{"id":228486,"date":"2026-01-05T12:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/228486\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T12:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:23:07","slug":"xi-jinping-says-irish-novel-the-gadfly-sustained-him-during-traumatic-teenage-years-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/228486\/","title":{"rendered":"Xi Jinping says Irish novel The Gadfly sustained him during traumatic teenage years \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese<\/a> president Xi Jinping<\/a> has told Miche\u00e1l Martin<\/a> that an Irish novel had sustained him when he was going through some of the most traumatic years of his life as a teenager. <\/p>\n

During their meeting<\/a> in Beijing\u2019s Great Hall of the People on Monday morning, the Taoiseach told Mr Xi that he had read the same book, The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich<\/a>, in his youth and it had also made a profound impression on him.<\/p>\n

\u201cCoincidentally, I had read it as a late teenager as well, and had a first edition copy presented to me by an uncle of mine,\u201d Mr Martin said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us, but there you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set in Italy during the revolutionary ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, the novel was a huge success after its publication in 1897. It struck a chord with Irish nationalists and later with communists in both the Soviet Union and China because of its evocation of a revolutionary culture and camaraderie.<\/p>\n

The son of a senior Communist Party official, Xi was sent to the countryside as a teenager when his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution. In an experience he later embraced as a formative one, Xi spent his days doing manual labour and slept in a cave at night.<\/p>\n

The Gadfly has a Cork connection because Voynich was the daughter of the mathematician George Boole, who taught at Queen\u2019s College Cork, which later became University College Cork.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chinese president Xi Jinping has told Miche\u00e1l Martin that an Irish novel had sustained him when he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[114,46,61,60,1843,43,12139],"class_list":["post-228486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-china","tag-cork","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-micheal-martin","tag-news","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}