The Chinese president spent his teenage years living in a cave in a backwater village. Now, it is being transformed into a theme park-style tourist attraction, as the Chinese leader’s past is used to legitimise Communist Party rule.

By Neil Connor, Monday 19 October 2015

Villagers in Liangjiahe in northern China can still remember the years when a tall, pale teenager worked with them in the fields and slept on a straw mat in a flea-infested cave. They have reason to reflect on those days all the more now – and profit from others’ interest in their little village – now that the young man sent from Beijing for seven years of hard labour is their president.

Xi Jinping has said that he experienced his political awakening when he was “sent down” to Liangjiahe in Shaanxi province, as part of a campaign by Mao Tse-tung to force the educated urban youth to experience peasant life. “Many ideas and characteristics of mine were formed [in Liangjiahe],” Xi told a television programme in 2004.

But the misery of life in the impoverished village of a few dozen houses was too much for the 15-year-old Xi. Longing for his home comforts, he escaped. On his return to Beijing, his mother informed the authorities, and he was sent back – after undergoing six months of “re-education”, it is believed.