XI Zhongxun - Political Career in Beijing, Purge, Rehabilitation and Retirement

Political Career in Beijing, Purge, Rehabilitation and Retirement

In September 1952, Xi Zhongxun became chief of the party's propaganda department and supervised cultural and education policies. At the 8th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1956, he was elected a member of the CPC Central Committee. In 1959, he became a vice-premier and worked under Zhou Enlai in directing the State Council's lawmaking and policy research functions.

In 1962, he was accused of leading an anti-party clique for supporting the Biography of Liu Zhidan, and purged from all leadership positions. The Biography of Liu Zhidan, written to commemorate Xi's former comrade who died a party martyr in 1936, was alleged to be a covert effort to subvert the party by rehabilitating Gao Gang, another former comrade who had been purged in 1954. Xi Zhongxun was forced to undergo self-critique and in 1965 was demoted to the position of a deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang. During the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted, jailed and spent long periods in supervised confinement in Beijing. He regained his freedom in May 1975 and was assigned to another factory in Luoyang.

After the Cultural Revolution ended, he was fully rehabilitated at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in December 1978. From 1978 to 1981, he held leadership roles in Guangdong Province, successively as the second and then first provincial secretary, governor and political commissar of the Guangdong Military Region. In Guangdong, he stabilized the provincial government and began to liberalize the economy.

When he first arrived in Guangdong, the provincial government was struggling to hold back the tide of Guangdong residents trying to flee to Hong Kong. At the time, daily wages in Guangdong averaged 0.70 yuan, about 1/100 of wages in Hong Kong. Xi understood the disparity in standards of living and called for economic liberalisation in Guangdong. To do so, he needed to win over leaders in Beijing skeptical of the market economy. In meetings in April 1979, he convinced Deng Xiaoping to permit Guangdong to make its own foreign trade policy decisions and to invite foreign investment to projects in experimental areas along the provincial border with Hong Kong and Macau and in Shantou, which has a large overseas diaspora. As for the name of the experimental areas, Deng said, "let's call them, 'special zones', Shaanxi-Gansu Border Region began as a 'special zone'." Deng added, "The Central Government has no funds, but we can give you some favorable policies." Borrowing a phrase from their guerilla war days, Deng told Xi, "You have to find a way, to fight a bloody path out." Xi submitted a formal proposal on the creation of special zones, later renamed special economic zones and in July 1979, the party center and State Council approved the creation of the first four special economic zones.

In 1981, Xi returned to Beijing and was elected the deputy chair of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and also held the chair of the legal affairs committee. In this capacity, he oversaw the drafting of numerous laws. In September 1982, he was elected to the Politburo and the party secretariat. He retired from public service in April 1988 and spent most of his retirement years in Shenzhen.