Xi Jinping's recollections of sent-down youth burnish man-of-people image
Interview from 2004 creates a stir online as president recounts his Cultural Revolution experience as one of the "sent-down youth"
The Cultural Revolution era phrase "sent-down youth" (zhiqing) still resonates with many mainland families touched by the campaign that saw millions of young city dwellers sent to the hinterlands to be "re-educated by the peasants". Now it has become an online buzzword following the release of an interview President Xi Jinping gave a decade ago about his teenage years in rural Yanan, Shaanxi province, from 1969 to 1975.
In the 2004 interview, Xi recounts how he adjusted to the rough-hewn ways and coarse meals of the people of the barren Loess Plateau during Mao Zedong's "Up to the mountains and down to the countryside" movement.
The video has become a publicity coup for the president, on par with the approval lavished on him after he queued up at one of the capital's steamed bun shops in December and visited one of its storied hutongs on a particularly smoggy day in February.
Commentators regard Xi's sent-down years as a rite of passage that helped hone his qualities as the nation's leader. Xi himself has invoked the period on several recent occasions, including this year's National People's Congress session and during regional inspection tours.
In books, reports and photos, several leaders have retold their experiences during the period of tumult and relocation, including Premier Li Keqiang and Wang Qishan, chief of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party's top disciplinarian.
Xi sits atop the so-called "fifth generation" of leaders, the post-1949 generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution.
They experienced the same key historical events during their adolescence. Many grew up as poverty-stricken children and witnessed the famine caused by Mao's disastrous policies.