Xi Jinping’s father is the subject of a rousing new historical drama that premiered on Chinese state television on Tuesday.
Funded by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), Time in the Northwest chronicles the life of Xi Zhongxun, the father of the Chinese president, who was himself a CCP elder and key figure in the party under Chairman Mao Zedong.
The show, which has received overwhelmingly positive reviews on China’s closely censored social media platforms, is the latest in a string of mass market productions which focus on glorifying the CCP’s military history. But unlike other popular television shows and films, Time in the Northwest also glorifies Xi Jinping’s personal family history.
Across 39 episodes, the show dramatises the elder Xi’s life from a peasant family in rural Shaanxi province to a leader in the CCP revolution in China’s north-west. According to an article published by the state broadcaster CCTV to promote the show, the biopic is “the first epic masterpiece that presents a panoramic view of the magnificent history of the north-west revolution”, and in particular, highlights Xi’s “extraordinary experience”.
The show takes place against the backdrop of the Chinese civil war, in which the Communists and the Nationalists (KMT) fought for control of the country after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Xi is portrayed as a loyal and determined revolutionary who helped to build key CCP bases in Shaanxi and Gansu.
Xi’s fervour as a young man propelled him into the highest echelons of the CCP elite. After the Communists’ victory in the civil war, he became the head of the party’s publicity department and a vice-premier of China. His red credentials have been inherited by his son, Xi Jinping, who is often referred to as a “princeling” of the party he now controls.
But the elder Xi also felt the rough edges of the party. The series reportedly ends in 1952, one year before Xi Jinping was born, and a decade before Zhongxun was purged for supporting a novel that was seen as being a covert attempt to rewrite party history. In the 1960s and 70s, Xi spent 16 years in purgatory, an experience which is thought to have deeply affected the younger Xi and his relationship to the party. Xi was rehabilitated after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and went on hold leadership positions.
Xi Jinping has been described as China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao. Since taking office in 2012, the question of controlling the party’s history has become a key concern. In an early speech, he said the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by “historical nihilism” and must be a “cautionary tale”.
Time in the Northwest avoids historical nihilism by dodging the most traumatic years of the elder Xi’s life. But there are still moments in the biopic that are fraught with difficulty.
In the first episode, which aired on Tuesday evening, Xi is shown scrapping with a school administrator called Wei Hai. In real life, Xi was jailed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Wei, according to a forthcoming biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. The dramatised version minimises Xi’s role in the attempted killing.
“The treatment of cultural products has always been a barometer for politics in the party,” Torigian said, noting that Xi himself was purged because of his support for a novel that was seen as a covert attempt to rewrite Party history. “Party history and how it’s presented has always been a minefield.”
More recently, Xi Jinping seems to be concerned with young people losing the fervour of his generation and his father’s. In an article published in the Communist party newspaper People’s Daily last year, he urged young people to “unswervingly listen to and follow the party” and to be people who “can endure hardships and are willing to work hard”.
Such rhetoric is at odds with the recent buzzwords that have been popular among young people: tangping, or “lying flat”, reflects a desire to quit the rat race for a more passive lifestyle, while neijuan, or “involution”, reflects despair at the feeling of being overworked.
“Part of the idea of Xi’s model is that this generation needs to take the baton from the older generation,” said Torigian. “One specific, concrete way of doing that is to show how Xi Jinping took the baton from his own father.”
Additional research by Chi-hui Lin