CHINA-INTERNAL: LEADERSHIP-XI JINPING
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Reports referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping's past as a "social youth" are quietly circulating in Beijing. In this context, Xi Jinping's statement made in the Summer of 2000 is relevant. He said: "….But I have also made mistakes that I have learned from. When I was sent to the countryside, I was very young. It was something I was forced to. At the time I did not think very far and did not at all think of the importance of cooperating. While others in the village every day went up the mountain slopes and worked, I did as I chose, and people got a very bad impression of me. Some months later I was sent back to Beijing and placed in a “study group”. When six months later I was let out, I thought a lot about whether I should return to the village. At last I called upon my uncle, who before 1949 had worked in a base area in the Taihang Mountains. At the time he, my aunt and my mother were active in revolutionary work. All of them are people who have meant a lot to me. My uncle told me about his work then, and about how decisive it is to cooperate with the people among whom you are.
That settled it. I went back to the village, got down to work and cooperated. In a matter of a year I did the same work as people in the village, lived in the same way as they and worked hard. People saw that I had changed….."
(Comment: 'Social youth' is a term that existed before the Cultural Revolution and was reasserted by Mao Zedong in 1962. It essentially applied to youth in the period when pressures to go to the countryside were not as stringent as they became from 1968 and many youth who did not want to leave or were too young to leave just stayed unemployed at home. Since they had no 'danwei' (work unit), they were lost in "society".)
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