Making Revolution
A new biography may yield few secrets about Xi Jinping, but it speaks volumes about the party that forged father and son
ACADEMIC REVIEWS of Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First, a Chinese Communist Party history, as viewed via the prism of party elder (and father of Xi Jinping) Xi Zhongxun, invariably refer to the party elder’s alleged “humanism” – or his “humanistic nature.” He’s also referred to as a “reformer.”
For the non-academic reader—like this reviewer—it’s a refrain that strikes a dissonant note. After all, Xi the elder, at the tender age of 14, launched his political career with an assassination attempt of a school administrator .
In his defense—it was the end his formal education—the boy was obviously out to burnish his revolutionary credentials. In that sense, the action might be construed—in this long but riveting saga of Shakespearean intrigue, feuds and revenge—as noble. But by the book’s closing pages our aged party loyalist is Lear-like exiled from cradle-to-grave followers of his creed and quite likely just as Lear-like in rudderless madness.
Skip forward to the closing pages—and no spoiler alerts needed:
In August 1990 … According to the diaries of Li Rui, one of Mao’s former secretaries, at a meeting of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, Xi screamed at Premier Li Peng, leading Li Rui to write, ‘This demonstrates that his mental situation has, at the very least, completely lost control.’
Perhaps it was all preordained. But a young Comrade Zhongxun, born in what was poised to become the very crucible of the revolution, Shaanxi, the Northwest Military and Administrative Region, wasn’t to know that. Yes, as early as the 1930s, signs abounded that the revolution would never stop devouring itself. But it would have required superhuman foresight to not only see that but also imagine that, somehow, time and time again, the party would sit up in bed and find the vigor to reassert itself as the forge of Chinese greatness.
In the beginning, being a revolutionary like Comrade Zhongxun was hardship—hardship in the cause of ideological purity. It was hardship all around. His father died shortly after he was released from prison at the age of 15 (for his poisoning attempt), his mother and two sisters died in famine.
“Many of his former colleagues, as well as his own family, suffered terribly because of their connections with him—some were even persecuted to death, including a daughter,” Torigian writes.
By the time the revolution came to Xi’s neck of the woods in Shaanxi, with Mao Zedong and his long marchers making Yan’an their home, Xi, the homegrown revolutionary was regarded with suspicion. But then so was everybody else.
Xi and more prominent leaders, such as Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, were incarcerated by fellow Communists. For the rest of his life, Xi would claim that the party’s plan had been to bury him alive. Mao and the rest of the central leadership, nearing total exhaustion after months of fleeing Nationalist forces on the Long March, stumbled upon the Shaanxi Communists.
The idea that Xi was about to be “buried alive” was probably embellished in the telling – likely elaborated over the years to emphasize Mao’s importance at a critical revolutionary juncture, redounding also to Xi’s importance in the grand scheme of things.
But Xi and others like him in Shaanxi were most certainly purged—it’s almost a page-by-page occurrence over the course of Party First. And Xi, like others who were lucky enough to survive come out of it, did so reforged—men (and it was almost always men) born anew.
Incarcerated, in brutal conditions, Xi reportedly said, “If I die, that is also dying for the revolution. And if I survive, I will redouble my efforts for the party …
Xi suffered terribly. Still in summer clothes, he slept in the cold Shaanxi weather tied up with ropes and crawling with lice … About two hundred of his fellow cadres were executed by their own party.
Such were the imperatives of the time. Xi may have got to live another day, but it’s not as if the purge itself was ever declared a mistake: Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Peng Dehuai confirmed that “people had been wrongly incarcerated” but apparently cleaved to the line of a Central Committee document that such purges were necessary in the struggle against “rightist surrenderism” and the “purge of counterrevolutionary rightists.”
This is one of many points in Torigian’s book in which most readers might start to wonder about sheer possibility of Xi’s “humanism”—not to mention his reformist character. It’s not as if, despite some reported distaste for the kind of mass purges he himself suffered from, he ever took a firm stand against the party’s tendency to make punishable sins of thought crimes.
Looming over all this is a question—an unpalatable question if you cleave to the notion that the revolution was well intentioned and had good elements, of whom Xi Jinping is one. The question is, are “humanistic” actors even feasible within the system that the Chinese Communist Party somehow brought into being the country we today recognize as China.
It’s quite possible that the “humanism” ascribed to Xi by certain China-watchers was always a chimera. Yes, it to would be gratifying to find at least a hint of something redemptive in the party system that remolded China from “old” to “new.” But was it ever a grand project with legs?
As Russian historian Roi Medvedev writes, no one in a Leninist system could occupy a top post and not “from time to time betray one’s own friends, associates, or completely innocent people. Everyone made their own choice, and everyone sought justifications for their transgressions
The Party’s Interests Come First": The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
Joseph Torigian
Stanford University Press
June 3, 2025
718 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-1503634756
A Revolutionary Education
Xi Zhongxun's formal educational shortfall—it never extended beyond his early teens—might seem like a limitation, but it may have been the perfect preparation for his role as revolutionary seducer in chief. Without the theoretical sophistication that foreign study provided other leaders, Xi operated on pure revolutionary instinct—he understood that power meant making people complicit in their own subjugation.
Just as he did—it’s a subject that comes up again and again in Party First—the purged, the punished, the bludgeoned and starved in frigid rooms ideally come out of the experience reborn, a newly zealous converts to the revolution. It’s a subject that Torigian steers away from analyzing. This is a book that is thankfully free of any attempt at psychoanalysis, although it’s difficult not to be struck by the cult-like elements that are key to bonding its revolutionaries to their cause.
The United Front—and it was there that Xi Zhongxun spent most of his party career, a dangerous job because it put one close to non-revolutionary elements—wasn't diplomacy; it was arguably a systematic corruption machine designed to compromise potential opponents. Xi's famous charm, his friendship with the Panchen Lama, his sympathy for the Tibetan spiritual cause, for the ethnic interests of the far western former East Turkestan regions, the plight of the Inner Mongolians … Were these signs of humanity shining through amid complex ethnic diversity?
They’re arguably the system working exactly as designed—or as the cards fall nicely into place—Xi's natural gifts drawing in religious and ethnic leaders in webs of obligation and false friendship.
When hardliners later attacked Xi for the relationships that made successes for party policy, for which he has been lauded for as a humanistic reformer, as much as anything they were scapegoating him for implementing party policy too successfully. The revolution had left Xi with no option but to betray when circumstances demanded it, even if included United Front “friends”—silently complicit, for example, when the vice tightened on Tibetan protests.
To be sure, Xi the elder is a complicated character. Torigian, who is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University and a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University, draws on three-volume Chinese biography by Jia Jiuchuan, the diaries of Li Rui, former secretary to Mao. He also draws on Warren Sun and Fred Teiwes in their reassessment of Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer, allowing the reader to ponder whether Deng really was the reformer so many histories have portrayed him as.
The work of Sun and Teiwes is particularly valuable because they've consistently emphasized the messiness of modern Chinese party histories, questioning the neat, linear narratives of the past. Their books suggest policy emerging from complex factional struggles, bureaucratic compromises, and often accidental developments—not from the vision of singular leaders.
The Party’s Interests Come First may not provide razor sharp insights into Xi Jinping, the man who puts the party’s interest first in today’s China, but what it does do, via a range of new sources, is to give us renewed insight into the party that controls China.
And that might do much to explain why the book jars at time to the Western reader. We come to the book expecting either technocratic management or standard authoritarianism, but rather—in Xi the elder—we get someone who genuinely believes in the transformative power of revolutionary discipline and ideological purity—concepts that feel almost medieval in a globalized, market-driven world.
The "anachronistic" framing is particularly powerful because it suggests Xi Jinping isn't just authoritarian, he's temporally displaced. He's applying 1940s revolutionary methods to 2020s problems. The anti-corruption campaigns, the ideological education, the emphasis on party purity—these aren't modern governance techniques, they're revolutionary practices being imposed on a society that has moved far beyond the conditions that made them relevant.
The Son Rises
Outside the box of the narrative, the reader is confronted by Xi Zhongxun, his most famous son and others in their milieu being close to crushed—some of them are crushed—by the fickle vicissitudes of rectification campaigns and purges, as they’re “forged” in “struggle” that leads to rebirth and sunk-cost doubling down on commitment to the party and revolution.
But the 1980s offered Xi Zhongxun what appeared to be vindication. His United Front methods—the patient cultivation of ethnic leaders, the tactical flexibility, the calculated charm—suddenly looked like prescient policy rather than dangerous accommodation. Special Economic Zones weren't ideological compromise but proof that the revolution could absorb anything, even capitalism, and emerge stronger.
But this apparent triumph contained the seeds of Xi's final tragedy. The very success of his methods in the 1980s deepened his investment in a system that was preparing to devour him. Each “reform” that bore his name, each minority leader who accepted party authority through his mediation, each foreign visitor charmed by his affability—all became evidence of the revolution’s adaptability, not his humanity.
And yet … One of the most psychologically fascinating aspects of Xi Zhongxun's story is how his loyalty to the Party deepened rather than weakened under persecution—a pattern that research on thought reform and cognitive dissonance suggests is more common than we might expect
Beijing could not simply turn back the clock to 1952. Although the party’s failures, as well as many years away from the center of power, facilitated a zeal among senior cadres to right the ship of the revolution in the twilight of their lives, decades of persecution meant something quite different for many of China’s ethnic minorities and religious faithful. While everyone went through tribulations, the ethnic minorities suffered at the hands of the Han. And it was not only the Bolsheviks who could find meaning in the “forge” of adversity. As China exited the long tunnel of the Mao years, party leaders were shocked when religious activity exploded after the Cultural Revolution. Thinking that the influence of the Dalai Lama had been extinguished, when a group from Dharamsala visited Lhasa, the local authorities asked the crowds not to attack the members of the group or to spit at them. The cadres were then stunned when the prostrating crowds mobbed the Dalai Lama’s representative, weeping and shouting anti-Han slogans.7 In 1979, near the Catholic pilgrimage site of Sheshan, a demon, before it was exorcised, foretold the coming of Mary. In March 1980, about ten thousand Catholics who heard the news of the prophecy traveled to Sheshan. They broke into the church, which was still officially closed, and knelt down in the dust.
When things began to unravel, the question of whether Xi privately opposed the Tiananmen massacre misunderstands what he had become by 1989. After decades of making the party's interests indistinguishable from moral truth, genuine opposition would have required him to acknowledge that his entire life's work—all those United Front successes, all those careful accommodations—had been in service of something monstrous.
Instead, he did what the revolution had trained him to do: he supported the decision “as he had done so many other times earlier in his life.” The phrase reads like an epitaph for whatever remained of the man beneath the revolutionary. By the time tanks rolled into the square, Xi Zhongxun was no longer psychologically capable of rebellion against the system that had so thoroughly colonized his conscience.
Xi Jinping, his son, rose to power gradually, beginning in 2007 when he was appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, culminating in his assumption of the top leadership roles in 2012-2013. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012 and President of China in March 2013.
Many Western observers initially viewed Xi as a potentially reformist leader who might liberalize China’s political and economic systems. Several factors contributed to these expectations:
Given China’s previous trajectory of market-oriented reforms under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, many analysts expected Xi to continue this liberalization. His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been associated with economic reforms in the 1980s, leading some to believe the son might follow a similar path.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times—always on hand for a glowing spin on the ineffable—was particularly effusive in his early assessments. In 2013, he wrote pieces suggesting Xi might be China’s “reformer-in-chief” and praised what he saw as Xi's anti-corruption drive as evidence of genuine institutional reform.
Western commentators, in short, projected their own hopes onto Xi's early moves, interpreting his consolidation of power as necessary preparation for major reforms rather than as an end in itself. The anti-corruption campaign was particularly misread—seen as rule-of-law building rather than as a tool for eliminating political rivals and centralizing control, all rulebook plays his father would have recognized.
In the 1980s, Xi developed a reputation as one of the reformers in the CCP. He encouraged the growth of Special Economic Zones and endorsed a certain amount of flexibility on policy matters. He resumed his United Front work, seeking to improve the PRC’s relations with ethnic and religious minorities, and worked with reform-minded leaders like Hu Yaobang. He continues to be remembered as a cadre who worked to achieve a more liberal and humane CCP during that decade.
But how much of a “reformer” could a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary and loyal Party man really be? Torigian explores the limits of Xi Zhongxun’s reform-mindedness, especially in his chapter on the 1989 protests and June Fourth massacre.
Many interviewees told Torigian that they assumed Xi opposed Deng Xiaoping’s decision to use violence against the protesters—a point of view he regards as “tantalizing” but not backed up by available evidence. Xi’s personal thoughts on the crackdown remain unavailable to us, but we do know that in the end, Xi “supported the party after a decision was made, as he had done so many other times earlier in his life.”
In her review of The Party’s Interests Come first, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, quotes Xi Zhongxun as saying:
“I did justice for the party, did justice for the people, and did justice for myself; I did not make ‘leftist’ mistakes, I did not persecute people. My accomplishments have been ordinary. I feel no guilt.
The tragedy isn’t that a “reformer” was eventually crushed by the system. It’s that by the 1980s, Xi had become so thoroughly the system’s creature that he couldn’t recognize the moral void at his center. His support for the Tiananmen crackdown wasn’t a final betrayal of his principles—it was the logical endpoint of a life spent perfecting the art of ideological justification.
By then, the man who might have once been capable of genuine human feeling had been methodically replaced by revolutionary reflex.
Such as it is, Xi the elder won accolades because he really gave every appearance of pushing for a more understanding, yielding take on governance of Tibet, former East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia—even if the truth was the party’s interests came first.
He was doomed not so much to fail, as to never approach becoming the man others would have him be. But by then the Tiananmen protests had taken place and been put down.
If madness consumed him late in life that should come as no surprise. The fact that Xi the younger is following his father in putting the party’s interests first should come as even less of a surprise.