The scar of a personal tragedy that visited Chinese President Hu Jintao’s family in the 1970s continues to haunt him.
HONG KONG: Given the security that will surround Chinese President Hu Jintao when he arrives on Monday, not many people may get close to him. But the few who do may discern a lingering sadness in his eyes. It’s the scar of a personal tragedy that visited Hu’s family in the 1970s and continues to haunt him. Yet, since the line between the personal and the political is easily breached in China, it’s also a compelling, little-known story of China.
In Taizhou in China’s east coast, the fortunes of Hu’s family went into decline after the Communist Revolution of 1949. In the 1950s, Hu Jintao saw his father Hu Jingzhi’s tea business being appropriated by Communists.
In the 1960s, Hu Jintao went to Beijing’s Qinghua University; alongside his academics, he showed flashes of his privileged upbringing in his fondness for ballroom dancing and ping-pong. But his father’s experience taught him never to antagonise the party: he joined the Communist Youth League.
In 1966, Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution, and Hu Jingzhi’s troubles worsened: he was charged with corruption and imprisoned. Hu Jintao was by then a party cadre, but could not intervene. Hu Jingzhi died in 1978.
At that time, Hu Jintao, 36, was a deputy-level cadre in western China. He dashed back to Taizhou, and tried to get local party leaders to retrospectively clear his father’s fair name. He even organised a “mediation lunch” for the leaders, spending in excess of a month’s salary, but the leaders didn’t turn up. A heartbroken Hu left Taizhou and resolved never to return.
It’s been 28 years, and Hu Jintao’s fortunes have soared since then. Today, he is President of a country that is nominally Communist but has embraced a free-market economy. Yet, the fact that his father was branded a ‘capitalist’ and tortured evidently still rankles: to this day, Hu Jintao hasn’t returned to Taizhou.
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