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Ladies and gentlemen welcome aboard to this fourth edition of the China Files.

We call this episode Hong Dijuat, the rise of the Red Emperor.

Now where we left you at the end of part three was the opening up of China to the world.

And we talked about how the CCP had made a deal with the West that they were going to provide the slave labor,

while the West provided the capital and the intellectual property for the world.

But that began to change when a new leader arose to take over the CCP.

Xi Jinping was born in 1953.

And interestingly enough, Xi Jinping was not raised in Beijing.

He was not raised in a big city.

Now Xi Jinping's father had himself been a member of Mao's early Chinese Communist Party.

He was one of Mao's closest lieutenants.

In fact, Xi Jinping's father, if you remember all the way back in part one,

when I talked about that long march, that they left and then joined up with the communists in the West

after being defeated by the nationalists, or they bided their time.

Xi Jinping's father was the one who initially set up that base out in the West that Mao has adung fled to.

So this was a guy who was in close standing with Mao.

However, during the Cultural Revolution, when all of this went down and even during the Great Leap Forward,

Xi's father had fell out of favor, the same way that so many other communist leaders fell out of favor.

And he and his family, including his 10-year-old son, were sent to the countryside.

He was purged.

And so Xi Jinping didn't grow up in Beijing, didn't grow up as the son of some great leader.

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