20/04/2020
Xi's stories: A special birthday in Xiamen
In mid-June 1985, arrived in to assume office as a vice mayor of the island city in East China’s Province. That day happened to be his 32nd birthday.
The day was still fresh in the memory of Li Xiuji, the then deputy secretary of the Xiamen Municipal Party committee, who was assigned to welcome Xi at a hotel.
Setting out in the morning from Fuzhou, capital of the province, Xi hitched a ride and arrived at the hotel in Xiamen around 4 pm with light luggage. At that time, there was only a dusty and narrow gravel road from Fuzhou to Xiamen, which was an eight-hour drive. Now it only takes three hours because an expressway was built.
As soon as he got off the car, Xi smiled to greet Li. “I am Xi Jinping,” Xi said. Li’s first impressions of Xi were, “Plain and simple clothes, young and modest.”
Li took Xi to a room in the hotel and served him tea, according to Xiamen’s custom. After sitting for a while to listen to Li’s introduction of building Xiamen Special Economic Zone, Xi said cheerfully, “Today is of great significance to me. It’s the day I come here to participate in building the special economic zone, and it’s also my birthday.” Li quickly stood up and said “happy birthday” to him.
They talked until dinner. Li thought that there should have been a cake for Xi’s birthday celebration, and also longevity noodles and eggs according to the custom in Xiamen. But none of these were prepared due to limited resources. They had some specialties of Xiamen instead - fried oysters, fried thin noodles and sipunculid worm jelly. There were eggs in the fried oysters, and the fried noodles could be a replacement of longevity noodles.
25 years later, when Xi was the vice president of China in 2010, he went to inspect Xiamen. When shaking hands with Li, Xi mentioned the three dishes he had for his first birthday in Xiamen.
At a meeting on the work and life of officials in November 1985, Xi said, “When I came to work in Xiamen, I encouraged myself with words from Sun Yat-sen, ‘Aspiring to do great things, not to be a high-ranking official’. Even if our rank changes, we should never change our working style.”
His actions are consistent with his words.
Xi was always approachable and pragmatic at work, attached great importance to investigation and research, and was ready to hear the views from all sides, Li said.
All this laid a solid foundation for him to “do great things.”
Xiamen abounds in islands and mountains. In his three years of work in Xiamen, Xi visited all of Xiamen’s countryside and islands.
He also led a series of groundbreaking reform measures and made great contributions to the development of the city in its early days.
Photo below: Xi Jinping (first from left), then vice mayor of Xiamen, speaks at a conference in Xiamen in December 1986.