The Party's Interests Come First

Selected as a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, BBC History Magazine, New Indian Express, and Marginal Revolution   "[A] masterly biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's present-day president, Xi Jinping.... [A] scrupulously researched and keenly perceptive account of an important but, in the West, little-known historical figure."—Robert B. Zoellick, The Wall Street Journal   China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world – and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.   The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the party's demands. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping's father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP – and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.

Joseph Torigian is Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University and a Research Fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University.

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1. The Party's Interests Come First
PART I THE PARTY'S "FOOTHOLD": The Shaanxi Years
2. The Young Wanderer
3. Who Saved Whom: The Rise of the Base Areas and the Arrival of Mao
4. The Yan'an Era
5. Love and Revolution
6. War on the Nationalists and the Peasants
PART II BUILDING THE NEW REGIME
7. King of the Northwest
8. Political Means, with Military Force as a Supplement: Ethnic Minorities in the Northwest
9. Ideology and Power Politics in the Beijing of the Early People's Republic
10. The Perils of Intimacy at Home and Abroad
11. "Military Suppression Combined with Political Struggle": The Radicalization of Ethnic and Religious Policy
12. Home Life in the Capital
PART III CATASTROPHE
13. The Great Leap Forward
14. Liu Zhidan
15. The Cultural Revolution
16. The Xi Family Slowly Rebuilds
PART IV THE PARTY'S "LAUNCHPAD": The Guangdong Years
17. Facing the Consequences of the Cultural Revolution
18. Blazing a Bloody Trail
19. Opening to the West
PART V TRYING TO SAVE THE REVOLUTION
20. A New Order at the Secretariat and the National People's Congress
21. Princeling Politics
22. The United Front Restored and Restrained
23. A New Era in Ethnic and Religious Affairs
24. "Things Were Going So Well!"
25. Xi and the Fate of Global Communism
PART VI CATASTROPHE AGAIN
26. "It Is Necessary to Also Have a Spiritual Civilization!"
27. The Deep Waters of Zhongnanhai
28. Tiananmen Square
29. The Final Years
30. Fathers and Sons
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index