The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
Presented by 大象传媒 David Lam Centre and 大象传媒's Department of History
China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world鈥攁nd one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913鈥�2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the Party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.
The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party's demands. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping's father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP鈥攁nd the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.
Speaker Bio
Joseph Torigian is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His first book, 鈥淧restige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao鈥� was released with Yale University Press, and "The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping" was published by Stanford University Press in 2025.