{ "id": "xi-zhongxun", "title": "Xi Zhongxun", "lang": "en", "source_lang": "en", "summary": "Xi Zhongxun was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and senior official associated with northwestern China and Guangdong’s early economic reforms.", "category": "society", "subcategory": "politics", "type": "person", "aliases": [ "Hsi Chung-hsun", "习仲勋", "習仲勛" ], "generated_at": "2026-10-14", "model": "gpt-6.1-sol", "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/xi-zhongxun/", "translations": { "zh-Hans": { "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/xi-zhongxun/", "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/xi-zhongxun.json" } }, "sections": [ { "heading": "", "text": "Xi Zhongxun (15 October 1913–24 May 2002) was a Chinese revolutionary and politician who held senior positions in the Chinese Communist Party and the government of the People’s Republic of China. He helped establish Communist revolutionary bases in the northwest during the 1930s and subsequently served in regional military and civilian leadership. His national appointments included secretary-general of the State Council, vice-premier, Politburo member, and vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. (news.12371.cn)\n\nHis career encompassed revolutionary warfare, the establishment of Communist government, political persecution under Mao Zedong, and the early reform period. Removed from active leadership in 1962 over the novel Liu Zhidan, he returned to office in 1978 and helped advance Guangdong’s opening to foreign economic activity and the establishment of special economic zones. He was also the father of Xi Jinping. His life connects the history of the Communist movement in northwestern China with the development of the post-Mao party-state and its economic reforms. (chathamhouse.org)" }, { "heading": "Early life and entry into revolutionary politics, 1913–1932", "text": "Xi Zhongxun was born on 15 October 1913 into a farming family in Fuping County, Shaanxi. His father was Xi Zongde, and the household belonged to an extended family living in the county’s rural southwest. Xi began attending nearby Ducun Primary School in 1922. In spring 1926 he entered the higher-primary division of Licheng School, where Communist organizers were active. He joined the Communist Youth League in May that year, aged twelve. His early political assignments connected school activism with rural organizing: he delivered handwritten leaflets calling on peasants to resist grain levies and other exactions. After official scrutiny of Licheng intensified, he transferred to Fuping County’s First Higher Primary School. (paper.people.com.cn)\n\nXi subsequently attended Shaanxi Provincial Third Normal School and continued distributing leaflets and writing slogans. In March 1928, a dispute over participation in a school ceremony commemorating Sun Yat-sen exposed nine Youth League members, including Xi, to the school’s disciplinary director, Wei Hai. According to the account published in Global People, a Communist-approved attempt to poison Wei failed and precipitated the students’ arrests. Xi joined the Chinese Communist Party while imprisoned and was released after approximately four months. His imprisonment thus followed student political activity, but the immediate circumstances also involved a failed assassination attempt. (paper.people.com.cn)\n\nIn early 1930, the party assigned Xi to underground organizing among troops serving under Yang Hucheng. The work was intended to create Communist-controlled armed forces from within existing military units, rather than simply to distribute propaganda. Organizers recruited soldiers into the party, established clandestine company-level organizations, and used soldiers’ everyday grievances to build support for a future mutiny. Xi became secretary of the battalion’s underground party committee in autumn 1931. By that winter, Communist activists were present in each company, and many squad and platoon leaders were party members. The battalion remained within Yang’s forces after its brigade commander broke with Yang in 1931; it was subsequently designated the First Battalion, Second Regiment, Third Brigade of the Seventeenth Route Army. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nThe opportunity for the Liangdang uprising arose when the battalion was ordered to change garrisons in spring 1932. Soldiers recruited largely from Shaanxi objected to moving farther from their homes into Gansu’s mountainous districts. The underground committee sought provincial party approval, and the Shaanxi organization sent Liu Linpu to assist with preparations. On 2 April 1932, Xi and fellow organizers launched the mutiny at Liangdang, Gansu. More than 200 soldiers withdrew from the town and were reorganized at Taiyang Temple as the Fifth Detachment of the Shaanxi–Gansu Guerrilla Force of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, with Xi serving as its party committee secretary. (isrs.nwu.edu.cn)\n\nThe detachment marched northward, intending to join Liu Zhidan’s guerrillas, but encountered armed opposition and shortages of supplies. At Yueyu Temple in Yongshou County, Shaanxi, forces led by the local bandit commander Wang Jiezi surrounded and dispersed it. The uprising therefore failed to establish a lasting independent force or achieve the planned rendezvous. Xi later located Liu Zhidan at Yangliuping, turning from military underground work toward the guerrilla and rural organizing activities that preceded the establishment of the Shaanxi–Gansu revolutionary bases. (dswxyjy.org.cn)" }, { "heading": "Establishing the Shaanxi–Gansu revolutionary bases, 1933–1935", "text": "In 1933, Xi Zhongxun worked with Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, and other Chinese Communist Party organizers to establish a base around Zhaojin, in the mountainous borderlands of Shaanxi and Gansu. His responsibilities combined political organization with the development of local armed forces: in March he served on the border-area special party committee, and in April he became political commissar of the guerrilla headquarters and deputy chairman of the revolutionary committee. He helped reorganize more than twenty guerrilla detachments and promoted land redistribution and the abolition of landlord rents and Nationalist taxes. Zhaojin provided a defensible rear area; caves at Xuejiazhai housed weapons-repair facilities, clothing production, a hospital, and stores. These installations supported mobile forces rather than an administration securely controlling an uninterrupted territory. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nThe base remained vulnerable to Kuomintang attacks. In October 1933, Nationalist troops captured Xuejiazhai while the main Communist forces were operating elsewhere, and the center of base-building shifted toward Nanliang in eastern Gansu. Xi and fellow organizer Zhang Ce undertook village-level political work there, establishing peasant organizations and supporting the formation of local guerrilla units. In February 1934, a meeting at Sihetai elected Xi chairman of a renewed border-area revolutionary committee. This provisional administration created committees for land, labor, finance, grain, military affairs, and cultural and educational work, giving civilian organization a more defined institutional structure alongside guerrilla warfare. (paper.people.com.cn)\n\nIn November 1934, a congress of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ representatives at Liyuanbao, Nanliang, elected the twenty-one-year-old Xi chairman of the Shaanxi–Gansu border-area Soviet government. Liu Zhidan chaired its revolutionary military commission. Civilian administration supplied the armed movement through grain collection, financial management, and economic organization, while military forces protected the villages in which those institutions operated. Land committees investigated ownership, measured holdings, and organized the confiscation and redistribution of landlords’ land, livestock, and grain to poorer peasants. The government also issued local currency, organized market trade, and established Lenin primary schools and literacy classes. A military-political cadre school, with Liu as principal and Xi as political commissar, trained personnel for the expanding base. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nDuring 1935, the Shaanxi–Gansu border base and the northern Shaanxi base acquired unified leadership. A joint party meeting on 5 February established the Northwest Working Committee and Northwest Military Commission; Xi joined the working committee while retaining his border-government chairmanship. Military cooperation subsequently connected the previously separated territories. Consolidation nevertheless required continued mobility: in April, under Nationalist pressure, Xi led the party and government offices and a guard force of more than one hundred people out of Nanliang toward the Luo River valley in Ganquan County. In September, the arriving Twenty-Fifth Red Army combined with the local Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh armies to form the Fifteenth Red Army Corps. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nThis expansion coincided with an internal campaign to suppress alleged counterrevolutionaries. In September 1935, Xi was detained during the purge; Liu Zhidan and other established local leaders were also imprisoned. The subsequent official account characterized their arrests as wrongful. After Mao Zedong and the central Communist leadership reached northern Shaanxi in October, at the end of the central Red Army’s Long March, they intervened to halt the campaign and review the cases. Xi and the other detained leaders were released, restoring cadres whose arrest had disrupted the northwestern base’s political and military leadership. (cpc.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "Border-region administration during the war with Japan, 1936–1945", "text": "In January 1936, Xi Zhongxun became deputy chairman of the Guanzhong Special District Soviet government and secretary of its Communist Party group. After accompanying the Red Army’s westward expedition in June and holding party posts in the Huanxian area, he returned to Guanzhong in August. Over the following six years, his successive responsibilities included secretary of the Guanzhong party subcommittee, district administrative commissioner, and political commissar of the district security command. This Communist administrative district lay along the southern boundary of the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, rather than encompassing the whole geographical region of Guanzhong. In February 1937, its party and government offices moved to Majiabao in Xinzheng County, now part of Xunyi County; Xi reorganized its party, administrative, and military institutions that April. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nDuring the war with Japan, Xi’s work combined border defence with implementation of the anti-Japanese united front between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang. Cooperation against Japan did not eliminate disputes over local territory and administration. A report he submitted to the border-region government in July 1940 recorded several armed clashes: on 2 June, two Kuomintang battalions, supported by artillery, attacked Communist troops at Shenyagou in Xinzheng; on 8 June, provincial security troops occupied Jingcun in Chishui, forcing Communist offices to relocate to Zhongzui; further fighting occurred around Xiangshan and Tunzhuang in Chunyao. These incidents show how maintaining the national alliance coexisted with military resistance to encroachments on Communist-controlled territory. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nIn February 1943, Xi transferred to Suide as secretary of its prefectural party committee and political commissar of the garrison command. Rural investigation became an instrument for directing production rather than simply collecting administrative reports. That spring, he led an investigation at Haojiaqiao village, examining agricultural production, rent and interest reduction, village government, household livelihoods, women’s textile work, and education. Investigators supplemented the general village survey with detailed studies of six households—two each with relatively high, intermediate, and low living standards and production conditions. The resulting model centred on village leader Liu Yuhou’s organization of farming, improved cultivation, and household production planning; the prefectural committee promoted these practices through a campaign urging villages to emulate Haojiaqiao and individuals to emulate Liu. (yulin.qinfeng.gov.cn)\n\nThe Suide production campaign also required government personnel to economize and undertake productive labour, while local political administration followed the “three-thirds” principle. Under this wartime arrangement, Communists, non-party left-wing progressives, and political intermediates were each assigned one-third of positions in representative and governmental bodies, while Communist political leadership was retained. In Suide, this provided an institutional framework for involving non-Communist notables and intellectuals. Xi’s administration also promoted seasonal “winter schools,” using the agricultural slack season for education; the local party-history office records 905 such schools in the district in 1943. These measures linked agricultural mobilization, administrative economy, and participation by groups outside the party. (yldsyjs.com)\n\nIn June 1945, the party’s Seventh National Congress elected Xi an alternate member of the Central Committee. During the final weeks of the war, he also served as political commissar of the temporary headquarters established for the Yetai Mountain fighting against Kuomintang forces. In August, he was appointed deputy head of the Central Committee’s Organization Department, marking his movement from district-level party, civil, and garrison responsibilities into central organizational work. (cpc.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "Civil war and Communist expansion in the northwest, 1945–1949", "text": "After Japan’s surrender, Xi Zhongxun combined regional party leadership with successive military political appointments during the Chinese Civil War. As secretary of the Northwest Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party, he oversaw regional party work and the implementation of policies in the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia border region, working with its government chairman, Lin Boqu. His military responsibilities belonged to separate command structures: he served as political commissar of the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia–Shanxi–Suiyuan Joint Defense Army and, when the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Field Army Group was established in January 1947, became its political commissar under commander Zhang Zongxun. These offices connected party organization and military political work but did not make the Northwest Bureau itself a battlefield headquarters. (news.12371.cn)\n\nIn March 1947, Xi worked with Peng Dehuai in the campaign against Kuomintang forces advancing into northern Shaanxi. After the Communist evacuation of Yan’an, their forces used diversionary movements and concentrated attacks against isolated enemy units rather than attempting to hold the city. At Qinghuabian on 25 March, a feigned withdrawal helped draw the Nationalist 31st Brigade into an ambush; the fighting at Yangmahe on 14 April destroyed the 135th Brigade. The subsequent operation against Panlong, in late April and early May, targeted a Nationalist supply base after the main enemy force had been drawn away. Official military histories place total Nationalist losses in the three operations at more than 14,000 men. Xi participated in the campaign leadership alongside Peng; these accounts do not establish that he personally directed every tactical action. (news.12371.cn)\n\nThe July 1947 Xiaohe conference clarified the division between front-line operations and rear-area support. Peng became commander and political commissar of the newly designated Northwest Field Army, with Xi concurrently serving as deputy political commissar. He Long commanded the reorganized Joint Defense Army, which incorporated the Shanxi–Suiyuan Military Region, while Xi served as its political commissar. Peng concentrated on combat operations; He and Xi assumed responsibility for rear-area mobilization and supply. Xi consequently returned from the battlefield to administrative and logistical work. At a joint meeting of county party secretaries in Suide on 10 August, He and Xi addressed coordination between the two border regions, including production, finance, trade, and support for the field army. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nRear-area support required both recruitment and the reorganization of scarce resources. He, Xi, and other regional leaders coordinated the two border regions’ financial and economic administration, reduced rear-office staffing and expenditure, and organized transport to the front. Local guerrilla forces and regional units provided a pool from which field formations could be reinforced. An official historical account records recruitment during 1947 of approximately 30,000 men into field forces and 50,000 into local forces. These were regional mobilization results, not troops personally commanded by Xi in battle. In February 1949, the Joint Defense Military Region was reorganized as the Northwest Military Region, retaining He as commander and Xi as political commissar. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nXi’s involvement in land reform likewise centered on differentiated regional administration. In a report dated 4 January 1948, he argued that established Communist districts, where earlier redistribution had made many former poor peasants into middle peasants, should not undergo another indiscriminate equalization of landholdings. Instead, limited adjustments should address households still lacking sufficient land. His subsequent exchanges with Mao Zedong distinguished these older districts from partially reformed areas and newly occupied territory. For newly controlled areas, Xi advocated continuing rent and interest reductions rather than immediately launching comprehensive redistribution. He also required officials to correct mistaken class classifications and return, or compensate for, improperly confiscated land and property. These interventions formed part of the broader correction of land-reform excesses while preserving agricultural production and rural support for the war effort. (dangshi.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "Governing northwestern China, 1949–1952", "text": "After the establishment of the People’s Republic, Xi Zhongxun exercised regional authority through overlapping party, administrative, and military appointments. He became second secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Northwest Bureau, vice-chairman and subsequently acting chairman of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee, and political commissar of the First Field Army and Northwest Military Region. These offices connected party supervision, civilian administration, and military political work without making them identical functions. The region comprised Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Xinjiang, with Xi’an as its administrative centre. When Peng Dehuai departed to command Chinese forces in Korea in 1950, Xi assumed the committee’s acting chairmanship and responsibility for its routine regional business. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nThe transition to civilian government required cadres capable of taking over urban institutions and restoring production. In preparations for the transfer of Xi’an in May 1949, Xi instructed incoming personnel to protect and administer the city and rapidly resume its productive activities. Subsequent economic work combined reconstruction with nationwide political campaigns. In late 1951 and the first half of 1952, the region implemented the Three-Anti campaign against corruption, waste, and bureaucratism in public institutions, and the Five-Anti campaign targeting bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts, and theft of state economic information in private business. Rural reconstruction also involved agricultural mutual aid: in a report dated 6 June 1952, Xi cited incomplete returns from 213 counties recording more than 620,000 mutual-aid groups, including 129 agricultural production cooperatives, involving over six million workers. He also criticized compulsory grouping, inflated returns, and failures to account properly for labour contributions. (xinhuanet.com)\n\nXi chaired the regional committee’s 25-member land-reform commission. Implementation was staggered rather than imposed simultaneously across the northwest: work began in predominantly Han farming districts in the winter of 1950–1951, extended to farming districts with substantial minority populations in 1951–1952, and was deferred elsewhere pending further preparation. His instructions required participation by cadres of the local nationality, respect for religious practices, and prior negotiations with influential community and religious figures. Pastoral districts received different treatment. In his report to the Xinjiang party conference on 15 July 1952, he prioritized public order, medical services, trade, and cadre training, while opposing the immediate transplantation of agrarian redistribution into livestock economies. The policy preserved herd owners’ economic operations while envisaging the gradual removal of their political privileges and improvements in herders’ conditions. (dswxyjy.org.cn)\n\nRecruiting minority cadres supplied personnel for these differentiated policies. The Northwest Nationalities Institute in Lanzhou, established in 1950, provided an institutional training base; Xi addressed its opening ceremony on 20 August 1951, emphasizing the need to train minority officials. A contemporary report published in February 1952 recorded approximately 27,000 minority cadres across the northwest and more than 3,500 students enrolled in the region’s minority-oriented training institutions and university departments. These were regional totals, not figures for the Lanzhou institute alone. (hljzx.gov.cn)\n\nContacts with religious authorities were part of regional administration and united-front work. Xi maintained relations with the Tibetan Buddhist scholar Sherab Gyatso and the Muslim religious leader Ma Zhenwu, alongside other minority representatives. He welcomed the Tenth Panchen Lama in Xi’an in April 1951 while the latter travelled to Beijing, and visited him at Kumbum Monastery in December before his journey to Tibet. Acting for the central government, Xi also participated in arrangements for that departure. Religious institutions affected land-reform decisions directly: following investigations around Kumbum in late 1951, the Northwest Bureau temporarily postponed reform in monastery-administered communities and left mosque, Muslim shrine, and religious-establishment lands untouched. (dswxyjy.org.cn)" }, { "heading": "Central government service under Zhou Enlai, 1952–1962", "text": "In September 1952, Xi Zhongxun transferred from northwestern China to Beijing, becoming head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department and concurrently deputy chairman and Party-group secretary of the Government Administration Council’s Culture and Education Committee. These appointments combined Party responsibilities for propaganda with governmental supervision of cultural and educational affairs. An official historical account credits him with helping formulate a policy of consolidation, selective development, improved quality, and steady progress for these sectors. His place in the governmental division of labour was also explicit: a draft decision prepared under Zhou Enlai on 10 March 1953 assigned cultural and educational work to Xi, alongside separate responsibilities for planning, finance, political and legal affairs, and foreign relations held by other leaders. (zhouenlai.people.com.cn)\n\nXi became secretary-general of the Government Administration Council in September 1953. The constitutional reorganization of September 1954 replaced that institution with the State Council, in which he continued as secretary-general. The new institutional framework gave the position defined executive responsibilities rather than merely clerical functions. Under the State Council Organic Law, adopted on 21 September 1954, the secretary-general headed the Secretariat and belonged to both the plenary meeting—comprising the premier, vice-premiers, ministers, commission chairmen, and secretary-general—and the smaller executive meeting of the premier, vice-premiers, and secretary-general. State Council resolutions and orders required approval by one of these two bodies. Xi therefore participated in the machinery through which departmental proposals became collective government decisions. He also became a full Central Committee member at the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nOn 28 April 1959, Xi was appointed vice-premier while retaining the secretary-generalship, with responsibility for the State Council’s routine executive business under Zhou. This combination linked participation in senior deliberations with supervision of the offices supporting government operations. His responsibilities included oversight of the Government Offices Administration, whose work covered administrative expenditure, accommodation, reception arrangements, and other services for central institutions. Its institutional history records that Xi urged improvements in working methods in March 1954, warning against reliance on inherited experience as state business expanded. He subsequently presided over the preparation, or personally issued, regulations including rules for domestic official reception and provisional expenditure standards for central state organs. These were administrative instruments governing how institutions operated, rather than evidence of independent authorship of national economic policy. (cn.govopendata.com)\n\nInterdepartmental and central–local coordination formed another identifiable part of his work. In June 1958, the Government Offices Administration established a joint office for provincial, municipal, and autonomous-region representative offices in Beijing under instructions from the State Council secretary-general. Xi also served as a channel between Zhou and non-Communist figures holding government posts. In a later recollection, he described Zhou’s instruction to maintain contact with officials including Zhang Zhizhong, Fu Zuoyi, Ma Xulun, and Shi Liang, ascertain their working and living circumstances and their views on domestic and international affairs, and report these to the premier. Such contacts connected routine administration with the government’s relations with personnel outside the Communist Party. (ggj.gov.cn)\n\nHis coordinating duties also involved investigation outside the capital. On 10 April 1961, following instructions from the Party centre and Zhou, Xi led a twelve-member central working group to Changge County, Henan. The group included State Council deputy secretaries-general Zeng Yifan and Zhao Shougong, Government Offices Administration director Li Mengfu, and personnel and general-office officials. Its investigation addressed the locally documented “five winds,” a contemporary designation for practices including inflated reporting, coercive commands, and wasteful administration. This assignment brought officials responsible for government operations into direct examination of local implementation. Xi’s active central-government service was interrupted in September 1962 by the political case concerning the novel Liu Zhidan. (dangshi.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "The Liu Zhidan affair and political exclusion, 1962–1978", "text": "The historical novel Liu Zhidan, written by Li Jiantong, became the basis for Xi Zhongxun’s removal from central government work in 1962. Li was married to Liu Jingfan, the younger brother of Liu Zhidan, Xi’s former revolutionary colleague in northwestern China. Her novel concerned the establishment of the northwestern Communist bases and therefore touched on disputed accounts of their leadership and political history. Xi had been consulted during its preparation and had offered comments about its treatment of that history. In August and September 1962, critics converted these consultations into allegations that he had directed the book’s production to rehabilitate Gao Gang, a former northwestern leader purged in the 1950s, and to promote his own political standing. These were accusations made during the investigation, not findings sustained by the later official review. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nKang Sheng played a central role in turning the literary dispute into a disciplinary case. At the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in September 1962, he accused Xi of using the novel for anti-party activity. On 27 September, the plenum established a special investigative committee under Kang. Its May 1963 report alleged that the book exaggerated and distorted the importance of the northwestern bases, sought to reverse Gao Gang’s condemnation, and constituted a political programme for a supposed “Xi Zhongxun anti-party group.” The investigation thus treated the novel’s representation of revolutionary history, and Xi’s connections with its author and historical subjects, as evidence of an organized political conspiracy. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nXi’s exclusion initially involved prolonged investigation rather than continuous imprisonment. After approximately three years under review, he was assigned in December 1965 to the Luoyang Mining Machinery Factory in Henan as a deputy director. He remained there until January 1967. During the Cultural Revolution, that factory assignment gave way to coercive detention and public denunciation. According to his wife Qi Xin’s published recollection, Red Guards seized him from his factory accommodation on the night of 3 January 1967 and took him to Shaanxi. He was subjected to struggle meetings, including in his home county of Fuping. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nOn 3 January 1968, Xi was flown from Xi’an to Beijing and placed in the custody of the Beijing Garrison. Qi Xin attributed the transfer to Zhou Enlai and described it as protection from further public persecution; it nevertheless entailed years of confinement and restricted contact. An official retrospective places him in a room of approximately seven or eight square metres at a transport cadre school in Beixinqiao from early 1968 until May 1975. He then returned to Luoyang with Qi Xin and lived in accommodation belonging to a refractory-materials factory, without a political appointment. The sequence comprised investigation, factory employment, public persecution, confinement, and assigned residence—not sixteen uninterrupted years in prison. (news.12371.cn)\n\nXi returned to political work in 1978 and was sent to Guangdong, but his reinstatement preceded completion of the formal reversal of the case. On 4 August 1979, the Central Committee endorsed an Organization Department report rehabilitating the novel and rejecting the allegation that its preparation constituted an anti-party conspiracy. On 25 February 1980, it issued a separate notice reversing the case against the supposed “Xi Zhongxun anti-party group.” These decisions distinguished his practical return to office from the subsequent documentary removal of the accusations against him. (magazine.inewsweek.cn)" }, { "heading": "Guangdong and the beginnings of economic opening, 1978–1980", "text": "Xi Zhongxun arrived in Guangdong in April 1978 as second secretary of the provincial Communist Party committee, responsible for its day-to-day work. In December he became first secretary and chairman of the provincial Revolutionary Committee; he subsequently served as governor when the provincial government was restored. These appointments placed him at the head of a province adjoining Hong Kong and Macau, with extensive overseas Chinese connections. Xi’s provincial leadership identified this location as a basis for attracting investment, technology, and export business rather than treating the border principally as a security problem. His provincial party tenure ended in November 1980, when he returned to central-level work. (news.12371.cn)\n\nThe review of earlier political cases accompanied the redirection toward economic development. One prominent example concerned Li Zhengtian, Chen Yiyang, and Wang Xizhe, whose collective pseudonym, “Li Yizhe,” appeared on a November 1974 wall poster discussing socialist democracy and legality in Guangzhou. The provincial leadership decided at the end of 1978 to reverse their case, and a public rehabilitation meeting followed in February 1979. Xi met the participants repeatedly before the meeting. Following the Third Plenum of December 1978, he also presided over provincial discussions on transferring the emphasis of party work to economic construction and on using Guangdong’s overseas connections to obtain equipment, capital, and technical expertise. (jishi.cntv.cn)\n\nAt the central work conference in April 1979, Xi requested greater provincial discretion in foreign economic relations. Guangdong’s proposals included permission to attract overseas investment, expand exports, and experiment with designated areas operating under different economic arrangements. Deng Xiaoping supported the initiative and endorsed the designation “special zone.” Vice-premier Gu Mu then led an interdepartmental investigation in Guangdong and Fujian in May, linking provincial proposals to the central agencies responsible for planning, finance, trade, and construction. Guangdong submitted its report on expanding foreign trade and accelerating development on 6 June, including a specific proposal for experimental export zones. Xi’s role was therefore principally provincial advocacy and coordination, while national leaders and ministries shaped the authorization. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nOn 15 July 1979, the Party Central Committee and State Council issued Document No. 50, approving special policies and flexible measures for Guangdong and Fujian. The arrangements enlarged provincial authority over foreign economic activity and introduced fiscal and foreign-exchange contracting, alongside greater scope for market adjustment under national planning. The central directive fixed Guangdong’s annual remittance to the central government at 1.2 billion yuan for the following two years. It authorized initial export-zone experiments in Shenzhen and Zhuhai, leaving zones in Shantou and Xiamen for consideration after experience had been obtained. This was a conditional experiment within the national administrative system, not an unrestricted delegation of economic authority. (news.12371.cn)\n\nDuring 1980, the export-zone scheme developed into special economic zones. A central endorsement dated 16 May confirmed the revised designation, and on 26 August the National People’s Congress Standing Committee approved the Guangdong Special Economic Zone Regulations. The regulations provided for designated areas within Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou, rather than automatically applying the special regime to each entire municipality. Foreign and overseas Chinese investors could establish enterprises independently or through joint ventures, subject to official approval and Chinese law. The provincial zone management committee issued registration and land-use certificates and was responsible for basic infrastructure. (yywyxy.gtcfla.edu.cn)\n\nThe regulations made the experiment concrete through a 15 percent enterprise income-tax rate, exemptions from import duties on necessary production equipment and materials, and permission to remit lawful after-tax profits under foreign-exchange rules. These provisions supplied mechanisms for attracting foreign direct investment that went beyond the earlier request for provincial flexibility. Xi helped secure political support and central permission for the initiative; investment approval, infrastructure provision, and enterprise operation were assigned to administrative bodies and investors. Shenzhen’s subsequent development rested on these institutional arrangements and continued beyond his departure from Guangdong. (gd.gov.cn)" }, { "heading": "Party leadership and legislative responsibilities, 1980–1993", "text": "In September 1980, Xi Zhongxun was elected a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), beginning the first of two periods in that office, 1980–1983 and 1988–1993. He also joined the Constitution Revision Committee and, in June 1981, became chairman of the Standing Committee’s Legislative Affairs Committee. These appointments gave him responsibilities for reviewing draft legislation and participating in constitutional revision, distinct from his earlier provincial executive duties. Between June 1981 and June 1983, he chaired 17 meetings of the committee’s leadership and five committee meetings, which discussed or reviewed 25 draft laws, resolutions, and decisions. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nHis legislative work included chairing reviews of the draft Organic Law of the NPC and Organic Law of the State Council, together with proposed amendments to the laws governing local people’s congresses, local governments, and elections. These measures went before the fifth session of the Fifth NPC in 1982, alongside the revised constitution. His committee also worked on economic and procedural legislation, including the Economic Contract Law, the Foreign Enterprise Income Tax Law, and the Civil Procedure Law for Trial Implementation. His documented role was organizational—directing committee consideration and the preparation of proposals for legislative deliberation—rather than sole authorship of these laws. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nXi began participating in the work of the CCP Secretariat in March 1981 and was formally elected a Secretariat member at the Eleventh Central Committee’s Sixth Plenum that June. In September 1982, the Twelfth Central Committee’s First Plenum elected him to both the Politburo and the Secretariat; he took responsibility for the Secretariat’s day-to-day work. His remit included party organization, cadre administration, institutional streamlining, leadership succession, and participation in party rectification. These were responsibilities exercised within the collective leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, not a separate executive authority over national policy. (cpc.people.com.cn)\n\nLeadership renewal involved adjusting senior personnel and preparing younger cadres for promotion. At consultations with non-Communist party leaders and other public figures on 10–12 September 1985, Xi explained the proposed changes to the central leadership and preparations for the forthcoming National Conference of Party Representatives. He presented the changes as part of reforming cadre arrangements so that officials could move down as well as up the hierarchy. On 24 September 1985, the Twelfth Central Committee’s Fifth Plenum accepted his request to leave the Secretariat, together with those of Gu Mu and Yao Yilin; Xi nevertheless remained a Politburo member through the remainder of that Central Committee’s term in 1987. (cn.govopendata.com)\n\nHis later party responsibilities also encompassed united-front work, including relations with religious communities, non-Communist political figures, and overseas Chinese. In a published recollection, United Front Work Department head Yan Mingfu described Xi’s supervision of policy implementation, consultation with religious leaders, and overseas liaison. This work included contacts concerning Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Xi convened interdepartmental discussions involving propaganda, foreign affairs, overseas Chinese affairs, Taiwan affairs, and Hong Kong and Macau affairs officials to coordinate overseas united-front activity. (xzdw.gov.cn)\n\nReturning to the NPC Standing Committee in 1988, Xi served under chairman Wan Li and concurrently became the first chairman of the NPC’s Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee. The committee reviewed bills concerning women’s rights, the protection of minors, and people with disabilities, and conducted inspections of legal implementation and judicial work. In May 1988, he called for cooperation with government departments and local authorities to develop more regularized legislative supervision. Parliamentary exchanges formed another part of his duties: he led an NPC delegation to North Korea on 8–15 July 1988 at the invitation of its Supreme People’s Assembly’s standing body. His second vice-chairmanship ended in March 1993. (cpc.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "Family, retirement, and death", "text": "Xi Zhongxun married twice. His first wife, Hao Mingzhu, was the mother of two daughters, Xi Heping and Xi Qianping, and a son, Xi Fuping, later known as Xi Zhengning. A biographical entry issued by Xi Qianping’s school alumni association identifies both parents and records her birth in Yan’an in 1939; accounts published by People’s Daily identify the three children of the earlier marriage. These records establish the family relationships without depending on later anecdotes about household life. Xi Heping died during persecution in the Cultural Revolution. Xi Zhengning subsequently served as director of Hainan’s provincial justice department and died in 1997. (crt.com.cn)\n\nXi married Qi Xin in Suide, northern Shaanxi, on 28 April 1944. The date appears both in Qi’s recollections and in published accounts of his career. Qi described the wedding as a small ceremony held in a cave dwelling behind the prefectural party committee’s offices. Their work frequently kept them apart during the following years: she undertook local administrative and rural work around Suide and Yan’an, while his responsibilities increasingly centred on the Northwest Bureau. They had four children: daughters Qi Qiaoqiao and Xi An’an, and sons Xi Jinping and Xi Yuanping. Qiaoqiao was born on 1 March 1949; Jinping and Yuanping were born in 1953 and 1956 respectively. (news.12371.cn)\n\nThe family moved from Xi’an to Beijing at the end of 1952, following Xi’s transfer to central government work. Qi studied at the Marxism–Leninism Institute and later worked at the Central Party School, whose distance from the family home complicated childcare. Her memoir provides much of the published detail about these domestic arrangements and Xi’s approach to parenting. For example, she recalled that when Jinping resisted wearing his sister’s hand-me-down shoes, Xi darkened them with ink rather than buying replacements. Such episodes are family testimony, distinct from the documented chronology of appointments, births, and residence. The family’s separation during Xi’s political exclusion after 1962 also affected Qi and the children; published accounts record her assignment to a May Seventh cadre school in Henan and the children’s relocation to rural work. (dangshi.people.com.cn)\n\nXi retired from leadership positions in March 1993, at the end of his final term as a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee. He spent much of his retirement in Shenzhen and Zhuhai. A published family photograph records him with Qi, children, sons-in-law, and grandchildren at the Shenzhen Guesthouse on 15 October 2000. He died in Beijing on 24 May 2002. Born on 15 October 1913, he was 88 years old by completed years, although the official obituary reported his age as 89. His body was cremated at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on 30 May 2002; Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao, and other senior officials attended the farewell ceremony. (dangshi.people.com.cn)" }, { "heading": "Documentary record and public commemoration", "text": "Xi Zhongxun’s published writings include Selected Works of Xi Zhongxun (Xi Zhongxun wenxuan), issued by the Central Party Literature Press in December 1995. It contains 77 speeches, reports, and articles dating from 1940 to October 1992, most of which had not previously been published. The collection formed part of a publication programme approved by the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party in April 1992 and coordinated by the Shaanxi provincial party committee. The programme also produced Xi Zhongxun’s Revolutionary Career, published in April 2002, and the official biography Xi Zhongxun zhuan. These publications brought together selected texts by Xi and retrospective accounts of his career, rather than constituting an unrestricted edition of his papers. (m.dushu.com)\n\nThe official biography appeared in two volumes through the Central Party Literature Press: the first in April 2008, covering his revolutionary career before the establishment of the People’s Republic, and the second in August 2013, covering his subsequent political life. Together they comprised approximately 940,000 Chinese characters. The Shaanxi provincial party-history research office organized the compilation, with participation from other provincial institutions, the central United Front Work Department, and archival authorities. A published account of work on the second volume reported consultation of more than 3,000 archival volumes, photocopying of over nine million characters of material, and more than 300 interview visits. These figures document the scale of the collection effort; the resulting narrative remained an institutionally commissioned and edited party biography. (paper.people.com.cn)\n\nThe centenary of Xi’s birth on 15 October 2013 prompted coordinated official commemorations. A symposium held that morning in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was chaired by Liu Yandong; Zhang Dejiang attended, Li Jianguo delivered a commemorative address, and Xi Jinping participated as a family member. CCTV broadcast the six-part documentary Xi Zhongxun on its main channel from 14 to 16 October. Jointly produced by the Central Party History Research Office, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, and CCTV, it used historical interviews and archival footage. The production announcement identified previously unshown colour film of Xi reading State Council orders at the 1955 military rank-conferral ceremony, restored with contemporary imaging techniques. Both the symposium and the documentary were commemorative presentations sponsored by party-state institutions, not independent assessments of his career. (xinhuanet.com)\n\nA further official reference work, Chronology of Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002) (Xi Zhongxun nianpu), was announced for national distribution on 25 May 2024. Compiled jointly by the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee and the Shaanxi provincial party committee, and published by the Central Party Literature Press with central party approval, it consists of four volumes containing approximately 1.1 million Chinese characters. Its chronological coverage extends from Xi’s birth to his death. The publication announcement explicitly connected its use to party-history education, identifying its institutional purpose as well as its biographical scope. (zywxpress.com)\n\nJoseph Torigian’s English-language biography, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, was published by Stanford University Press in June 2025. It reconstructs Xi’s life through documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, representing a scholarly synthesis distinct from the official biography and chronology. Family recollections form another source category: Qi Xin’s “Remembering Zhongxun,” published in People’s Daily on 18 October 2013, recounts shared work and domestic experiences from the perspective of his wife. Such testimony provides personal observations and remembered conversations, whereas an official biography presents an institutionally edited narrative and a scholarly biography evaluates evidence from multiple kinds of records. (supress.sites-pro.stanford.edu)" } ], "links": [ "chinese-communist-party", "china", "mao-zedong", "xi-jinping", "kuomintang", "long-march", "second-sino-japanese-war", "chinese-civil-war", "xian", "beijing", "zhou-enlai", "cultural-revolution", "hong-kong", "macau", "guangzhou", "deng-xiaoping", "shenzhen", "legislation", "taiwan" ], "sources": [ { "title": "百年习仲勋", "url": "https://paper.people.com.cn/hqrw/html/2013-10/16/content_1317370.htm" }, { "title": "习仲勋", "url": "https://cpc.people.com.cn/daohang/n/2013/0225/c357210-20593663.html" }, { "title": "革命星火燎陇原——土地革命战争时期甘肃的武装斗争", "url": "https://www.dswxyjy.org.cn/n1/2021/0312/c244516-32050244.html" }, { "title": "丝绸之路研究院党支部党史教育系列（13）| 两当起义", "url": "https://isrs.nwu.edu.cn/info/1064/2686.htm" }, { "title": "【红色记忆】习仲勋：回忆在陕甘边区革命根据地的战斗岁月", "url": "https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29484090" }, { "title": "中国共产党大事记·1935年", "url": "https://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/64164/4415983.html" }, { "title": "习仲勋：带队蹲点调研", "url": 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