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Business Times
3 days ago
- 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
Mint
24-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Behind Xi's strongman image, a demanding father always loyal to the party
When President Trump paused his tariff fight against Beijing this month, prominent voices in China praised their leader Xi Jinping as having fended off American pressure with resilience and resolution. Beijing had taken a tough stance toward Trump's tariffs, retaliating with economic countermeasures and vowing to 'never kneel down" before foreign bullies. This defiance burnished Xi's self-styled image as a leader with absolute authority, one imbued with the fortitude and spirit of sacrifice needed to guide China's resurgence as a great power. These qualities, some historians say, have roots in Xi's formative years as a son of the revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun, whose harsh parenting and unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party—throughout a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution—seem to have inspired Xi Jinping to show the toughness his father demanded. Party lore celebrates the elder Xi as a stoic figure who fought bravely for the Communist revolution and stayed true to the cause despite being wrongfully purged under Mao. 'While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?" historian Joseph Torigian writes in the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, which offers fresh vignettes and insights into the father's influence on the Chinese leader. Many within the party elite misread Xi Jinping when he took power in 2012, expressing expectations that he would emulate his father's reputation as a reformer who helped open up China's economy and managed religious and ethnic minorities with a softer touch. Instead Xi used iron-fisted tactics to centralize power, squelch dissent and tighten party control over the economy and society. Xi's hard-line approach belies a deeper degree of continuity with his father, whose 'absolute devotion" to the Communist Party may have inspired his son's own commitment to it and its long-term rule, Torigian argues in 'The Party's Interests Come First." Xi Zhongxun joined the Communist Party as a teenager in 1928 and won Mao's trust as a revolutionary fighter. After the Communist victory in 1949, he took on roles as a regional leader, propaganda minister and vice premier, but was purged in 1962 for alleged 'anti-party" activities. Stunned by his downfall, the elder Xi told a friend that he felt like 'a person who fell off an eighteen-floor building," according to the biography. He was sent away from Beijing to work in a factory and separated from his family. During Mao's 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which began as Xi Jinping entered his teens, militant Red Guards abused Xi Zhongxun at public-shaming rallies and, according to party accounts which don't offer details, 'persecuted" one of his daughters to death. But Xi Zhongxun 'never abandoned his emotional attachment to Mao," writes Torigian, who describes how the patriarch—while still in political disgrace—made Xi Jinping memorize some of Mao's speeches. During a brief reunion in 1976, the father watched his son recite the speeches by heart while they both sat in their underwear, according to the book. 'Although the party betrayed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Zhongxun never betrayed the party," Torigian writes. The elder Xi was rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1976, serving as a provincial chief, a member of the party's elite Politburo and a senior lawmaker before being sidelined after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A father of four daughters and three sons across two marriages, the patriarch died in 2002 at the age of 88. Xi Jinping is the elder of the two sons he had with his second wife, Qi Xin. Historians and people who knew Xi Zhongxun say he molded his son's character by imposing brutal discipline at home—including strict rules on frugality enforced with physical beatings—and by recounting tales of his revolutionary exploits. During the Mao era, Xi Jinping often faced persecution as a child of a disgraced official—experiences he later credited for hardening his character and schooling him on the vagaries of power. Xi Jinping 'does seem to have learned quite a bit from his father about the nature and dynamics of Chinese politics, which even insiders struggle to navigate successfully—including Xi's own father," said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a former director for China on President Joe Biden's National Security Council. Xi Jinping showed reverence for his father, publicly and privately. Torigian recounts how the son would kowtow to his father at Lunar New Year gatherings, wait for the patriarch's go-ahead before taking his seat, and on one occasion even finished a piece of food that his father had started eating but found too difficult to chew. 'The ways in which Xi has gone out of his way to almost perform respect and obedience to his father…is striking," said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, who has written books on Xi. 'Xi [Zhongxun] respected toughness—Jinping was his favorite son precisely because of a belief that Jinping had the most 'mettle,'" writes Torigian. Xi Jinping has sought to demonstrate that mettle as China's leader. He has pursued a more assertive style of diplomacy to advance Beijing's interests and called on the Chinese people to show grit in adversity such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current trade war with the U.S. The younger Xi's forcefulness in cleansing corruption and disloyalty within the party echoes his father's approach. Notwithstanding his reputation as being relatively liberal, Xi Zhongxun was zealous in implementing Mao's brutal purges, according to Torigian. During the 1942-1945 Yan'an rectification drive, a purge that Mao launched to consolidate power, Xi Zhongxun directed an 'aggressive hunt for spies" that led to many wrongful persecutions, according to the book. Suspects often made false confessions to avoid torture, sometimes while Xi watched. Entire classes of school children were denounced as enemy agents, Torigian writes. In the early 1950s, as a senior official overseeing northwestern China, Xi fervently enforced a Mao campaign to hunt counterrevolutionaries, saying that 'it is necessary to remember that the more bad people whom we kill, the more they will be afraid." 'Studying his father enables us to understand how Xi [Jinping] would have gained a view on how vicious elite-level politics in China was, and what would need to be done to stay in power," said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London and co-author of a book on Xi's political ideas. Write to Chun Han Wong at
