As China’s top leader, biographical details of Xi Jinping are tightly controlled. Official biographies are scripted and arranged around key messaging approved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That historical flattening applies to Xi Zhongxun, Jinping’s father as well. Though less known outside of China than his peers like Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, Xi Zhongxun too was one of the elder giants of the CCP, and his story provides a revealing glimpse of the upper echelons of power in the PRC – once pried away from the tight grip of party-sanctioned historiography.
Joseph Torigian sought to shine light on a figure both historically important and elusive in “The Party’s Interests Come First,” the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun. Torigian traces the political journey of Zhongxun, through all its contradictions and challenges. Ultimately, the life story of Xi Jinping’s father reveals the CCP’s capacity for cruelty and coercion, but also the immense loyalty and attraction it inspired in adherents like Zhongxun.
As 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, put it in a written interview with The Diplomat: “When forced to make a decision, he always put the party’s interests first, even when he profoundly disagreed with the party’s choices.”
How important was Xi Zhongxun’s CCP status in Xi Jinping’s own rise – especially given that the former experienced repeated set-backs in his political career?
When Xi Jinping joined the CCP during the Cultural Revolution, the party was still persecuting his father. Because of Zhongxun’s status, Jinping had to submit an application to join many times before he was accepted. After Zhongxun returned to work in 1978, Jinping certainly benefited from his father’s family ties to other prominent figures. Yet “princelings” were deeply unpopular within society and much of the party as well. On one occasion, in 1985, an attempt by Zhongxun to help his son’s career was rejected by the party boss of Hebei, where Jinping worked at the time. During the 1990s, Jinping fared poorly at two party congresses, possibly because he was a princeling. He did not see his first dramatic promotion until a few months after his father’s death.
Some accounts have suggested that Zhongxun’s popularity as a reformer helped Jinping’s candidacy for the top position, but much of that process remains mysterious. Zhongxun’s status, then, was both good and bad for Jinping’s career.
Zhongxun likely affected Jinping’s rise in another important way as well. Jinping would have learned a lot from his father about the nature of the party, especially the cutthroat politics at the heart of Zhongnanhai.
How does Jinping talk about his father or engage in legacy-building for Zhongxun? What role does Zhongxun play in the party-sanctioned narratives of Jinping’s life?
As leader, Xi Jinping has often discussed his father with foreign leaders, and you can see family pictures on Jinping’s desk during New Years greetings. Yet Xi has not spoken about his father openly on a regular basis for quite some time. Instead, Jinping tends to assert that the party’s current leaders have inherited revolutionary traditions from the entire founding generation. He argues that accepting their legacy and passing it onto the next generation will save China from the previous dynastic cycles that have marked the nation’s history in the past. Jinping’s brother Yuanping is much more involved in commemorating the Xi family’s own history.
Nevertheless, Jinping almost certainly knew about the production of a long, hagiographic television series on Zhongxun’s early years that was released last year. And the party’s propaganda apparatus sometimes describes Xi Zhongxun’s household as a place where Jinping learned to love the revolution. In 2024, Xinhua also argued that Jinping’s “commitment to reform was influenced by his father, Xi Zhongxun, a champion of reform and opening-up.”
Given Zhongxun’s ethnic policy, what might he think about how Jinping has approached Xinjiang and Tibet?
It’s impossible to say what Zhongxun would think of his son’s policies in Xinjiang and Tibet, but it is safe to say that Jinping’s views on ethnic affairs must have been shaped by his father’s experiences. As head of the Northwest Bureau in the last years of the revolution and the first years of the People’s Republic, Zhongxun faced the question of how the party would manage its relations with the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other ethnic and religious minorities that inhabited huge areas of this vast expanse. Incorporating Gansu, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Ningxia into the PRC was undoubtedly a bloody process, but Zhongxun also used co-optation and other classic United Front tactics to win over powerful interlocutors. Zhongxun befriended several prominent Tibetan and Uyghur figures during this period.
After Zhongxun moved to the capital in 1953, the party gradually pursued a much more radical approach – a shift that preceded his purge in 1962. When Zhongxun returned to the capital in 1981 to run ethnic affairs and religion for the Secretariat, it was clear to the top leadership that the violent, transformative agenda had failed. He tried to use addressing grievances, cooptation, and economic development to find a new equilibrium. Yet Zhongxun also believed that nefarious forces sometimes used this new open environment for evil purposes, and he struggled to find the right balance.
For the CCP, Xi Zhongxun’s tenure as the party’s pointman on ethnic issues became a lesson in the failures of a softer approach. Jinping apparently hopes to resolve a problem that defeated his father’s abilities by resolving the ethnic “problem” once and for all.
In the public imagination, the “reform and opening” era in China is often simplistically associated with Deng Xiaoping. Can you briefly explain the role Xi Zhongxun played in bringing about critical reforms, like the famed special economic zones?
In the 1990s, Xi Zhongxun complained that “Giving Deng Xiaoping credit for everything is bad.” He was likely asserting that disgraced figures like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang deserved more official credit for China’s economic takeoff, but he almost certainly had the special economic zones and the role of Hua Guofeng, Mao’s initial successor, in mind as an example too.
Deng Xiaoping is often seen as the individual who played the most significant role in the establishment of the special economic zones, one of the premier success stories of the reform era. Yet the real story is a bit more complicated. It was Zhongxun and other party cadres in Guangdong who came up with the idea. Deng was not present for much of the 1979 work conference that approved the SEZs. It certainly mattered that Deng was in favor of the SEZs, especially because such an innovation could be politically dangerous. Yet Hua Guofeng, who is often depicted as a sort of Maoist in the historiography even now, was the person in the party center whose approval was the most significant at the time. Party heavyweights like Chen Yun were skeptical of the idea, and Deng did not speak out forcefully in favor of the SEZs for several years.
How did Zhongxun navigate the tension between advocating for political checks on absolute power vs. the primary driver of keeping the CCP in power?
This question gets at the heart of one of the central contradictions of Xi Zhongxun’s life. Zhongxun was someone who believed deeply in the party’s mission and appeal. He thought that many problems could be solved by winning over people. In the 1980s, as a vice chairman of the National People’s Congress, he helped establish a new legal foundation to guide state-society relations. Without allowing for some political openness, according to Zhongxun, it would be impossible to come up with new ideas like the special economic zones. Economic growth would convince people not to vote with their feet and flee to Hong Kong. After Mao’s death, Zhongxun concluded that another strongman figure would be a disaster for the party.
Yet Zhongxun’s limitations are almost as striking as his insights. Especially after the Cultural Revolution, he suffered from a deep phobia of chaos. He thought party unity was essential. Despite his dreams of a China that could grow faster, he also saw dangers in materialist values and a drift away from the party’s ideals. Under both Mao and then Deng, he and other party members of the elite proved incapable of restraining the worst impulses of those two leaders. When forced to make a decision, he always put the party’s interests first, even when he profoundly disagreed with the party’s choices.