When Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Communist Party in 2012, his reputation outside China was that of a technocrat who was seen as unlikely to change the country’s broad policy direction. Most western observers expected him to pursue the economic reform agenda that had prevailed since the 1980s and adhere to the collective leadership norms established after the death of Mao Zedong.
Chinese political insiders knew about Xi’s preoccupation with fighting corruption and his focus on securing the party’s grip on power. But many found reassurance in the fact that the new leader was the son of Xi Zhongxun, a communist revolutionary and a senior political figure who embraced economic and political reform.
It was not just the father’s record as a guerrilla fighter during the war against Japan and the Chinese civil war or as a high-ranking official that elevated him in the esteem of party comrades. It was also his personal conduct towards others during the party’s vicious power struggles and purges, some of which he found himself on the wrong side of.
“He established a reputation as the very best kind of individual that the party could produce. According to that narrative, shared widely among Chinese elites, Xi was a righteous individual who was almost uniquely practical, open-minded, and merciful,” Joseph Torigian writes in his magisterial biography of Xi Zhongsun, The Party’s Interests Come First.
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The book’s title comes from an inscription written by Mao for Xi Zhongxun in January 1943 and devotion to the party is the red thread that runs through the lives of both father and son. A member of the Communist Youth League at 13, Xi Zhongxun was imprisoned at 15 for the attempted assassination of a teacher on the party’s orders.
He played an important part in the rise of the party in northwest China in the early 1930s and fought in the communist stronghold of Yan’an during the war against Japan and the civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he held a number of high offices, including vice-premier and minister for propaganda.
He was persecuted by the party five times and purged for 15 years in 1962, during which time he was in political exile or under house arrest. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 he and his family were targeted and those years saw his daughter take her own life and Xi Jinping sent down to the countryside as a teenager to work in the fields.
Rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, Xi Zhongxun became an enthusiastic champion of economic reform and cultivated connections with intellectuals, ethnic and religious minorities and overseas Chinese. Initially sympathetic towards the student demonstrators in 1989, he fell into line behind the deadly crackdown that saw soldiers open fire on protesters in Tiananmen Square.
The puzzle at the centre of Xi Zhongxun’s life, and of Torigian’s book, is why he remained so loyal to a party that betrayed him so many times and caused such suffering to himself and his family. Torigian uses memoirs, letters, interviews and archival sources inside and outside China to explore the details of his subject’s life but it is the biographer’s radical empathy and subtlety of mind that illuminates it.
The party was the source of meaning in Xi Zhongxun’s life and the suffering it caused him bound him more closely to it so that it was a source of pride that he endured so much and remained so loyal. Xi Jinping also endured great hardship during the Cultural Revolution but appears to have inherited his father’s unwavering devotion to the party.
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Many readers will come to this book looking for insights into the character and thinking of Xi Jinping and how he was influenced by his father. And his father’s story and that of his own upbringing do reveal much about the forces that shaped China’s most powerful leader since Mao.
But Torigian’s signal achievement is in the way he takes the reader into the world of the Chinese Communist Party in the 20th century and the interior life of its elite figures. That paranoid and intensely emotional political culture had a profound influence on Xi Jinping and its consequences are playing out in China today.
