‘The Party's Interests Comes First' Review: First-Generation Revolutionary
Joseph Torigian, a young scholar of both Communist Chinese and Soviet politics, has written a masterly biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's present-day president, Xi Jinping. 'The Party's Interests Come First' is a scrupulously researched and keenly perceptive account of an important but, in the West, little-known historical figure.
Mr. Torigian's first book, 'Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion' (2022), revealed the pathological court politics that prevailed after the deaths of Joseph Stalin in the U.S.S.R. and Mao Zedong in China. The successions of power that followed in these Leninist regimes weren't the result of policy differences, bargains to gain support and maneuvers within party rules, as is often assumed. Instead, Mr. Torigian shows, they were the outcomes of intrigue, battles over ideology, historical animosities and violence.
The biography of Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002) expands on that theme. Xi was a revolutionary and, after the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, held several high-ranking party offices from the 1950s to the early 1990s. He was never the country's ruler, as his son has become, but Mr. Torigian's examination of the elder Xi's life affords important insights into China's opaque and mysterious Communist regime of the 21st century.
Mr. Torigian, an associate professor at American University's School of International Service, traces Xi's career as it developed from the first phase of the Chinese Civil War, through World War II and the triumph of Mao and the Communists, to the post-Mao reforms and the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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