Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) father is the subject of a rousing new historical drama that premiered on Chinese state television on Tuesday.
Funded by the Chinese Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Time in the Northwest chronicles the life of Xi Zhongxun (習仲勛), the father of the Chinese president, who was himself a CCP elder and key figure in the party under China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
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 that focus on glorifying the CCP’s military history.
However, unlike other popular television shows and films, Time in the Northwest also glorifies Xi Jinping’s personal family history.
Across 39 episodes, the show dramatizes the elder Xi’s life from a peasant family in rural Shaanxi Province to a leader in the CCP revolution in northwest China.
An article published by the state broadcaster CCTV said the biopic is “the first epic masterpiece that presents a panoramic view of the magnificent history of the northwest revolution,” and in particular, highlights Xi Zhongxun’s “extraordinary experience.”
The show takes place against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War, in which the CCP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) fought for control of the country after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. Xi Zhongxun is portrayed as a loyal and determined revolutionary who helped to build key CCP bases in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.
After the communists’ victory in the civil war, he became the head of the party’s publicity department and a vice premier of China, and his red credentials have been inherited by his son, Xi Jinping.
However, 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 1970s, Xi Zhongxun 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 Chinese Cultural Revolution, and went on to hold leadership positions.
Since he took office in 2012, controlling the party’s history has become a key concern of Xi Jinping’s. In an early speech, he said the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by “historical nihilism” — a CCP term that refers to the questioning of official history — 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 Zhongxun is shown scrapping with a school administrator called Wei Hai. In real life, Xi Zhongxun was jailed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Wei, said Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab and author of a forthcoming biography of Xi Zhongxun.
The dramatized version minimizes Xi Zhongxun’s role in the attempted killing.
Xi Jinping seems to be concerned with young people losing the fervor of his generation and his father’s.
In an article published in the CCP’s newspaper People’s Daily, 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 such as tang ping (躺平) — or “lying flat” — which reflects a desire to quit the rat race for a more passive lifestyle, and neijuan (內捲) — or “involution” — which reflects despair at the feeling of being overworked.
“Part of the idea of Xi [Jinping’s] model is that this generation needs to take the baton from the older generation,” Torigian said.
“One specific, concrete way of doing that is to show how Xi Jinping took the baton from his own father,” he added.
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