Xu Jiatun, a 100-year-old, former elite Chinese Communist Party official turned defector, chooses his words carefully. In the two decades he has lived in exile—he defected after the June 4 massacre in 1989—he has only given a handful of interviews to Hong Kong media, and says little that’s worthy of a good headline.
After an emergency spell in a Los Angeles hospital, however, he appears to have thought it time to confide his musings and hopes for current Party politics in a well-known Hong Kong journalist.
Simon Kei Shek Ming, the 2009 winner of the prestigious Society of Publishers in Asia’s Journalist of the Year award, has had about a dozen informal interview sessions with Xu over the past eight years. Kei, formerly with the reputable Chinese language magazine Yazhou Zhoukan, connected with Xu in Los Angeles, and got the centenarian to share his thoughts on Party leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.
