Xi’s New Year visit marks village homecoming

YAN’AN, Shaanxi, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) — At the entrance to a village in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, the man villagers had been waiting for finally arrived. They were excited and called him by his first name: Jinping.

Forty-seven years ago, a teen Xi Jinping came to Liangjiahe as part of a campaign launched by Chairman Mao Zedong that asked urban youth to experience rural labor life.

On Friday, Xi, now leader of more than 1.3 billion people, returned to the village in Shaanxi to extend Spring Festival greetings to locals in old revolutionary base areas.

During his seven years in the village, Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads. It was also here that he joined the Communist Party of China.

“Ying’er, you’ve grown old,” said Xi, who immediately recognized villager Wang Xianjun and called him by his nickname. The two reminisced about building mud dams together to hold water for irrigating the dry land.

In front of them was the cropland Xi, who was village Party chief at the time, helped to cultivate alongside locals with their dam-building efforts. It is still growing crops.