The Chinese state channel CCTV has been broadcasting on a loop for a few days a six-part documentary about the father of the omnipresent President Xi Jinping. It is 110 years since the birth of Xi Zhongxun, one of Mao Zedong's comrades and big shot of the first generation of Chinese communist leaders.. The anniversary excuse was perfect to reunite the Xi family around the figure of the late patriarch.

The documentary, titled Chicheng, which translated from Mandarin means Total Devotion, reviews the revolutionary career of Xi Sr., who led several guerrillas in the north until he became, after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China (1949), vice prime minister.. What the film forgets to highlight is that, just over a decade later, at the gates of the Cultural Revolution, Xi Zhongxun was accused of treason..

He went from revolutionary hero to being a plague. He ended up in prison and his family, publicly humiliated, also suffered the consequences.. Xi Jinping, like many other young people from wealthy families in big cities, was not spared from forced labor in the countryside.. And many reports suggest that one of his sisters committed suicide.

After only six months of digging wells in a village in northern China, Xi Jinping fled the countryside and sought refuge again in Beijing.. But the young rebel did not count on the fact that his own mother, instead of opening the doors of the house for him, would report him to the authorities.. She, Qi Xin, did not want her son to become a lifelong deserter.

“The entire Xi family suffered unfair persecution by Mao's Red Guard. The current president was a teenager when his family separated and he had to fend for himself. Before being sent to the camp, he ended up in a reformatory and became a counterrevolutionary juvenile delinquent.. He even had to beg on some occasions,” Professor Alfred L. told this newspaper.. Chan, one of the biographers of what is now probably the most powerful man in the world. No other leader of a superpower concentrates so much power in his hands without having to be accountable to anyone for his decisions or being questioned in the political and media arena of his country.

The social rehabilitation of the Xi family came in the first years of openness under the leadership of the reformist Deng Xiaoping. The father's reintegration came with a position as deputy director of a tractor factory. Later, back in politics, Xi Zhongxun was one of the promoters of the special economic zones that made the Guangzhou region become the factory of the world.

Xi father died in 2002. In the documentary, his widow, Qi Xin, 97, makes a strange appearance, who is interviewed in several episodes and who highlights the humility that her husband transmitted to her children. Regarding the figure of the matriarch, Chinese propaganda claims that Qi, who was also working as a peasant during the Cultural Revolution, joined the army in the late 1930s, in the war against the Japanese, and that she led a battalion of women. .

Among the characters in the documentary is the president's little brother, Xi Yuanping, who heads an environmental organization. And the older sister, the businesswoman Qi Qiaoqiao, who opened a fund with investments in the mining and real estate sector.