Latest news with #TheParty'sInterestsComeFirst
Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian: The paranoid and intensely emotional political culture behind China's Xi Jinping
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping Author : Joseph Torigian ISBN-13 : 978-1503634756 Publisher : Stanford University Press Guideline Price : £41 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. READ MORE 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. [ 'Dominance, dependency and blackmail': EU and China talks overshadowed by deep divisions Opens in new window ] 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. [ How China uses soft power to exert influence in Ireland Opens in new window ] 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.
New Statesman
14-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Xi Jinping's daddy issues
Xi Jinping was born into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) equivalent of royalty. As the son of Xi Zhongxun, one of the first generation of CCP revolutionaries, he was educated at a prestigious boarding school in Beijing where he underwent military training intended to inspire the offspring of high-ranking cadres 'to give their lives to the desire to struggle', and read books such as Be a Successor to the Revolution. But the future Chinese leader's real political education began at the age of nine, when his father was purged from the party elite by Mao Zedong in 1962, and the Xi family was plunged into the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The elder Xi's downfall was triggered by his decision to support, albeit reluctantly, the publication of a novel about the life of Liu Zhidan, his former comrade and mentor, which was held to contradict the party's version of history. This might sound like a trivial matter, but as Joseph Torigian explains in The Party's Interests Come First, the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, the past was a 'battlefield' for the CCP. Xi's political rivals seized the opportunity to move against the then vice premier and Mao agreed that he was guilty of 'anti-party activities'. During the years that followed, what had started as an attack on Xi transformed into a 'full-scale assault on cadres from the north-west', writes Torigian, with an estimated 20,000 people targeted as part of the 'Xi Zhongxun anti-party clique', of whom at least 200 were 'beaten to death, driven mad, or seriously injured'. Xi later described his disorientation at being persecuted by the organisation to which he had previously devoted his life as feeling like 'a person who fell off an 18-floor building'. When the Cultural Revolution ignited four years later in 1966, as Mao exhorted his zealous young followers – the Red Guards – to tear down what he saw as the remaining institutional resistance to his great revolution, Xi was targeted as a 'class enemy'. He was kidnapped by a group of Red Guards from the mining-tool factory where he had been working – he had requested the opportunity to 'transform myself into a new ordinary labourer in the style of Mao Zedong' while the Liu Zhidan case was being investigated – and subjected to repeated 'struggle' sessions. These included being forced to stand on stage with his head bowed and his body bent over in the 'jet-plane' position, with his arms twisted behind him, as the crowd screamed abuse and sometimes kicked and punched him as a purported 'counter-revolutionary'. He was held in various forms of confinement and not permitted to see his family for the next eight years. The supposed sins of the father were also visited on his children. One of his daughters, Xi Heping, hanged herself during the campaign after apparently being 'persecuted to death'. Xi Jinping, who was 13 at the start of the Cultural Revolution, was derided as 'a bastard' and a 'reactionary' by fellow students. In the spring of 1967, he was denounced at a mass rally in Beijing, where he stood on the stage in front of the jeering crowd, a slightly built teenager alongside a group of adults. 'Because of his young age, Jinping had trouble with the humiliating heavy steel cap they were all forced to put on their heads as part of the spectacle,' Torigian writes. 'He had to hold it onto his head with his hands.' Xi Jinping's mother was in the crowd, standing just a few feet from her son during the ordeal. 'When the slogan 'Down with Xi Jinping' was shouted, she too raised her hands and yelled along with everyone else,' apparently afraid that she, too, would be arrested and taken away from her remaining children if she was deemed insufficiently loyal. When he turned up on her doorstep one rainy night begging for food, having managed to run away from the school where he was being held, she sent him away and then personally reported him to the authorities. In January 1969, at the age of 15, he joined the millions of other 'sent-down' youths who were dispatched to the countryside to learn from the peasants during the Cultural Revolution. He boarded the train in Beijing carrying a 'bag knit by his mother bearing the words 'Mother's heart''. Yet these experiences did not prompt either father or son to turn away from the party. After Mao died in 1976 and the worst excesses of the campaign were formally pinned on the Gang of Four, a group of senior officials – which included Mao's widow – Xi Zhongxun was welcomed back into the party leadership. During the era of 'reform and opening up' that followed under Deng Xiaoping, Xi was given responsibility for overseeing China's first special economic zone in the coastal province of Guangdong, which included what is today the global manufacturing hub of Shenzhen. He served in senior roles for the next 15 years, retiring in 1993 at the age of 79. Xi Jinping appears to have been equally determined to demonstrate his unwavering commitment to the CCP. He applied repeatedly for membership in the years that followed, finally succeeding on his eighth attempt. Both men later related their suffering as a valuable process of 'forging' and strengthening their willpower and dedication to the party. As Torigian recounts, 'when people complained about party policies, Xi [Zhongxun] often bragged about his hardships to delegitimise their grumblings… [He] even boasted to a Western historian that although Deng Xiaoping had suffered at the hands of the party on three occasions, he had been persecuted five times.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The younger Xi has similarly mythologised the years he spent labouring in rural China as a 'sent-down' youth, claiming to have drawn inspiration from the 19th-century Russian novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose protagonist sleeps on a bed of nails to forge his own sense of willpower. Whereas many of Xi's generation emerged from the Cultural Revolution determined to make up for lost time by turning their attention to 'romantic relationships, drink, movies and Western literature as a release from the hardships of the time', as one US embassy cable reported. '[Xi Jinping] chose to survive by becoming redder than red.' While many observers have since questioned why the future leader would remain so loyal to an institution that had persecuted him and his family, Torigian argues that this fundamentally misses the point. 'Perhaps the better question is: how could Jinping betray the party for which his father had sacrificed so much?' [See also: The People's Republic of iPhone] Xi Zhongxun grew up in a peasant family in Shaanxi, a province of north-west China, where he was born in 1913, less than two years after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. He was drawn to communism at school, enraged by the abject poverty he saw around him, and took part in a plot to poison a local school administrator at the age of 14 (they chose the wrong bowl and succeeded in sickening several teachers instead). Xi was arrested and sent to prison, where he sharpened his knowledge of 'revolutionary principles'. His father and mother both died shortly afterwards, which he attributed in part to the anguish they suffered during his incarceration. Xi had to arrange for his mother's remains to be stored in a 'cheap coffin' for two years before he could afford to pay for a funeral. Two of his sisters then died during a famine. Reflecting on this period in his diary more than 60 years later, Xi recalled how his younger brothers and sisters had come to rely on him and he had wanted them 'to live like human beings'. As he concluded: 'The influence of this year on me was truly great, and it established the basis for a life of revolution.' He first encountered Mao in 1935, when the Red Army arrived in Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, the gruelling year-long retreat under fire from south-eastern China to what would become its new revolutionary base in the north-west. He credited Mao with saving his life, claiming that he would have been buried alive within days as part of an internal party purge – presaging the bitter intra-party struggles that would shape his later life – if the CCP leader had not appeared when he did. (Torigian is sceptical of this account, concluding that Xi's death was not imminent and that he likely overstated Mao's role, which in turn became part of the CCP's mythology.) Still, Xi proved his loyalty and his utility to Mao, fighting in the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War in the years that followed. In recognition of his efforts, Mao presented him with a white cloth on which he had written: 'The party's interests come first.' Torigian writes that the cloth 'became one of Xi's most treasured possessions'. After the communists' victory in the Civil War in 1949, Xi Zhongxun rose swiftly through the ranks to the 'very top echelon' of the new People's Republic of China. Despite – or perhaps because of – the privileges the family now enjoyed, he enforced frugality and strict discipline among his children. Xi Jinping, who was born in 1953, the third child of his second marriage, was required to kowtow before his father during annual Lunar New Year celebrations. If he failed to perform the ritual according to his father's exacting standards, he was spanked. He later recounted how the children had bathed in their father's used bathwater, which he had also required them to use to wash their clothes, before the bathtub could finally be drained. This abstemious approach applied to mealtimes too. Torigian describes one occasion when the ageing Xi Zhongxun abandoned his attempt to chew a tough piece of garlic rib, passing 'a piece that had already been in his mouth to Jinping [who was then in his thirties and already rising through the CCP ranks] to finish – which he promptly did'. 'Actually, eating with me is a form of suffering,' Xi Jinping remarked during an interview in 2001. 'I am the son of a peasant. I have never been picky about eating, and, moreover, I never allow people to leave any leftovers.' Most importantly, the elder Xi also instilled in his children the need to 'make revolution in the future'. As his son recalled, 'we heard so much about this that our ears got calluses.' Writing to his father on his 88th birthday in October 2001 – seven months before Xi Zhongxun died and just over a decade before he himself ascended to the leadership of the CCP – Xi Jinping reflected on the lessons he had learned from the older man's life. 'No matter whether you were libelled or you were in a difficult situation, in your heart, you continuously had a bright lantern that always lit the correct path forward,' he wrote. 'When people yelled at us for being bastards, I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero, that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud of.' Compared to his example, he confessed, 'I am too mediocre, and I am blushed with shame.' He vowed to 'respectfully study father' in his future life and work, signing the letter, 'Son. Jinping. Kowtow.' This book is an extraordinary work of scholarship. The list of Chinese-language sources alone runs to nearly 40 pages, many of which have been rendered into English for the first time. It is not for the faint of heart, running to more than 700 pages and tracing the precise contours of the complex intra-party debates and intrigues that spanned Xi Zhongxun's adult life. While nominally a biography of the elder Xi, the book is also an important history of the CCP's bloody struggle for power in the past century and the world that shaped Xi Jinping. Indeed, it is striking how recent many of these tumultuous events are – well within living memory for China's current leadership. Perhaps above all else, The Party's Interests Come First is a study in the nature of political power – what it means to have it, the complexities and fallibility of those who wield it, and how quickly it can slip away. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that has tended to portray Xi Zhongxun as a 'reformer' whose family suffered terribly under Mao Zedong, and whose son was therefore once expected to pursue economic reform, perhaps even a degree of political liberalisation when he took over, the truth was always more complicated. 'All the 'characters' in this book, not only Xi [Zhongxun] but also the people whom he despised, were full of contradictions,' writes Torigian. 'They were both victims and perpetrators.' In fact, he concludes, 'Xi's life is a powerful statement about the misleading nature of grand narratives.' His son, presumably, would agree. 'For people who rarely encounter power and are distant from it, they always see things as very mysterious and fresh,' Xi Jinping remarked in 2000, as he reflected on the connection between his family's experiences and his own political career. 'But… I didn't just see power, flowers, glory, and applause. I also saw the cowsheds [where people were confined during the Cultural Revolution] and the fickleness of the world. I have a deeper understanding of politics.' From an early age, he learned that when you lose power, you stand to lose everything. Maybe that is why he now seems so determined to hold on to it at all costs. The Party's Interests Come First : The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping Joseph Torigian Stanford University Press, 718pp, £42 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Britain faces another showdown with the bond market] Related
Wall Street Journal
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘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.
Business Times
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
How an agonising relationship with his dad shaped Xi Jinping
The Party's Interests Come First By Joseph Torigian; Stanford University Press; 718 pages; US$50 and £41 BY THE time Xi Zhongxun was in his 70s, his teeth were failing him. Tough, chewy foods were a challenge, so during one family meal, he extracted some half-masticated garlic ribs from his mouth and gave them to his son to finish. Xi Jinping – by then in his mid-30s and a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party – accepted the morsel without hesitation or complaint. He took the remains of the ribs and swallowed them. Xi Jinping was used to leftovers. As a boy, he would wash in his father's bathwater. (The next morning the water would be used for a third time, to launder the family's clothes.) He also understood the importance of deference, for Xi Zhongxun had taught him that children who did not respect their parents were doomed to fail as adults. Every Chinese new year, Xi Jinping would perform the traditional kowtow ritual, prostrating himself before his parent in a display of reverence. If his technique was off, his father would beat him. These stories are recounted in The Party's Interests Come First, a biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, an American scholar. Torigian draws on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources, including official documents, newspapers, diaries and interviews. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. As China's unquestioned ruler, possibly for life, Xi Jinping is arguably the most important person in the world. He will be wielding power long after Donald Trump has retired to Mar-a-Lago. Yet information about him is paltry. His every movement is choreographed by a fawning propaganda machine; in the accounts of his life, interesting details are expunged by overbearing censors. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. There are only a handful of ways to understand Xi Jinping, which involve poring over party records or leaked speeches, learning about key moments in Chinese history that he lived through and studying the people who most influenced him. Few people have shaped Xi Jinping more than his father. Xi Zhongxun's relationship to the party and his thwarted ambitions offer clues as to what his son wants for China. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Like many of his generation, Xi Zhongxun's life was marked by tragedy. Born in 1913 into a family of peasants, he was an ardent believer in communism from a young age. His belief strengthened in his adolescent years, he said, as he witnessed 'the tragic mistreatment of the labouring people'. He took part in violent student protests in 1928 and was imprisoned by the then anti-communist authorities. Xi Zhongxun's parents died when he was a teenager: the result, he thought, of the stress caused by his jailing. Two of his sisters died of hunger. After the civil war, Xi Zhongxun rose fast through the party's ranks and 'entered the very top echelon of the government', Torigian writes. Then, in 1962, he was purged by Mao Zedong for supporting the publication of a novel Mao considered subversive. Four years later, China's paranoid dictator launched the Cultural Revolution, unleashing frenzied gangs who killed between 500,000 and two million people and displaced many more. Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Around 20,000 people were targeted for having supported Xi Zhongxun, the author estimates, and at least 200 'were beaten to death, driven mad or seriously injured'. His family suffered, too. They were forced to denounce Xi Zhongxun; one of his daughters committed suicide. A teenager at the time, Xi Jinping was branded a 'capitalist roader' (essentially, a traitor) because of his father's disgrace. On one occasion, the young Xi Jinping was forced to wear a heavy steel cap and subjected to public humiliation. A crowd ridiculed him, shouting slogans including 'Down with Xi Jinping'. His mother joined in the jeering. Xi Jinping was thrown in prison, where he slept on an icy floor during the winter. 'My entire body was covered in lice,' he wrote. One time, Xi Jinping managed to escape and make his way home. He begged his mother for some food. Not only did she refuse, she also reported him to the authorities, fearful that she would be arrested otherwise. Crying, Xi Jinping ran out into the rain. What doesn't kill you The anguish did not stop there. In 1969, aged 15, Xi Jinping was 'sent down' to the countryside with millions of other young people exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave in a desolate part of the country, where girls were sold into marriage for a dowry calculated by their weight. 'Even if you do not understand, you are forced to understand,' he later recalled of that time. 'It forces you to mature earlier.' Why did both men stay committed to a party that had caused them so much pain? Torigian suggests the answer may lie in What Is to Be Done?, a novel of 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian journalist. In the story, a young man named Rakhme sleeps on a bed of nails to strengthen his will. Xi Jinping imagined that he was Rakhme as he endured those cold floors, lice, rainstorms and blizzards. Both father and son may have been influenced by a Bolshevik political culture that glamorised 'forging' – the idea that suffering strengthens your willpower and dedication to the cause. Throughout his life, Xi Jinping has been loyal to two groups that demand absolute obedience: the family and the party. Both were often 'unfairly' strict, Xi Jinping has said, yet this did not dent his loyalty. Torigian shows how Xi Jinping balances dedication and realism. 'If I were born in the United States, I would not join the Communist Party of the United States. I would join the Democratic Party or Republican Party,' Xi Jinping once told Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister at the time. Abe concluded that Xi joined the party not because of ideology, but as a way to gain power. After Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, he was put in charge of Guangdong province and began to liberalise the local economy. When Xi Jinping became general secretary of the party in 2012 – the top job in China – many expected him to be an economic reformer like his father. But the assumption that Xi Jinping was any kind of liberal was wrong: he is not interested in creating an open and free country. He believes in restoring China's greatness and thinks that, to this end, the party should use any means necessary. His experience of injustice has not taught him that arbitrary power is undesirable; only that it should be wielded less chaotically than it was under Mao, by someone wise like himself. In a little over a decade, Xi Jinping has become the most autocratic Chinese leader since Mao. His regime ruthlessly represses dissidents at home and activists abroad; it enforces a stifling political conformity, forcing many to study 'Xi Jinping Thought'. Such methods are justified, he thinks, because he sees himself as a man of destiny, with a duty to generations past and future. He often speaks of himself as a protector of Chinese civilisation. 'Whoever throws away those things left behind by our ancestors is a traitor,' he told Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of Taiwan. That attitude is apparent in Xi Jinping's Taiwan policy, which bears his father's influence. Towards the end of his career, Xi Zhongxun was put in charge of unification with Taiwan. The party had ambitious dreams of reclaiming the island, which has been self-governing since China's civil war ended in 1949 and the losing side, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), retreated there. But Xi Zhongxun died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled. His son yearns to fulfil it. Xi Jinping has made it plain he wants to take back Taiwan. Those who rule China must remember that 'the territory left by the ancestors must not shrink', he said in 2012. When or how he may try to seize Taiwan – through war, a blockade or other means – is unclear. What is clear, though, is that his family's suffering has shaped Xi Jinping's dark view of politics. 'For people who rarely encounter power and who are distant from it, they always see these things as very mysterious and fresh,' Xi Jinping once said. 'But what I saw was more than the surface of things. I didn't just see the power, flowers, glory and applause. I also saw the cowsheds (where people were confined during the Cultural Revolution) and the fickleness of the world.' Xi Jinping's formative years made him clear-eyed and cynical, hardened and imperious. The worldview he learned from his father will affect not only 1.4 billion Chinese people, but the whole of humanity. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
