CONFIDENTIAL
Until 1983 Xu Jiatun's career had been exclusively in the provincial Party and government administration of Fujian and Jiangsu provinces. He rose steadily through the ranks in Jiangsu province before the Cultural Revolution. He is known to have specialised at one stage in scientific work, but it is likely that he also served in other departments of the provincial administration. Like many other senior Party and government officials he was disgraced in the Cultural Revolution. However he reappeared fairly quickly and became in December 1970 a Vice-Chairman of Jiangsu Revolutionary Committee. After the fall of the "gang of four", Xu replaced Peng Chong as the most senior official in Jiangsu province, and was also elected a full member of the Central Committee. In 1978 he is said to have taken personal charge of the province's foreign trade.
Xu does not have any demonstrable connection with Deng Xiaoping's group. During his long service in Jiangsu province and especially since the Cultural Revolution he will have worked closely with Xu Shiyou and Peng Chong, both of whom preceded him as the senior leader in Jiangsu. They were both antagonistic to the extremist wing of the Party represented by the "gang of four", but neither have really prospered under the current leadership. Xu Jiatun was himself subject to poster attacks in 1976 which accused him of following Deng Xiaoping's revisionist line and of fomenting the Nanjing counter-revolutionary incident (a local analogue of the Tiananmen demonstrations of April 1976 which were blamed on Deng and used to engineer his disgrace). Such accusations do not necessarily imply a direct connection with Xu and Deng, but they do show that both were considered enemies by the supporters of the "gang of four".
There is no record of Xu's having travelled before the Cultural Revolution, but during his time in charge of Jiangsu he led a Party Workers' delegation to Romania in October 1977, was a member of Vice-Premier Gu Mu's delegation to Tokyo in September 1979, led a Jiangsu provincial delegation to Australia in November 1979, was a member of the Chinese Governor's delegation to the United States in October 1980, and himself led a Jiangsu delegation to Japan in November 1981.
CONFIDENTIAL