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Chinese state-run broadcaster shares Xi Jinping’s letter to mark Father’s Day

蘋果日報 2020/06/22 08:07


A Father’s Day feature that appeared on the website of a Chinese state-run broadcaster praised paramount leader Xi Jinping for inheriting the noble character of his late father.

In a story published on Saturday on the China Central Television’s official website, Xi is said to have written a letter to his father Xi Zhongxun to celebrate his 88th birthday in 2001.

“There are many noble characters I wish to inherit from my father,” Xi Jinping, then governor of the coastal province of Fujian, wrote.

Xi Jinping revered his father, who he compared to an ox “toiling for the Chinese people in silence and without complaint.” In the feature, Xi senior is said to have once told his son to “serve the people diligently, consider the interests of the people with all your heart, maintain close ties with the people” no matter what his title became.
In his letter, the younger Xi promised his father that he would commit his life to serving the people and make life better for all.

The story, however, made no mention of how Xi Zhongxun, then a vice premier, fell out of favor with Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and was denounced and imprisoned. As a result, Xi Jinping, then 15 years old and living in Beijing, was exiled to a remote village in the inland province of Shaanxi, where he worked in the fields and lived under harsh conditions until his early twenties.
While the China Central Television’s story highlighted the lessons Xi Jingping supposedly learned from his father, a U.S.-based political commentator has pointed out that the Chinese president shared more similarities with the man responsible for his father’s imprisonment.
Political scientist Hu Ping said that most descendants of senior Communist Party officials care only about power and their self interests. Many of them also have no sense of right and wrong and were not bound by moral values, Hu added.

“That’s why Xi Jinping is more of a grandson of Mao than a son of his own father,” Hu said.
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