Lifestyle
In 'The Party's Interests Come First,' Joseph Torigian tries to understand Xi Jinping through his father
Xi Jinping, left, with his father Xi Zhongxun in 1958.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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.
Stanford University Press
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Stanford University Press
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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
via Joseph Torigian
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via Joseph Torigian
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.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images/Getty Images AsiaPac
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Kevin Frayer/Getty Images/Getty Images AsiaPac
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.
The Kennedy Center on June 28, with its facade signage still covered by a tarp and scaffolding.
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
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Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court denied President Trump’s request to stop the removal of his name from Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. The signage on the building has been covered with tarp and scaffolding since June 13, but in a court filing last month, the center’s current executive director said that Trump’s name has been removed.
In their decision, three judges from the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the president had failed to prove that the arts center would be “irreparably injured” without Trump’s name attached to it.
NPR requested comment from the Kennedy Center, but did not receive an immediate reply.
This latest round of court decisions is part of the ongoing litigation filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, against President Trump and the board of the Kennedy Center. In a statement emailed Wednesday to NPR, Beatty said: “Today’s ruling again affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename the Kennedy Center were unlawful. His name no longer desecrates this sacred memorial, which belongs to the American people. Now it is time for the Trump administration to accept this, comply with the law, and take the tarps down.”
In previous court filings, Trump’s legal team had asserted that removing the president’s name from the arts complex, both on the physical building and in its digital materials, would inflict irreparable harm in both time and money already spent. In the denial, the three judges — Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Gregory Katsas — wrote that since Trump’s name has already been removed, “a stay would not avert those harms.”
Furthermore, Trump had claimed that without his name attached, future fundraising would be threatened “and [will] contribute to the financial decline of the Center.” In response, the appeals judges wrote: “Appellants, however, have failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence. They offer only the conclusory assertions of the Kennedy Center’s Executive Director that were made in a factually unsupported declaration.” The center’s current executive director, Matt Floca, specializes in physical plant management.
The presiding judge in the case, Christopher R. Cooper, has ordered that the center provide him a status report on the center’s operation and programming before the end of this month. As of Wednesday, the center’s calendar lists a small roster of programs, including outdoor free movie screenings, workshops for children, and five free live performances in July on its Millennium Stage. In the past, the Kennedy Center presented over 2,000 arts and education events each year, including free daily Millennium Stage performances.
Lifestyle
A meal with an animated Mona Lisa? Immersive dining goes high tech — but will L.A. eat it up?
My dinner course is served. It is a Campbell’s-inspired soup can, lightly angled so strands of broccoli are peeking out. I lift the can to uncover a slow-braised short rib and mashed potatoes. An American dish to represent an American artist, here Andy Warhol.
The room is overtaken with projections, scenes of bustling New York traffic paired with bachelor-pad-like guitar riffs. Shown on a wall above a dinner table is a selection of Warhol silkscreens. It’s a Friday night in West Hollywood, and I’m surrounded by a mix of out-of-towners and those celebrating an anniversary. And while this is a special occasion, we’re urged to get a little messy with our food — to use our hands, to paint with a salad, to draw on a cookie.
The main course: A tomato soup can? “7 Paintings” is an immersive event that occasionally hides dishes in artist-inspired presentations.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Play is the primary side dish at “7 Paintings,” a tech-infused dinner theater that aims to be a crash course in fine art. That selection of veggies paired with multiple mini cups of colorful dressings? Guests are encouraged to mix and match the vinaigrettes into a mess of hues, a nod to abstractionist Jackson Pollock. And yellowfin tuna with dashes of avocado and taro chips? That’s an edible tribute to Banksy, of course. What does raw fish have to do with stenciled street art? It’s bold, heavily angled and has a short shelf life? Maybe? Perhaps don’t overthink it.
Even the paper is edible.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Have you ever eaten a painting before?” says Nadine Beshir, the Dubai-based creator of “7 Paintings.” “We try to get people out of their comfort zones and eating paper. I want to bring out the child in them.”
“7 Paintings,” held at Sunset House L.A. through the end of August, is the latest example of immersive dining to arrive in this city. These experiences often involve guest participation and are accentuated with advanced multimedia technology and sometimes theatrical elements.
Worldwide, there have been standouts. For instance, Eatrenalin at Germany’s Europa-Park, a dining room-meets-ride where participants are whisked around the space on trackless “floating chairs,” has just received a coveted Michelin star. Ibiza’s Sublimotion has similar haute ambitions, pairing 12 diners together in a room that will come alive with otherworldly projections and performers. At times, diners will win don virtual reality headgear.
But tech-driven immersive dining experiences have never quite taken off in Los Angeles as a trend. Last year, the Gallery, where fantastical cityscapes and projections surrounded downtown L.A. diners, stood just a couple months before the concept was abandoned.
“7 Paintings” pairs food with art and music. It’s “fun dining, not fine dining,” says its founder.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Bartender Luca Famulari shakes a cocktail at the immersive dining event.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“The economics of a restaurant are not the same as the economics of theater and the challenge of combining the two lies in thinking outside the box with respect to pricing and cost structure, such that the customer perceives high value from both the food and the experience,” says the Gallery co-founder Daren Ulmer.
Entrepreneurs keep aiming for that careful balance. “Le Petit Chef and Friends” is currently running at Tangier at downtown’s Hotel Figueroa, an event in which a fully animated film is projected on our plates and tables. Long-running pop-up event Fork N’ Film leans more dinner and movie, pairing dishes directly inspired by what is happening on screen. Upcoming films include “Ratatouille” and “Lilo and Stitch.”
The field comes with challenges. “The costs are very high,” says Joanna Garner, an immersive designer and former creative director with experiential art firm Meow Wolf. Garner has been experimenting herself with communal, immersive dinner events, and her next, the flirtatious “Please Open Your Mouth,” is set for July 11. (No tech there, as Garner is after a more sensual, adult-focused gathering.) Tickets for her event are $150 and a spot in the “7 Paintings” dining room runs $175, priced on par with a number of city’s most acclaimed restaurants.
There is also the reality that all public dining is in some fashion immersive, usually requiring varying combinations of engagement, communication and presentation. And then, are all these added elements distracting?
An animated Mona Lisa sits on the wall as guests enjoy their meals. Throughout the dinner, the painting provides factoids on various artists.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Throughout “7 Paintings,” for instance, an animated Mona Lisa, situated on the wall next to the main dinner table, will provide brief biographical details of each artist represented.
“Being able to nail the food, and nail the story, those are two very difficult threads to weave,” Garner says. “I do think, ultimately, people come to a dinner table to talk to the people at the table and to have intimate experiences. To have an experience where you’re constantly being taken away from the food, I’m not so sure if that’s what people are looking for.”
Food is framed as a star of “7 Paintings” but tasting it is just one component. At one point, we must uncover a cheese course in a tiny treasure chest, the code for the lock hidden in the projections (don’t stress, it’s not a hard puzzle). Beshir highlights the Pollock-inspired salad course, which is accentuated with a jazz soundtrack, as the thesis of the evening.
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1. A guest uses a silicon brush to apply sauces onto an entree, a nod to abstractionist Jackson Pollock. 2. Projections fill up the dining table during meals.
“This course is really about getting people to free their minds from preconceived ideas,” Beshir says. “Like, you have to eat with a fork and knife, or the salad comes and then the dressing. No, the dressing comes and then the salad, and it’s trying with big brushes to paint the way he did. A lot of people do not understand Abstract Expressionism, and they think it’s people just splashing colors around. But when you understand the link between the rhythm of the music and painting, you live it. We give you time to paint with your salad dressing.”
In L.A., Beshir has partnered with nightlife impresario Kim Kelly, who is plotting a “Sleep No More”-inspired walk-around theatrical show for the Sunset House venue later this year. “7 Paintings,” however, is fully seated, and purposefully a little silly. Beshir and Kelly have been evolving it during its L.A. run, recently adding a stronger painting component by giving guests their own canvas to work on throughout the evening. Each night crowns a winner.
“Everyone comes over to look at their art,” Kelly says. “It just kind of changed the whole thing, to be honest. People are now being creative throughout the entire evening. Instead of just watching and occasionally painting, you’re now painting the whole time.”
As for what, perhaps, soba noodles with edamame and mushrooms have to do with Pablo Picasso, or why Salvador Dali gets an unexpected dessert course of a white chocolate potato souffle, Beshir clarifies the goal of the evening. While the animated Mona Lisa will provide backstories on each painter, this isn’t an educational night. “It’s fun dining, not fine dining,” Beshir says.
And by the end of my night, strangers were socializing, showing off their painted cookie creations, sharing Banksy tidbits and asking for recommendations on various vinaigrette combinations. Ultimately, it’s an evening of discovery, packed with surprises like finding an entire course hidden under a canvas.
Darryl Mayes of Charlotte, N.C., left, and Taylor Smith of North Hollywood, right, uncover their course.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“We try not to have too much sophistication, like fried ants or something. I’m personally very adventurous in how I eat, but if I want to have this in 100 cities around the world, I cannot be too meticulous.”
And Beshir has big goals.
“I want this be your movie and dinner thing,” Beshir says. “I want people to be waiting for our next show, and to be able to afford to come every couple months.”
And to come home not with leftovers, but perhaps a painting of their own.
Matthew Rhys was nominated for his role in Widow’s Bay.
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The 2026 Emmy nominations are here. We’re unpacking the record-breaking nominations for Hacks, plus a big day for Widow’s Bay, The Pitt, and The Bear. We’ll also talk about the snubs and make some early predictions of who will win.
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