How China’s Jackie O took a great leap forward to escape her dirt-poor past
...AND WHY HER HUSBAND THE PRESIDENT DIDN’T WANT US TO TOUR HER OLD VILLAGE ON EVE OF UK STATE VISIT
WITH her glossy hair perfectly swept up in a stylish chignon and a meticulously-tailored wardrobe, it is easy to see why China’s First Lady has been compared to Jackie Kennedy and Carla Bruni. Peng Liyuan, the wife of Chinese president Xi Jinping, is a national icon in her homeland thanks to a career singing fiercely patriotic anthems celebrating the successes of the ruling Communist Party. But this week she is set to be propelled on to the global political stage in the heart of the Western world.
During a prestigious four-day State visit to the UK, and at the express invitation of the Queen, the glamorous Madame Peng, 52, will accompany her husband as an honoured guest of Buckingham Palace.
Her easy smile and gentle charm have helped establish her as the most high-profile and photogenic leader’s wife for decades, just as China seeks to present a softer, more humanitarian side to the international community.
But behind her polished exterior – and the official, deliberately vague life history released by the Communist Party – lies an altogether more dramatic tale.
For the first time, The Mail on Sunday can reveal Madame Peng’s poverty-stricken roots in a tiny dustcovered village where her educated family were cruelly targeted during the dark days of the 1960s Cultural Revolution – humiliated, stripped of their jobs and forced into degrading occupations instead. Her father was made to scrub the filthy village toilets.
That she survived such hardship and succeeded far beyond even the greatest expectations is testament not only to her family’s determination but to her own steely sense of ambition. Yet it is a history the Chinese ruling powers would rather never came to light.
On a recent visit to the village of Peng, reporters investigating Peng Liyuan’s past for this newspaper were confronted by a Communist Party official and ushered away from her childhood home, while other locals refused to discuss their famous former resident. All had instructions to report the presence of outsiders and journalists. A Communist Party official, alerted to our presence, approached on a bicycle. ‘Of course, we are very proud of her and we would love to show you around,’ he said, courteously. ‘But we had orders from higher officials to keep a low profile and not let any outsiders visit uninvited.’
One likely reason is the potential embarrassment at the treatment of her family during the Cultural Revolution. During Chairman Mao Zedong’s turbulent reign in the 1960s, Peng Liyuan’s intellectual father was among those persecuted and stripped of his local government work.
As a respected man who taught villagers how to read, he and his wife were obvious targets during the terrifying crackdown on the country’s bourgeoisie, which began when Peng Liyuan was just a toddler.
In villages like Peng, the treatment meted out to people seen as bourgeois during Mao’s Cultural Revolution could be particularly brutal with longstanding local jealousies and rivalries given full vent. Millions across China were persecuted and tortured.
Her father Peng Longkun was curator of a local cultural centre. Her mother, an actress, was made to give up her theatre work as the troupe was disbanded.
While Peng Longkun was subjected to what Communist Party officials called ‘reform through labour’, Peng and her mother visited him, washing his dirty clothes and giving him money and food stamps. It’s been previously reported how her mother and father would hold hands under the wall of the toilets her father had been ordered to clean while Peng acted as a lookout, hiding under a tree and making bird calls to warn them if anyone was close by.
In an interview with state television in 2004, Peng said the reason her father was labelled a ‘counter-revolutionary’ was because some of their relatives served in the Taiwan army during China’s bitter years of civil war. Her uncle lived in Taiwan, regarded as a renegade province by China.
Her family’s shame mirrored that of her husband Xi Jinping, 62, whose own father – a revolutionary hero – was purged and sent to work in a factory before later being jailed in 1968.
But despite the strictness of the regime, her parents made sure the young Peng Liyuan’s artistic talents continued to be nurtured.
When the chaos of the Cultural Revolution subsided, the family’s fortunes revived and she was sent to school in the nearby county town of Yuncheng. She was fast-tracked to Shandong Art School at 14 and at 18 joined the Peo-
‘She’s paid for a new road – and a school’
ple’s Liberation Army (PLA). There, she was appointed a ‘warrior of arts and culture’ and began her singing career, dressing in the uniform of the PLA to perform patriotic anthems to sell-out crowds across China.
In 1983, aged 21, she appeared in state broadcaster China Central Television’s first New Year gala and appeared in almost every annual show for the next quarter century. It was the most watched TV show on earth with an audience of hundreds of millions – and it made her a superstar. Controversially, she sang to PLA troops immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and in 2007 performed a dance routine showing Tibetan women thanking the Chinese army for ‘liberating’ them in the 1959 uprising in Tibet.
So when she was introduced by a friend to rising political star Xi Jinping in 1986, Peng Liyuan was far more famous than her suitor.
Almost ten years her senior and divorced from his first wife, Xi was deputy mayor of Xiamen, in southeast China, and the son of a leading Communist revolutionary and Mao ally, Xi Zhongxun. In an interview, she recalled how her parents, perhaps unsurprisingly given the family history, did not approve of her dating a privileged ‘princeling’. She herself has admitted: ‘He looked old and fusty and I didn’t like him at first.’
But the story of their romance, now part of popular mythology on the Chinese internet, suggests he eventually won her over by declaring: ‘My father was the son of a peasant and as common as an old shoe.’
Despite apparent political attempts to edit her life story, she herself appears to have refused to forget it. During an official visit to the US with her husband last month she made a speech to the UN in which she made a rare mention of her home village – referred to only as ‘a small village in China’. Peng Liyuan described how her father set up a night school for illiterate villagers, a gesture that would certainly have contributed to him being targeted by Mao’s army.
She said: ‘With his (my father’s) help, many people learned to write their own names. With his help many people learned to read newspapers for the first time. With his help, many women were able to teach their children how to read. As his daughter I know what education means to the people, especially those without it.’
Another clue to the official sensitivity over the First Lady came when, according to the Wall Street Journal, her visits to a school in the US and an art programme arranged for her were scrapped. Chinese officials were concerned the visits would draw attention away from Xi Jinping’s official business, according to the newspaper which said the government wanted to dampen public fascination with her.
The official jitters about her public image overshadowing that of her husband has prompted censors in China to block internet searches for her name on occasions and even searches for clothes designed after her much-observed outfits, the newspaper said.
The village of Peng lies in a farflung corner of Shandong Province, a rural landscape sandwiched between the cosmopolitan centres of Beijing and Shanghai and bordering the Yellow Sea. Rutted dirt tracks wind through fields where farmers and their families still sow and plough by hand, and lead to a collection of run-down brick and concrete buildings which house the village’s few hundred residents.
Local farmers scrape a living out of corn and wheat crops and the best prospect most young people can hope for is a job in a textile factory in the nearby towns.
The former family home stands near the crossroads in the village centre. Today, it is a simple, austere looking structure with tall wooden doors. But locals described how it had been extensively rebuilt over the years and previously had a dirt floor and mud walls.
Now, it stands bolted and empty, with farmers busily using its front yard to strip and pile thousands of ears of corn harvested from the surrounding fields. Villagers said the house is now only ever used by Peng’s half-brother.
The Mail on Sunday did find a few villagers willing to speak before the apparent crackdown on our presence. Retired farmer Peng Longyou, 68, a distant relative and one of many people who have the family name Peng, said: ‘We’re so proud of her – the whole country is very proud.
‘We don’t see her very often these days but we hear about her all the time and she sends money back to the village. She’s paid for a primary school and she had a road built in the village. I can’t believe how well she’s done for herself. I remember her as a skinny, slight girl, but she was always polite and well behaved.’
He added: ‘She is very busy these days of course and she only comes back once every few years. But when she does come back, she’s very friendly and kind.’
The farmer – wearing a blue Maoera jacket and cap – showed us the tarmac road through the centre of the village that Peng Liyuan funded and the village school she paid for with her savings.
The deputy head of the Number One Middle School simply said: ‘We have been instructed not to accept any interviews and not to talk about Peng Liyuan.’
Despite her investment, Peng is noticeably under-developed compared to other villages in the area.
‘There are people who want to invest in the village but they are not allowed to,’ one shopkeeper said.
That reluctance suggests Communist Party officials are keen to ensure no undue influence is gained by those attempting to curry favour with relatives of the president’s wife. Xi Jinping is seen by many as the most authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao, and one of his trademark policies since taking office in 2013 has been a crackdown on China’s endemic corruption.
Political commentators see mainly positives in Peng Liyuan’s emergence on the world stage, arguing she presents a more human face of China to a world increasingly nervous of the nation’s growing military and economic might. But for those in her home village, the biggest prize is a far simpler one: a brighter future for its young people.
Lu Sulan, the recently retired head at the nearby Liyuan Primary School, said: ‘Most parents in this village want their children to go to college, but it rarely happens.
‘I hope Peng Liyuan can be an inspiration for them. I hope children here see that even if they come from a poor village, they can do whatever they want with their lives and be anybody they want to be.’