To many observers of China, its top leader, Xi Jinping, is an enigma. Scholars and journalist have tried to glean insight into his thinking by reading his speeches and writings and going through archival tape.

Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at American University in Washington D.C., takes another approach through his forthcoming book, The Party’s Interests Come First — a riveting, if dense, biography of Xi Zhongxun, the leader’s father and a noted Chinese politician himself.

What is striking about The Party’s Interests Come First is the book’s emphasis on understanding the emotional life of the elder Xi (in addition to its extensive archival research), and how a lifetime of enduring immense psychological pain and personal tragedy shaped the father’s political convictions and may have sharpened those of his son’s.

Below is a conversation NPR had with Torigian about his research. It has been edited for clarity.

A new book examines the life of Xi Zhongxun, the famous father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping – and how father may have shaped the son.

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FENG: Why focus on Xi Jinping’s father?

TORIGIAN: Xi Jinping has often described how his own political agenda is rooted in what he learned from the revolutionary elders, and his father was one of the most important of those individuals. Like his father, Xi is also the product of multiple sources of gravity and is a politician who often, I think, reacts according to the specifics of the situation.

The more interesting story here isn’t what Xi Jinping learned from his father, but what Xi Zhongxun tells us about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party in the 20th century. And the reason for that is Xi Zhongxun was someone who had a front row seat to many crucial moments that are foundational for our understanding of modern Chinese history. He was someone who helped build the regime. He was someone who helped incorporate Xinjiang into the People’s Republic of China. He was someone who worked for Zhou Enlai in the 1950s. He was someone who worked for general secretary Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. He was deeply involved in the party’s relationship with foreign communist parties. He was someone who led the party’s efforts with ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. He was the party’s point person on relations with Catholics. And so understanding how the party has changed over time and how it has thought about these issues is something we can learn by looking at Xi Zhongxun’s life.

FENG: What does his life say about the Chinese Communist Party as a political entity that’s persisted over decades, despite multiple challenges when many other communist regimes have collapsed?

TORIGIAN: You know, outside observers who look at China often see elite politics as a division between good guys and bad guys, as a division between pro-reformers and anti-reformers. And what emerges from my book is an individual with fault lines within himself, an individual who was a man of competing impulses, an individual who was no stranger to the extraordinary emotional, organizational and coercive power of the party but also had his own views on things. And he struggled to manage those two parts of himself throughout his entire life, although ultimately it was the party’s interests that came first for him.

When you read my book, one of the questions it poses is whether a different party was ever possible. And one of the reasons that question is there is because Xi Zhongxun was most prominent in the 1950s and the 1980s. These were moments when many figures in the top leadership believed that a more consensus-oriented, less confrontational regime was possible. But of course, by the late 1950s and again at the end of the 1980s, both of those periods ended. The book reveals, I think, why those moments of experimentation failed, which is that ultimately the party decided that a model of co-optation, a model of less revolutionary zeal, was one that made the regime vulnerable.

FENG: One of the big themes in your book is personal suffering of the Xi family. The patriarch, Xi Zhongxun, and Xi Jinping himself underwent just huge amounts of personal pain and tragedy. Why do you think that’s important to highlight? How did that shape come into being the politicians they are today?

Joseph Torigian

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TORIGIAN: So that’s one central puzzle of the book is how someone like Xi Zhongxun, who suffered so much at the hands of his own party, remained so dedicated to it and why his son, who witnessed his father’s humiliation and suffering, has dedicated his life to the Chinese Communist Party as well.

To understand that requires an appreciation for the political culture that these individuals marinated in. They were part of a system that believed that suffering was something that dedicated you to the cause and revealed just how much you cared about it. And so if you’re Xi Jinping and you’re witnessing this, I think it’s possible to presume that you might have two reactions. One is, if my father continued to remain faithful, then why wouldn’t I? And second, since my father suffered so much at the hands of this party, I want to show just what my family is capable of. And I want to be redder than red.

FENG: Why do you think that suffering then didn’t compel Xi Jinping to reform the party, to make it less dogmatic and to be so black and white when it comes to enforcing top-down policies?

TORIGIAN: Well, it’s certainly the case that many people who went through the Cultural Revolution came out of it with very different conclusions. Some believed, after witnessing that chaos, that the party needed constitutionalism, that it needed rule of law, that it needed to avoid another strongman leader from leading the country onto a path like that. And so how you react to that kind of political experience reveals something about you because the answers are not always immediately obvious. It tells us something about Xi Jinping. And what Xi Jinping learned, it seems, was that if you take ideology too seriously, that’s dangerous because you get a Cultural Revolution. When you don’t have a strong state, people act in dangerous ways.

Xi Jinping waves as he leaves after speaking at a press event with members of the new Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China and Chinese and Foreign journalists at The Great Hall of People on October 23, 2022 in Beijing, China.

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FENG: Why was it important to you to give such a human face to Xi Zhongxun?

TORIGIAN: You know, when we think about a Bolshevik, we tend to have an image of a person without interiority. Counterintuitively, precisely because the party wanted to impose so much on the people who were in it, the party created an interiority because they had to hide their true selves. So there is this constant tension within him between human-ness and party-ness, where on the one hand Xi Zhongxun was someone with his own views, his own ambitions, and his own emotions. Yet on the other hand, he was expected to do whatever the top leader wanted, to keep his own doubts to himself, and to obey the party’s interests. It was never easy for him, even though his so-called “party nature” always emerged triumphant.

Xi Zhongxun’s own children learned different lessons about the meaning of their father’s life. One of them very sadly killed herself during the Cultural Revolution. One of them apparently had sympathies with the pro-reform elders in Beijing that hoped for a path that was different from the one that Xi Jinping took. Other members of the family wanted to make a lot of money.  Xi Jinping stands out for his devotion to the party and his skepticism of materialism – traits that suggest he believes that he is taking the revolutionary baton from his father.