Why China's Biggest Star Chose Xi Jinping Before Anyone Knew His Name

In 1986, Peng Liyuan was one of the most famous singers in China. Xi Jinping was a divorced deputy mayor. She married him in forty days. 👉 Subscribe to our channel for a new secret file every Sunday: @confidentialsecrethistory ▶ Watch next: The Daughter Steve Jobs Didn't Want the World to Know About The Daughter Steve Jobs Didn't Want the Wo... People knew Peng Liyuan's voice from the Spring Festival Gala and her face from the front of a record sleeve. The army had given her a rank. Xi Jinping was thirty-three, a deputy mayor in a coastal city, with a first marriage that had ended in London and a father who had spent sixteen years out of favour. A friend set them up. She wore loose army trousers to the date because she wanted to know whether he was the kind of man who looked at clothes. The Chinese state tells that story often. It has told it slightly differently over time. One sentence about what he asked her that night was in the official retellings in 2007 and was gone by 2011, and you can watch the edit happen. So this film goes back and meets them separately, before they had met each other. Her childhood in a Shandong county town and the latrine she cleaned at nine. His fall from a compound in Beijing to a cave dwelling in Shaanxi at fifteen, eight applications to the Youth League and ten to the Party. The first wife almost nobody mentions, the ambassador's daughter who went back to London. The parents who said no because they knew whose son he was. A marriage conducted largely over the telephone, a general's daughter's question at the wedding, and the year the most famous woman in China stopped using her own name. Every claim is sourced. Where two accounts disagree, the film shows you both and says which is better documented. Where the record goes quiet, it says so instead of filling the silence. CHAPTERS 0:00 The story China tells about the night they met 1:36 A short word from me 1:57 The date 3:20 Watch the sentence change 4:30 The photograph 5:52 Peng before Xi 8:47 Xi before Peng 11:51 The first wife 13:36 The deputy mayor's father 15:03 Her parents said no 16:04 The wedding nobody could quite believe 17:32 A marriage over the telephone 20:45 June 1989 22:00 What's there to congratulate? 23:44 The woman who would not use her name 24:48 Who is Xi Jinping? 26:24 She didn't just retire 27:23 You rebuild her 29:03 Xi Dada loves Peng Mama 30:40 The shawl, and the rumours 32:44 The most important thing we know SOURCES People's Daily and People's Daily Online, including the Peng Liyuan photo album published in 2014 Xinhua News Agency and its regional outlets; China News Service; CCTV and CGTN Zhejiang Daily, "Zhixiang nongcun" and the Xi Jinping local-press record from Zhengding, Xiamen, Ningde and Fuzhou United States Embassy Beijing cable 07BEIJING6884 and related cables, via WikiLeaks China Digital Times and the China Media Project on the deleted and blocked material Radio Free Asia, the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Free Press and The New York Times Chinese edition The Paper, Sohu, Sina, NetEase and Zhihu archives of the retellings Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, and the standard biographical literature on Xi Zhongxun The Internet Archive, for the 2007 and 2010 versions of pages that have since changed MUSIC All music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0): Clean Soul, Calmant, Healing, Tranquility, Eastern Thought. PHOTOGRAPHS 535 photographs and documents appear in this film, from Wikimedia Commons, the People's Daily album, Xinhua and its regional outlets, Flickr, Sohu, Sina, NetEase, China Digital Times, Discogs, kongfz.com, the Internet Archive and other public sources. Archival material is used for commentary and criticism. CC0: Gary Todd, Nationaal Archief / Anefo, Retired electrician. CC BY 2.0: Dennis HKG, Gobierno de Chile, Jorge Láscar, Jornny Liu, tiarescott. CC BY 3.0: Don-kun, Queer Comrades. CC BY 4.0: Cabinet Public Relations Office, Philip Nalangan, kremlin.ru, Presidential Executive Office of Russia, Presidential Press and Information Office. CC BY-SA 2.0: Aero Icarus, Angélica Rivera de Peña, In Your Ear Studios, WabbitWanderer. CC BY-SA 3.0: Alexchen4836, Americasroof, BrokenSphere, Karl Oppolzer, Maros Mraz, Nikolay Shopov, The Port of Authority, YubYub41, 慕尼黑啤酒. CC BY-SA 4.0: AlixSaz, Bengt Oberger, CHIU YAUR BOBOA, CatOnMars, Daiwenchen, Exploringlife, Jiří Tondl, Liuxingy, Morio, N509FZ, Pieceofmetalwork, Reinhold Möller, Rico Shen, Soramimi, Yumeto. Licences: creativecommons.org/licenses Two people in this film are shown as drawn figures, not photographs: Ke Lingling and Wang Jinshui. No photograph of either could be sourced, and the film says so on screen rather than casting a stranger in their place. One photograph, the cave-dwelling interior at Liangjiahe, was taken in 2018 of the preserved room, not in the 1970s. #XiJinping #PengLiyuan #China #History #Documentary