visiting Liangjiahe, in Shaanxi, where they offered Lunar New Year greetings to the villagers and brought gifts for the president's "old friends", Wang Xianping, deputy head of a local traffic police division, told Hong Kong-based news website Ifeng.com.
They were accompanied by their only child, Xi Mingze, the and Ifeng.com reported, citing Wang. She did not appear in any of the posted photos.

Mingze, who turns 23 this year, was previously attending Harvard University, but she remains out of the public spotlight, and the only available pictures of her are from the 1990s.

Dubbed "the cradle of the red revolution", Yanan was where top party leaders - including Mao, Zhou Enlai, and the president's father, Xi Zhongxun , forged the ragtag Red Army into a populist guerilla force and honed their socialist ideology.

The party continued to use it as its base until 1948.

Xi was sent to the village for "reeducation" in 1969 after his father fell out of favour during the Cultural Revolution.

As one of the country's millions of "educated youth" sent to the countryside during the era, Xi stayed in a cave home scooped from the yellow loess hillside for seven years. They revisited it yesterday.

Liangjiahe is also where Xi started his political career - he was appointed its party chief in 1973 and remained there until leaving for Beijing in 1976.

Commentators said the president wanted to emphasise his role as the inheritor of the party's early leadership and demonstrate he was connected to the poor at a time when economic growth was slowing.

"Xi has 'moved the cheese' of almost all the cliques within the Communist Party except for the princelings - children of the revolutionaries. They are now the basis of his power," said Zhang Lifan, an independent historian and political commentator in Beijing.

"He needs to stay close to his 'red roots' to show his legitimacy as the party's top leader. It also explains why he attended the Lunar New Year get-together of the princelings earlier this month."

Hong Kong-based political analyst Johnny Lau Yui-siu read the visit as a message from Xi to the less well-off that he would not neglect them.

"The state leaders need to pacify the country's low-income group, especially given that the country's economic growth will continue to stall this year," Lau said.

"Xi also wants to differentiate himself from other party leaders - [showing] that he truly understands what poverty and hardship are thanks to his humble past."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: First family visits revolution's 'cradle'
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