According to Chinese Communist official Xi Zhongxun, his first revolutionary act was an attempt to poison one of his school’s administrators when he was 14. He was faithful to the revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party, until his death at age 88 in 2002. In between those ages was a remarkable life. He fought Nationalists and Japanese. He was a right-hand man to both Zhou Enlai in the 1950s, and Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. As the Party administrator responsible for dealing with religious groups, he negotiated with the Dalai Lama–and would show off the wristwatch that the Dalai Lama gave him.

But Xi also spent sixteen years in house arrest, internal exile, under suspicion, or at least out of power, from 1962 to 1978. “In the early 1990s, Xi 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.” All this would make Xi Zhongxun fascinating simply as a psychological study of a Communist functionary who, despite everything, remained devoted to the system that oppressed him. But Xi Zhongxun was also the father of Xi Jinping, now effectively the dictator of China. If we are to understand the younger Xi, argues my guest Joseph Torigian, then we must understand his father.

Joseph Torigian is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He was previously on the podcast to discuss his book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, a conversation that was published on May 23, 2022. His latest book is The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was released with Stanford University Press in June 2025. It was a Financial Times Book of the Summer and an Economist Best Book of the Year So Far.

00:00 — Introduction

02:19 — Overview of Xi Zhongxun's Life

07:15 — Early Life and Revolutionary Beginnings

11:44 — Growing Up as a Peasant in Shaanxi

15:02 — Path to the Communist Base Areas

19:21 — The United Front Work

24:10 — Work with Ethnic Minorities

26:00 — The 1935 Arrest by Fellow Communists

27:56 — Patronage and Party Relationships

30:51 — The Northwest Bureau and China's Territorial Expansion

33:43 — Personal Life and Family

36:37 — The 1962 Purge

41:50 — Sixteen Years of Persecution

44:37 — Why Bring Him Back?

46:53 — Deng Xiaoping's Distrust

50:55 — Grudges and Party History

52:33 — Xi Jinping and His Father's Legacy

59:17 — Conclusion