(TibetanReview.net, Nov09’24) –Xi Zhongxun, the father of China’s party general secretary and state president Xi Jinping, is the subject of a rousing new historical drama that premiered on Chinese state television on Nov 5, reported theguardian.com Nov 8.
Funded by the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist party of China (CPC), Time in the Northwest, a 39-part serialised drama, chronicles the life of senior Xi, who was himself a CPC elder and a key figure in the party under Chairman Mao Zedong.
The show has naturally received overwhelmingly positive reviews on China’s closely censored social media platforms, focused as it is on glorifying the CPC’s military history. But unlike other popular television shows and films, Time in the Northwest also glorifies Xi Jinping’s personal family history, the report noted.
Across 39 episodes, the show is said to dramatize the elder Xi’s life from a peasant family in rural Shaanxi province to a leader in the CPC revolution in China’s north-west.
The report cited an article published by the state broadcaster CCTV to promote the show as saying 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, taking 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 Manchu Qing dynasty, portrays Xi as a loyal and determined revolutionary who helped to build key CPC bases in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.
The senior Xi’s fervour as a young man propelled him into the highest echelons of the CPC 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, the report said.
The serial conveniently 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 a covert attempt to rewrite the party history.
Were it to continue, the serial would have to show how in the 1960s and 70s, Xi spent 16 years in purgatory. Xi was rehabilitated after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and went on to hold leadership positions.
In the first episode, which aired on Nov 5 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, the report said, citing a forthcoming biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. The dramatized version is said to minimise Xi’s role in the attempted killing.
“Part of the idea of Xi’s model is that this generation needs to take the baton from the older generation,” Torigian has said. “One specific, concrete way of doing that is to show how Xi Jinping took the baton from his own father.”
This is expected to have a countervailing influence in a country where the buzzwords that have become popular among young Chinese today include tangping, or “lying flat”, reflecting a desire to quit the rat race for a more passive lifestyle, and neijuan, or “involution”, reflecting despair at the feeling of being overworked.