Few witnessed Xi Jinping’s formative years as closely as Liang Yujin. He operated a walk-behind tractor in Liangjiahe, one of the first agricultural machines in the village.

Now he has a shop at the entrance to the village where tourists can buy apples and instant noodles. If anyone can shed some light on the metamorphosis that the future leader of the Communist Party underwent here, it is he.

“My villager,” he says of a photo taken in the early 1970s. Liang stands diagonally behind a younger version of Xi with some comrades. The later party leader and president was sent from Beijing in the late 1960s as a 15-year-old boy to be “re-educated” in the caves of the village on China’s loess plateau. There he spent seven years.

A few years ago it didn’t seem like a speck in the air. Father Xi Zhongxun, a former guerrilla fighter and comrade of Mao Zedong, was a powerful man. Until the Cultural Revolution began.

Exclusive rights to Xi anecdotes

Xi senior fell out of favor and with him his family. For example, in the late 1960s, Xi junior, along with a dozen other fallen youths, ended up on the train bound for Yan’an near Liangjiahe. “Everyone cried,” Xi said later in an interview, then as Zhejiang provincial party chief.

He always smiled himself, Xi said of the trip. His sister committed suicide. “I would cry if I hadn’t gone because I didn’t know if I would survive. Wasn’t it good to go?”

The municipal Xi, learning what work is in Liangjiahe, reportedly had to relieve himself in a wooden barrel. The story of Xi is therefore also the story of China and the country’s rapid development, both politically and economically.

But on our visit, residents barely remember it at a time when the propaganda department has exclusive rights to Xi anecdotes. “It was 2015,” says shopkeeper Liang, around the moment Xi, as party leader, came to his old homeland to celebrate Chinese New Year. That’s where it stops. Then his memory deserts him.

Bomb headquarters

“I don’t understand anything,” says Liang, shadowed by a plainclothes officer. “I don’t know anything, don’t remember anything.” The smaller frame with the youth photo is pushed behind the cash register. He turns over the other, much larger list, clogged with a stack of Yan’an cigarettes, named after the city where Mao and Xi’s father once camped as revolutionaries. Other villagers duck when we approach them or say they have hearing problems.

“Some have turned their backs on the party, Xi has the opposite,” said Richard McGregor of the Lowy Institute of Xi’s Country Time. “He continued to believe in the party.” He sees the Cultural Revolution as the prime example of why Mao and Xi are so different.

Mao made the party weaker, Xi stronger, says McGregor. “Under Mao, the motto was: bomb headquarters,” he says. A call to rebellion against the Communist Party. “Under Xi Jinping, the headquarters are bombing you.”

Glued to the rear bumper

We’ll find out what that means in practice before we enter Liangjiahe. Shortly after the motorway exit, several cars appear in the rear-view mirror and won’t let us go. At every bend, on the road, they seem to be glued to the rear bumper of our rental car.

Upon arrival in the village, we are detained in a police station for a long time, where realtime– Enter data on a screen with data from visitors to the village, which is now a closed park. “Normal” or “not normal” can be read in one of the columns.

As it turns out, the Chinese surveillance apparatus is working at its best. At several points in the village of yellow earth, undercover investigators hide behind walls in order to be able to overhear what is being asked.

Once they step in and end an interview. But most people are pre-trained. A construction worker yells over his walkie-talkie that the foreigners have arrived at the edge of the village, a uniformed policeman hides his blue police shirt in the bushes as we walk towards him.

Spontaneously forgotten

Even in the new Liangjiahe, an orange-pink apartment building a few kilometers from the old village, there are hardly any answers. The original cave dwellers moved here a few years ago, and a dozen mostly elderly men sit on small wooden stools and play cards in front of Liu Hanghang’s liquor and cigarette store.

“He,” Liu points out when asked which of them remembers the village’s most famous resident from back then. “I don’t know,” says the man. “I was 8 at the time.” As soon as the name of Xi Jinping is mentioned, the friendly residents of Liangjiahe seem to spontaneously forget Xi’s seven years.