Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping is a monumental scholarly achievement — easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade. Joseph’s goal, in his own words, was to “shine as much light into the darkness of the past as possible” to understand the nature of authoritarian politics, and he succeeds beyond my wildest expectations.
This biography gives me a feel for Chinese politics that I honestly thought I’d never have. It does an incredible job of digging deep to shed light on some of the most consequential moments in CCP history, as well as conveying what it was like to live as a senior official under Mao and Deng. Reading it was a powerful experience at both an intellectual and human level.
We get memorable vignettes, like 15-year-old Xi Zhongxun attempting to assassinate a teacher, or General Peng Dehuai using his shoe to silence Xi Zhongxun’s snoring in their shared bunk.
In this interview, we discuss:
What we can learn about authoritarianism, the CCP, and China’s future from studying Xi’s father,
Torigian’s methodology for uncovering hidden Party history,
How the Party became an existential source of meaning, and how it weaponized suffering to paradoxically deepen political loyalty,
The arc of Xi Zhongxun’s life — from a young revolutionary to key advocate of reform — and his role during Tiananmen,
The interplay of family, love, and career under the all-encompassing shadow of the Party,
The role of “Surrogate fathers” and patronage in navigating political ascent,
How literature shaped China’s early revolutionaries, and even impacted the Party as we know it today.
Co-hosting today is Jon Sine, former ChinaTalk intern.
Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
From Teenage Assassin to Tiananmen
Jordan Schneider: Joseph, how do you define the purpose of this book?
Joseph Torigian: There is inherent value in going to the past and telling stories about these people’s lives, especially because they suffered so much. Second, this book helps people understand authoritarian politics and how the party works, in a way that gives us special insight into Xi Jinping. Finally, the book allows you to draw your own conclusions in many ways.
One of the themes that emerges from the book is how much suffering people in the party experienced and how they brought different meanings to it. The party imposes one interpretation on the past, but what I wanted to do with my book is facilitate multiple different interpretations for people who want to read it closely.
Jordan Schneider: Generally, when people read biographies of major political figures, there’s a bias in authors to tie bows around the narrative and make some overwhelming moral judgment about whether their decisions were right or wrong, and whether this person was morally upright or lacking in how they behaved and their impact on the world.
Remarkably, this book stops before going there. This man, whose life was incredibly gray, complex, and shaded from many different dimensions, could have been interpreted through party narratives or through the lens of liberal outside reformers projecting their ideas onto him. As you were going through his life and trying to portray what you learned and discovered to your audience, how did you think about your role as the author?
Joseph Torigian: I wanted the evidence to lead me in the direction of what was most interesting about his life. I didn’t feel there was a missing part of the literature that needed to be explored. I just wanted to do justice to his life in a way that would allow people to make their own judgments. As you see in the book, people in his own life — and Xi Zhongxun himself — sometimes found it unclear which morality was most relevant to make a particular decision.
Narrative certainly plays a role in the book. I wanted to make people feel just how dramatic, exciting, and electric it was to be a member of this organization, especially in the times and places where Xi Zhongxun found himself. I wanted people to draw broader lessons about how the party worked.
But I also didn’t want to allow the need for it all to come together or for there to be a single argument to do violence to the evidence. As I said before, I wanted people to be able to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of his life. Certainly I needed to bring an interpretive lens and my own analysis because facts don’t speak for themselves. Even choosing which evidence to include in the book required some level of reflection and thought. In many ways, a lot of the conclusions are obvious, but I don’t spell them out because they’re obvious. Allowing people to think about the most striking parts of his life on their own is a better approach.
Jordan Schneider: Before we get too meta, I think it’s important to ground folks. Generally, when you read a political biography, it’s about the number one leader, maybe the number two. Xi Zhongxun, though he was not quite at that level, lived one of the most incredible lives I’ve ever engaged with in book format. Joseph, can you give us an introduction to the arc of this man’s life?
Joseph Torigian: He grew up in Shaanxi province, which was a fascinating place because his home village was near Xi’an, where the first unified state was forged by Qin Shi Huang, and dynasties had ruled from there for millennia. But by the time he was born, two years after the Qing collapsed, it had fallen into banditry, war, famine, and poverty. It was a place of extremes.
He’s trying to figure out a way to address these wrenching problems facing society — feudalism, imperialist encroachment. He’s attracted to the party, but he doesn’t really understand it well. In fact, he’s able to read this revolutionary literature because the Nationalists and the Communists are still getting along. But of course, that all changed in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek betrayed the Communists and massacred them.
It’s in this milieu of violence that Xi Zhongxun is told to kill an academic administrator. He fails, instead getting a bunch of other teachers sick. He goes to prison and joins the party while incarcerated.
Jordan Schneider: At nineteen?
Joseph Torigian: Fifteen. He was fifteen years old. He became a founding member — although not one of the most important ones — of the base area in the northwest, which is where the Long March concludes. If it weren’t for that base area there, Mao Zedong and the other members of the Central Leadership would have needed to move even farther away from the interior Chinese areas.
He works in these fascinating places on the border of the base area, where he has to think about the United Front and manage relations with the Nationalists. They’re not at war with the Nationalists, but they’re not at peace either. It’s a very complicated liminal world he finds himself in.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was head of the Northwest Bureau, which is a giant expanse of Chinese territory that includes not just Han areas, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hui. He was brought to the capital and worked as Minister of Propaganda. There, he was a witness to several power struggles — the target of the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China is a man named Gao Gang, who was also a Northwesterner quite close to Xi Zhongxun.
Xi Zhongxun worked for Zhou Enlai, the famous premier who ran the government at the State Council. Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 because of a novel. He spent 16 years in the political wilderness facing incarceration, humiliation, and exile.
When he went back to work, it was in Guangdong province, where the failures of the revolution are perhaps most obvious. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing from the Communist mainland to capitalist Hong Kong. He sees with his own eyes just how developed things are right across the river.
Then he went back to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, managing its daily affairs. He’s the right-hand man to Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, the general secretary of the party. He has a fascinating set of tasks — he spends about 70% of his time on the United Front, returning to ethnic politics. But he also looks at Beijing’s relations with foreign leftist, revolutionary, and communist parties.
He witnessed this difficult relationship between Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping, which mirrored Zhou Enlai’s relationship with Mao Zedong. It all comes together in June 1989 when Xi Zhongxun faces the question of how he’s going to react to these student protests. Ultimately, he goes along with the crackdown, even though it seems he had very intense doubts and skepticism about using violence to resolve the crisis.
He spent much of his later years in the south, only rarely returning to Beijing. It’s quite a dramatic life — marked in particular by persecution by his own party. On many occasions, the party hurt people close to him or forced him to betray people close to him. One of the central themes that emerges is how he balances his own thoughts, emotions, and feelings with a party to which he is totally loyal, but which often does things that are deeply, deeply distressing to him.
Jordan Schneider: This book was especially engaging because you were able to find sources that really brought you into all these moments in his life. They also gave you a sense of his interior monologue and psychology at all these moments of incredible stakes, trial, and national as well as personal drama.
You take us on this arc from this 15-year-old who tries to kill his teacher all the way through to Tiananmen Square, including the family life and the experience of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening. But it’s all through this man who is incredibly faithful but also scarred in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend as a coddled person who grew up in America over the past 30 years. This book is a tremendous accomplishment.
Jon Sine: You open the book saying that Xi Zhongxun can fill one of three roles at least — his legend in the party, the role of the father to Xi Jinping, and the role that you take him as, which is a lens to party history. Could you explain how this book evolved, and why you chose to focus on Xi Zhongxun? I’m sure you’ve experienced the immediate reaction from many readers is, “How does this explain Xi Jinping?” when the thrust of the book is how Xi Zhongxun illuminates party history through the 20th century. We’d love to hear more about that.
Joseph Torigian: The book was kind of an accident, actually. I was asked to participate in an edited issue of an academic journal and was asked to write about Xi Jinping. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then I decided that the best way would be through a historical lens. I envisioned an article that was half about Xi Zhongxun and half about Xi Jinping as a young person.
I had just finished a book on elite party history, and that had been a training session on how to do it, find sources, and interpret them. As I started working on it, I realized there were many more sources than I had envisioned, even though I had just finished this other project. But also that Xi Zhongxun was an interesting person, not just because he was the father of Xi Jinping, but precisely as you said — he is someone whose life illuminates in powerful ways party history and party culture. His life is really a microcosm of the party in the 20th century.
With the book, it’s certainly the case that people are reading it because of Xi Jinping, and I’m glad people are reading it. I’m not going to be nitpicky about what reason they pick up the book. But ultimately, it says two things about Xi Jinping.
One is that it says a lot about the party and how the party works, and how every leader has tried to manage dilemmas that have been with it from the beginning. These are dilemmas that can be managed, not problems that can be solved. Xi Jinping is bringing his own approach, and we can understand how he’s bringing that approach because party history gives us the context. That’s the clearest line between the book and Xi Jinping.
But of course, there’s another line which is psychological. Here, we need to be careful because even Xi Jinping’s siblings drew very different lessons from the meaning of their father’s life. Xi Jinping, like his father, is a product of multiple influences. He’s someone who changes his mind, someone who reacts often to the peculiarities of his situation as opposed to some dogmatic worldview that always makes him do the same thing.
I hope my book is one tool in a box of tools that will be useful as we think about contemporary China. I didn’t write the book so that people will know what he’s going to do during the tariff war, although these Taiwanese talk show hosts quite loudly thought that my book might be relevant in that regard. That might be true to some extent. But the real value of the book is to take a step back and just get a general sense of the party and the milieu from which Xi Jinping emerged.
The Politics of Suffering
Jordan Schneider: There’s a very striking quote you have at the end of your book from Xi Jinping, where he wrote a letter to his father on his 88th birthday. I guess he couldn’t visit because everyone in the party is too busy to be at their kids’ births and parents’ birthdays —
Joseph Torigian: The party’s interest comes first, Jordan.
Jordan Schneider: Exactly. But the line that stuck out to me was him saying, despite the Cultural Revolution, “I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero and that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud of.”
The central question in Xi Zhongxun’s life, as well as Xi Jinping’s life, is, “Why are you sticking with these guys?” The party was treating them terribly while they were giving their lives to this organization. On several occasions, the lesson seemed to be that the party does not care about you and will chew you up and spit you out in ways that are illogical and detrimental both for yourself and for the country.
But you write this line explaining it:
“Some may wonder why Xi Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father. But perhaps the better question is how could Xi Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?”
That’s the central psychological question we explore over these 500 pages — how does this man relate to this organization, to which he has devoted his life, but is riddled with problems? What did the party mean to Xi Zhongxun?
Joseph Torigian: The party was the source of meaning in his life. It was the source of purpose. It was salvation. It was a place where a young boy growing up in a society wrecked by turmoil found an answer to solving that chaos. This was someone who didn’t really understand the intricacies of Das Kapital, but believed that only an organization as powerful as the Chinese Communist Party could respond to the challenges China was facing. It was the only way of organizing society that would allow China to return to its rightful place in the world and defeat the imperialists, the warlords, and all these other people who had brought China to the brink of collapse.
Sometimes when you join an organization like this, you don’t always fully understand what it’s going to be, but once you’re in it, it also changes you. You understand the principle of the organization, but then the organization has all these methods for changing your very soul. That’s not the language I’m using — it’s the language the Communists used. You have self-criticism, you have study sessions.
If you believe you are participating in a grand adventure, where you are a leading figure in a world historical force that is inevitable, that is a really exciting place to be. Also, think for a moment that you keep seeing the party failing over and over again, and then suddenly one particular person emerges in the form of Mao Zedong, who seems to finally have a way of getting it right. He takes this ragtag group of revolutionaries who had nearly been destroyed on many occasions and forges a new nation.
For Xi Zhongxun to reject someone like that would be rejecting his own self. When the party persecuted him, it didn’t turn him away from the party. It motivated him to ask, “How do I win back the party’s trust? How do I show that I’m better than other people? How do I show that, actually, precisely because I am going through this torment and still return to it, I am even more dedicated than other people who didn’t have to suffer?”
You see other people grumbling about the party, and Xi Zhongxun would say, “Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t go through this.” It was almost like a badge of honor that he could weaponize — this politics of suffering, of who went through the worst experiences, and that gives you political capital within the party. It’s an interesting way to think about life, but it does raise the question — what kind of suffering leads to dedication and what leads to alienation? This is really a fundamental question or puzzle.
Xi Zhongxun admitted that during the Cultural Revolution, he went through a period of doubt. But Xi Zhongxun says precisely because he wasn’t sure for a little while and nevertheless returned to the cause of the party, therefore his dedication is totally unshakable and even more powerful than someone who didn’t go through that experience.
That also raises a question for young people in China today: If you want them to eat bitterness, how do you do that without turning them away from the cause entirely? That’s a philosophical question in some ways, and it’s one that Xi Jinping thinks about all the time—something that keeps him up at night, I’m sure. It’s also at the very heart of the question of the future of the People’s Republic of China: whether or not they get that right.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, there was this very evocative moment with Xi Zhongxun towards the end of his life. In the 80s, during this spiritual pollution campaign, all these old revolutionaries were excited for the future but also worried that the youth were going soft and didn’t understand. One of his answers was that they just needed the old comrades to go into the high schools and tell their stories — like the astronaut showing up in middle school and telling you how cool space is.
Joseph Torigian: Yeah. He talks about them as flowers in a hothouse garden, right? They need to go out into the real world so they can survive in the real world. Interestingly enough, he thinks that young people who went through the Cultural Revolution might be a good group of successors because they underwent these terrible experiences.
Of course, the Cultural Revolution was largely about succession issues at the very top and at the very bottom — getting rid of Liu Shaoqi, the revisionist who proved to be unsuitable to the task, but also toughening young people who had been growing up in the privilege of youth in a socialist nation. Many of those youth actually did go through a period of disillusionment. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to study overseas, they wanted to make money.
Xi Zhongxun consciously contrasted himself with those other youth, and he saw a lot of danger in this spiritual crisis that many young people in China found themselves in during the 1980s. Of course, this was one of the roots of what happened in 1989.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, I mean, it is a religious attachment. There’s no other word to describe what someone like Xi Zhongxun or Xi Jinping has to the party. You have these little trials of faith, right?
The decision to go left or go right from Xi Zhongxun, as compared to all the other princelings who are having fun in Hong Kong and driving cars or whatnot. A wide swath of humanity would get disillusioned from the fact that you have all these people you idolize turn on you and say you’re a capitalist roader and making leftist deviations and being anti-party and whatnot.
The emotional effort to harmonize whatever you’ve seen and experienced and look back at that time in the wilderness from 1962 to 1978 — not as these people stealing 20 years of my life, but actually as a forging event that is making me a better party cadre, more well-honed to serve the people — requires some kind of deep spiritual belief. Even something as catastrophic as watching this party starve tens of millions of people or turn the country upside down in a Cultural Revolution is not able to shake it.
Joseph Torigian: We should remember though that even though he had this idealism, this conviction, these were not easy experiences to live through and he suffered. It was difficult for him to understand why this was happening to him. Part of it was this sense that the party was still the best future for China. But part of it was utilitarian, right? The sense that if we are going to move forward, we can’t think about the past too much.
There’s both an idealistic sense, but also this idea that if we are too reflective, if we’re too critical of the party, if we go too far, then we’re going to shake the whole house of cards and it’s going to come down with us. That was a central puzzle for the 1980s: how do we justify moving in any direction but still maintain this sense of faith even as we can’t even say what communism really is because we’re groping as we try to figure out a new direction?
That was the reason why there were so many zigs and zags in the 1980s. That was the shoal that Hu Yaobang crashed on. You could understand in theory how you could integrate reform with conservative principles because you needed to have stability to reform and you needed to have reform to have stability. But as Hu Yaobang said in his self-criticism, even though in theory that makes sense, practically it’s not easy and you need a lot of political skill. His inability to do that was one of the reasons that Deng Xiaoping scapegoated him.
Of course, Xi Zhongxun is this very close associate of Hu Yaobang and felt very strongly about that, even though he put the party’s interests first and went along even with Deng’s persecution of this very close associate of his.
Jon Sine: You cite Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government several times, primarily for its generational analysis and its examination of how faith erodes over time. But Slezkine’s central thesis is that the old Bolsheviks functioned essentially as a millenarian sect. You don’t use much of that religious language in your book, but I’m curious whether you see similar parallels. As someone who studies both Soviet and Chinese history, what similarities and differences do you observe between the old Bolsheviks and these Chinese revolutionaries?
Joseph Torigian: Culturally, they’re very similar. Xi Zhongxun, on his very first trip overseas, goes to Russia and meets these sinologists. He talks about how he loves reading a Russian novel, What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky. Of course, it has this very famous character, Rakhmetov, a professional revolutionary who would sleep on a bed of nails to inculcate his revolutionary élan. Xi Zhongxun said he wanted to mimic this person and walk around in the wind, in the rain, in the snow, and sleep on a hot kang stone bed with his shirt off. In that sense, there are some very powerful similarities.
Just like during the terror in the Soviet Union, people were sent to their execution yelling “Long live Stalin!” During the Cultural Revolution, these old revolutionaries had no idea what Mao wanted, didn’t understand what Mao wanted, and were going through intense physical and emotional torment. For them, the problem wasn’t Mao — it was that they weren’t keeping up with Mao. It was that they didn’t understand Mao. They were looking into themselves for the problem. They weren’t looking at Mao for the problem. That’s how they thought about the world.
More broadly speaking, what’s interesting too is sometimes when I give this talk, a person will come up to me and say, “You know, I was raised in a faith tradition. I went to Catholic school. A lot of what you’re saying, it’s not that unfamiliar.” Seeing meaning in suffering, redemption in suffering — it’s a universal thing.
Now, whether you call it a religion or not, or how similar these phenomena are, that’s a big discussion. Certainly, the contexts are very different. Class struggle is a message of violence. The gospel is a message of love. The gospel is also a message of individual conscience, while the party’s message is that conscience is the party’s conscience.
I don’t want to essentialize similarities or differences, but at the very least, even though many of the themes we’re discussing today seem very foreign to us, I think with radical empathy, it’s not impossible to understand these lives, and we should try to understand these lives. We should never underestimate how hard it is. We should never think that it’s easy to appreciate how culturally dissimilar or unique these situations can be, but nevertheless we’re all part of the human condition.
Jordan Schneider: I also think that one level down, at a tactical level, you see a lot of parallels in the moves that the church uses and the moves that the party uses. This whole confession, self-criticism thing, which is a central part of these guys’ lives, is this introspection and these doctrinal fights of who has the right line. Are we doing this right? The importance of words is just a really remarkable thing — they’re arguing about phrases and spending days and days trying to get the idea right, which is something that’s really important for religion and not really important for a lot of other parts of life. But it was literally life and death for these folks a lot of times.
Joseph Torigian: That’s one of the other ironies of this book. One of the communities in China that Xi Zhongxun was tasked with managing in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s was Catholics. He sees Catholics as the biggest problem for the party, partly because they’re in communion with the Pope and Xi Zhongxun sees the Pope as a tool of imperialism. But they’re also hierarchical, they’re very motivated, they’re very idealistic. They also have these texts that need to be interpreted. It’s not surprising that they have a very interesting collision both in the 50s and the 1980s, which people can read about in the book.
Jordan Schneider: But the Catholics figured out succession in a way that maybe the party hasn’t. Jon…
“Eating Sawdust” 吃木屑
Jon Sine: Let’s talk about the art and science of putting together a book like this, because I think a lot of people have a perception, maybe a misperception, that the regime today is hiding everything, that if you go to the government sources, sanctioned sources, you can’t really rely on them. But when you have the background that you do, there are things that you can pull from them and you can triangulate something — I think you call it “a mosaic.” There are about 2,000 endnotes in this book, and I know that you’ve probably had to cut quite a bit.
Joseph Torigian: A lot.
Jon Sine: Can you speak on the art and the science behind putting this together?
Joseph Torigian: Well, it wasn’t easy. We’ve talked a lot about ideals and conviction, and for Xi Jinping to achieve that, you need to have a single view of history. Xi Jinping was a surprise to a lot of people, but one of the first signs that he wasn’t going to be a reformer like people thought his father was came when he gave the speech about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said one of the reasons they collapsed is they lost control of their history, and nobody took it seriously anymore.
If you want people to think that the party is an inevitability, that it just goes from one triumph to another, the more you talk about its dark past, the more dangerous that is for party rule. He has this term “historical nihilism” that he uses to describe people who talk about the party’s mistakes too much. For someone with that view to write about their father is certainly something that is challenging.
I don’t want to say that my book is the final verdict on Xi Zhongxun’s life. It really is just the latest draft. Whether or not it’s a meaningful draft has to do with whether or not there are enough new sources since the last person took a look and whether or not you’re doing enough justice to the sources that are available.
The question becomes: what are those sources? I don’t really think in terms of good and bad evidence. I think in terms of getting as much evidence as possible and then parsing it and then using it in different ways as that piece of evidence demands. You can’t just go to one archive and collect the materials and then write it up. You really need to have a detective sensibility. You need to be sensitive to possibility and limitation. You need to have a capacity for tedium.
There’s this expression “eating sawdust,” that China watchershands have used, becausewhere you need to eat a lot to get any protein. I’d probably say 99.99999% of everything I read is totally useless. But when I do find something that is really useful, it’s very, very exciting.
I was able to get some primary sources, of course. For a variety of reasons, a lot of documents or internally circulated material have become available at US institutions, as you saw in the book. Some very interesting document collections were also published in Hong Kong, as well as memoirs and party history written by insiders who had access to a lot of evidence. I did a lot of interviews for the book. I used a lot of material published in the mainland. There were these party history journals that were really pushing the envelope for a very long time that included subjects that were very sensitive — the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward.
I use official sources as well. That might strike people as surprising, but they are absolutely essential. There are cases where they changed the literal words that people said, but they’re quite rare. More often the problems are what they don’t include. But what that means is that you can treat what they do include as a hypothesis for what happened, at the very least. Then you look for other sources to back it up. It sensitizes you to things you might want to look at. Or, you use this phrase ’mosaic theory’ — they reveal a piece of evidence, unaware that I can connect it with all these other pieces of material.
The other thing I did was to make a list of every time Xi Zhongxun met with a foreigner. Then I went to speak to that foreigner, or I went to their archives, which are open. That allowed me to tell a story not just about Beijing’s relations with global communism, which I think is a very meaningful part of the book, a very significant part of the book, but even to get his understanding of Tibet, right? I interviewed the Dalai Lama. I was able to get these Tibetan language transcripts of negotiations between Dharamsala and Xi Zhongxun in Beijing and have them translated into English so I could use them in the book.
If we are taking these issues, these questions, these subjects with the seriousness they deserve — and because in a way it is a matter of life and death, right? I mean, people are dying and we’re writing about why these people are dying — we should feel a sense of moral obligation to do everything we can to get these stories right. I certainly didn’t in this book, as I say in the acknowledgments. I’m sure that in some cases somebody else will come and tell me I got something wrong, but I’m very open to that. I hope people will tell me.
I’m hoping my book will lead to further questions and other avenues for research because the world files its information very miscellaneously, which means that people may figure out that there was something I didn’t look at because I didn’t think of it. If there weren’t so many people who knew what I was working on, who said, “Oh, by the way, I stumbled onto this.”You never know what tiny, tiny breakthrough then leads to huge breakthroughs. That happened so many times in my book that there was some complete stroke of luck where I was looking at something completely different, or I was going for a long walk and I said, “You know, maybe I should go back and reread this.” Then you reread it and then it has a new meaning that wasn’t there before.
For example, the Li Rui Diaries. Li Rui (李锐) was a secretary to Mao Zedong. He was working for the Organization Department in the eighties, knew Xi Zhongxun very well, was the senior pro-reform constitutionalist comrade in Beijing during the 2000s and 2010s. His diaries are available at the Hoover Archive. Now they’re extraordinarily hard to use because it’s a diary. There’s a lot in there that’s wrong because he would write down rumors, and he wrote a lot in shorthand, which I couldn’t understand at all the first time I read it. But when you read other stuff, you go back, even if it’s just a few characters, and suddenly it has this huge meaning that was totally invisible to you the first time that you looked at it.
Jordan Schneider: For instance?
Joseph Torigian: One example was a curious incident in the 1980s where there was a debate about how to think about princelings and how to promote princelings, especially the ones that had engaged in really brutal violence as the so-called old Red Guards in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Somebody wrote a letter and it was immediately approved by Chen Yun. It raised these questions about whether or not the whole thing had been planned ahead of time in the first place.
I saw the names had been mentioned in a conversation between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui, and I wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. But I read a memoir written by the person who knew about this letter and then suddenly, because I knew that background, this very brief discussion between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui that Li Rui didn’t include a lot of information about because it was his own diaries — suddenly I knew what Xi Zhongxun thought about this very interesting moment. That would be one example.
Jordan Schneider: That is just a tiny window into the amount of work that went into this book. Because you have that moment, but you actually have a 90-year life, and on every single page you can feel the amount of sawdust that you chewed through, Joseph.
Joseph Torigian: Each chapter has its own ecology of sources. I need to mention that I relied heavily on histories written by Chinese scholars — work published both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. For his family life, I inevitably needed to rely on commemorative essays written by the children about their father. You need to take these sources seriously, but one way to approach them is to understand the broader context.
What was it like to grow up in Beijing in the 1950s? What was it like to attend that particular school? Often, instead of researching Xi Jinping directly, I would take a different approach. If Xi Jinping went to August 1st School (北京市八一学校), I’d find every book I could about August 1st School. When Xi Zhongxun was exiled to a factory in Luoyang, I’d research the history of that factory. His name might not even appear in these sources, but you can at least understand what happened to him while he was there and what he would have experienced, even if we can’t say exactly what he did or thought about it.
Jordan Schneider: Those moments showcased your scholarship at its best. People will probably flip ahead to read the Tiananmen chapter first, but I appreciated how you condensed these experiences. In just a few paragraphs, you gave readers a sense of what these worlds were like — it’s some Robert Caro-level work. You’re not literally getting a job in a factory in Luoyang, but you’re doing the best you can with the available material.
Joseph Torigian: Robert Caro is my idol. His book on research methodology is perhaps the best guide to research ever written. The only other useful recommendation I have for aspiring researchers is watching old Gordon Liu kung fu movies like 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Fists of the White Lotus. Those training sequences offer a great way to think about learning research skills.
Caro writes about trying to understand LBJ but feeling like he couldn’t get close to his subject. He told his wife they were moving to the hill country in Texas. Only when he experienced how difficult life was there did he feel he understood who LBJ became — seeing the poverty and hardship firsthand. I often wonder how different my book would have been if I had lived in Shaanxi Province for two or three years. Those are the regrets you think about. You can only write the book that’s possible with the sources available to you, but it does make you wonder.
No Saints, Only Martyrs: Xi’s Early Years
Jon Sine: This seems like a good jumping-off point to discuss the book’s chronology. My first question is about getting into the mindset of someone like Xi Zhongxun, who was born in 1913 in a place of unimaginable suffering, death, battle, and tragedy — at least from a modern developed-world perspective. You might be uniquely positioned to answer this, having spent time reading dark literature from the Soviet archives and authors like Solzhenitsyn.
You open the book with Xi Zhongxun attempting to murder a teacher at age 14, which serves as a device to help us understand that this wasn’t particularly strange for the time — people of all ages were dying and being killed. How do you advise readers to get into the mindset of this world when Xi Jinping was growing up?
Joseph Torigian: One regret I have about this book is that people sometimes focus on the most salacious moments, like the one you described. You need to put these events in context. I’m not saying that understanding him means we should forgive him, but we should understand the conditions that led to this behavior. This book is as much about the party system as it is about Xi Jinping.
People like to think of the party as inhabited by good guys and bad guys, but it’s much more complicated. They’re all part of a system, trying to figure out what they can do in limited situations. This needs to be understood when we consider who these people were.
When Xi Zhongxun was 15 years old and attempted to kill this academic administrator, it occurred in a milieu of violence. The Nationalists were killing many of his comrades. This was an act of desperation by a frightened young person — a huge failure that wouldn’t have improved the party’s position even if it had succeeded. Not only did the administrator survive, but Xi Zhongxun and many others were arrested.
This illustrates a pattern Xi Zhongxun faced throughout his life: you need zeal and fearlessness, but too much zeal can lead to actions that go too far and trigger backlash, often making situations much worse. However, if you’re not aggressive enough, others will accuse you of being a rightist — an opportunist too frightened to use violence and risk to advance the revolutionary agenda.
There’s a famous communist text called “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder that recognizes being too radical can get you killed. But they don’t debate these questions rationally because of the ideological charge, which makes management extremely difficult and can lead to purges, arrests, and executions.
Jordan Schneider: The life-or-death stakes and emotional charge of those early years are hard to comprehend.
Joseph Torigian: Those were the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days.
Jordan Schneider: Kids these days aren’t getting horses shot out from under them or taking bullets through the leg while running from Nationalists. But seriously —
Joseph Torigian: You can see how Xi Jinping in the 1980s looked at younger people born under socialism, after all that violence was gone. When they criticized the party, he wanted to tell them what it was really like. I can see how some students would be inspired by that, while others wouldn’t be. It depends on who listens and who is moved.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay with the 1920s and 1930s. There was this one guy accused of something serious who said, “I’m going to show you just how committed to the party I am.” He was reckless in battle, got shot, and died. That tension — if you’re redder than red, you might literally end up being killed.
Joseph Torigian: You’re referring to Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor, Liu Zhidan (刘志丹). What’s fascinating about him is that even though they faced persecution and their cases hadn’t been fully rehabilitated, he would tell Xi Zhongxun that the party would eventually get things right and he should talk to others about this. Then this same person, Liu Zhidan, because he still had a black mark in his file and wanted to show his loyalty, got himself killed.
Jordan Schneider: It’s not like the Catholic Church as we know it today — this is early Christianity. There are martyrs, everything is life and death, the world is against you. To believe and commit your life to it, you need a truly revolutionary vision of how society will change.
Joseph Torigian: When you see people around you getting killed for these reasons, once the regime is established, you can understand wanting to do everything possible to ensure the regime persists not just during your lifetime, but for decades or even centuries into the future. This is something Xi Zhongxun thought about constantly — he would ruminate on how to make sure the party survives not just him, but deep into the future. This makes the fact that his son is now the leader of the country particularly interesting.
Jon Sine: There are a lot of novels in the book. When Xi Zhongxun is young, he read a novel with the same title as your second chapter (which is among my favorites of the 30 chapters, by the way). The novel is called The Young Wanderer 少年漂泊者. Xi Zhongxun sees a lot of himself in the protagonist. But I’m also reminded of Stalin. According to Kotkin’s biography, Stalin was very motivated by a novel he read before he was a committed Marxist-Leninist, which has a similar, though less tragic, heroic figure named Koba. So much so that Stalin uses Koba as a nickname for himself.
I’m curious both if you could explain the Xi Zhongxun example, but also what you think of the fact that so many of these revolutionaries were inspired by something like a novel before they even really had a conception of what they were going to be sacrificing their lives for.
Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that his life as an early revolutionary was so deeply shaped by this book. In fact, he told Xi Jinping, his son, that he reread this novel after being released from jail to rekindle his love for the party. At the time of his release, he was desperate and couldn’t walk. He was covered in eczema and boils. His father had died, apparently because of the stress related to watching what his son had just gone through. Soon after, he lost his mother and two sisters. There was famine everywhere. He couldn’t link back up with the party because most of it had been destroyed. He couldn’t go back to school because he’s a wanted man. He read this book to get himself back in the mood, so to speak. He rededicated himself because of reading this novel. Then in 1962, he was thrown out of the leadership because of another novel. It’s an interesting bookend.
Then Xi Zhongxun, of course, returned to work in Beijing in the Secretariat. The very first thing that happens is people think that the country is going to fall into another Cultural Revolution because of a movie, a movie called Bitter Love (苦恋). It’s a movie that probably should speak to him in some ways. It’s a movie that is about someone who is deeply dedicated to the party and to the nation, but who the party persecutes. It includes this famous line — “You have always loved the motherland, but did the motherland love you?”
He doesn’t like stuff that criticizes the party, but he still sees the need to reflect on the Mao era, and he’s not quite sure how to criticize it without going too far. But repeatedly, we keep seeing that movies and novels have really fundamental impacts, not just on the party, but on Xi Zhongxun in particular. It speaks to this issue of communism being preoccupied with souls and for communist writers being “engineers of the soul.” And why in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun, who in many ways was a reformer, would still say things like, “We also need to have a spiritual civilization."
People held different views on how to solve the same problems that Xi Jinping was witnessing. Some believed the solution lay in enlightenment, cultural change, science, and democracy. Mao Zedong disagreed. He thought the right path involved violence, class struggle, and forceful transformation.
In the 1980s, there was a reflection on these two different paths and how the May 4th movement represented one approach while the Yan’an Rectification represented something quite different. The Yan’an Rectification, as I write about in my book, addressed a fascinating problem — all these young people had hero complexes. They were young, entitled, and spoiled, yet nevertheless wanted to save the nation. They went to Yan’an and recognized they needed to become good party soldiers, but transforming into a party soldier proved extremely difficult. It was a wrenching, traumatic experience. However, when they emerged from this process of struggle sessions and self-reflection, they felt like completely new human beings and often experienced euphoria.
Jon Sine: Your book uses Xi Zhongxun as a lens to examine the party. However, for the first twenty years of his life, the party center hadn’t yet consolidated in Shaanxi and Yan’an. This raises a question about the story you’re telling, which relies heavily on Joseph Esherick’s excellent book Accidental Holy Land. How representative do you think this experience in Shaanxi was during these first twenty years of establishing the base area?
Joseph Torigian: The Northwesterners took great pride in the fact that almost all other base areas had been destroyed except theirs. This raises an interesting question. I’ve discussed how Xi Zhongxun was incarcerated in 1935 by his fellow communists and was still in prison when Mao arrived. Mao didn’t release them immediately and wasn’t the primary person involved in investigating. Nevertheless, if that base area hadn’t existed, it would have created a huge problem. Mao didn’t even know it was there. The Party Center only learned about this base area’s existence through a newspaper in some dusty, isolated town, which led them to investigate and eventually arrive. This raises the intriguing question: who saved whom? Did the Party Center save the Northwesterners, or did the Northwesterners save the Party? That situation was unique.
Another factor was the severe infighting in all these base areas, but it was especially bad in Shaanxi for various reasons. No clear leader emerged from the region. One potential leader I’ve already mentioned, Liu Zhidan, was killed for reasons we’ve discussed. Even before him, there was another prominent leader, Xie Zichang 谢子长, who was also killed. They weren’t represented by a single figure who could command the loyalty and affection of the entire group.
When Mao was in Yan’an, he needed to identify a representative who could speak for the Northwesterners’ group and whose promotion would signal to the Northwesterners that they were taken seriously. He chose Gao Gang. Many people disliked Gao Gang — in fact, they hated him. This left behind the potential for struggles that would emerge in subsequent years and continue to affect Xi Zhongxun’s life for decades.
Jon Sine: I was recently in Ruijin in Jiangxi, which some may know as the starting point for the Long March and the capital of that base area. When you’re there, you see the whole place covered with Mao’s little wax statues showing him standing and giving speeches. However, from what I understand of the history, he was actually marginalized for most of the period there after the Central Committee moved down around 1931.
I had a friend who recently went to Yan’an to visit the museum and see what role Xi Zhongxun plays and how he’s memorialized there. His view was the same as mine when I visited — the portrayal seems right-sized, which is pretty small. How would you right-size Xi Zhongxun’s importance, especially during the period before Mao arrived?
Joseph Torigian: He was primarily involved in civilian governance, mostly working with the Soviet structure. While that sounds important, what was even more crucial during this period were the military leaders. In some cases, these military figures who were actually commanding soldiers looked down on the civilians, and Xi Zhongxun was considered as such.
When Liu Zhidan, the commander of these forces, would interact with Xi Zhongxun and show deference to him as someone working for civilian government structures, Xi Zhongxun was quite struck by that respect. After the Party Center arrived, Xi Zhongxun was sent to some real backwaters — dangerous ones — and only gradually, as the party continued to review the 1935 persecution, was Xi Zhongxun placed in increasingly important positions.
What’s striking is that by the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, Xi Zhongxun was the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee. He benefited from Gao Gang’s rise because they were now on the right side of history, according to the view of the past that Mao was imposing on the party. You’re right that I wouldn’t place him as one of the leading figures who helped establish the base area. This was also important for Xi Zhongxun because later, when he was seen as an informal leader of Northwesterners within the leadership, he wasn’t as dominant over the rest of them as figures from other factions were seen as clear standard bearers with much more prestige and status.
Jon Sine: What about the factions that seem to emerge at this time? You have the Long Marchers, whom Mao derisively said something about — that just because you walked a lot doesn’t mean you have special status. Obviously, many of them certainly thought they did. Could you speak about the tension between the Long Marchers arriving and the people in the Shaanxi base area?
Joseph Torigian: The Long Marchers were the central leadership — the Central Committee. Many were very well educated with extensive experience. Many had studied in Moscow. Then they showed up in the Northwest and thought the locals were bumpkins. Yang Shangkun even said, “You consider this a city? I can’t believe you think this is an urban area given how undeveloped it is."
The Northwesterners had built the base area, and then the Long Marchers arrived and basically took over. People like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun continued to face the shadow of the 1935 purge — they weren’t immediately rehabilitated. The Long Marchers looked down on them, while the Northwesterners felt they had built this base area and were upset about the lack of respect they received.
Mao Zedong adopted the Northwesterners in quite striking ways. He gave them so many positions at the 1945 Seventh Party Congress that Mao’s associates from the Jiangxi base area became very jealous and quite unhappy. The story Mao told was essentially this: when he was in Jiangxi, dogmatic people who had learned in the Soviet Union told him to do wrong things and pushed him out through domineering behavior. He said that’s basically what happened in 1935 when people like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun were persecuted — because they were doing good, real, sinicized revolution and were persecuted by people who had no idea what they were doing.
For Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun, this must have been thrilling. Here was Mao saying flattering things about the Northwesterners, claiming their historical experiences mirrored his, and promoting them rapidly at the expense of his old associates.
Then something interesting happened. In the early 1950s, Mao Zedong started complaining about Liu Shaoqi. He talked to Gao Gang, and Gao Gang harbored antagonism against party cadres who had spent most of their time in the “white areas” — meaning the cities doing underground work. He didn’t understand why they had all these cushy positions when it was the “red areas” — the base areas — that had done the bulk of work during the revolution. He also thought the Northwesterners needed more respect as reflected in official party history. He was motivated by how the party evaluated their contribution to the revolution.
Part of Gao’s machinations against Liu Shaoqi were based on Mao’s encouragement and certain things Mao was saying about Liu Shaoqi. But Gao also had this view of history that explains why he was acting dangerously. Xi Zhongxun was much more cautious. He said they wouldn’t be respected because they weren’t Long Marchers — they didn’t have that credibility, status, and prestige. Xi Zhongxun felt that people like Deng Xiaoping, who was a Long Marcher and knew Mao for a long time, were people he and Gao needed to be careful of. Ultimately, it was Deng Xiaoping who betrayed Gao Gang, went to Mao, and signaled Gao’s defeat.
The Party as Mother and Matchmaker
Jordan Schneider: We have this elite drama as well as human drama. There’s love, there’s death. What’s his relationship to his parents and his first wife?
Joseph Torigian: Xi Zhongxun’s parents died when he was quite young — fifteen or sixteen years old — leaving him an orphan for a while. After he was released from prison, he had to take care of his entire family. Then he left them to join the revolution, which led to an unflattering comment from an uncle. On one occasion, he actually referred to the party as “mother” — I don’t have that in the book, but it’s an interesting word choice. By fifteen or sixteen, the party was essentially his only family, or at least the most important family he had. He went back to his home village once or twice, but the entire emotional center of gravity of his life was the party, not his immediate relatives.
His first wife, Hao Mingzhu 郝明珠, was a very interesting figure. She came from a revolutionary family and was very capable. She did extensive work trying to explain to women why the revolution was something they needed to take seriously and why they shouldn’t be frightened by it. She became pregnant several times, but she hadn’t joined the revolution to get pregnant — she joined to make revolution. That tension apparently led to the break between them.
Jon Sine: Can we pause on his first wife for a second? One of the things that stuck with me most from your book—almost haunting—was a one-sentence line about her first husband who was killed and beheaded. She had to retrieve his body, which was severed from the head, and bury him. She was eighteen at the time. People should sit with that for a second to imagine what kind of normal setting this was, where this woman had to endure that.
Joseph Torigian: She’s also interesting because she went on to have a pretty good career in a very male-dominated institution like the Chinese Communist Party. She became a powerful individual in Shaanxi in subsequent decades.
Jon Sine: Despite this very grown-up tragedy she suffered at eighteen, you offer a very strange description — which I presume is completely factual — of the way Xi Zhongxun courts her.
Joseph Torigian: The stories in the book are funny from our perspective. They’re frightening and sad at the same time.
Jon Sine: I don’t know if you want to give that story, because it has all these elements — they’re twenty, adolescents, but also patriarchal, yet also progressive in some weird way.
Joseph Torigian: As I mentioned, one interesting thing that emerges from the book is how often the party’s own ideals and mission would bump up against something else — exigencies and political needs. You would have matchmaking sometimes to pursue political goals, even as you’re telling women not to bind their feet. It was quite a striking contradiction.
Jordan Schneider: Tell the story.
Jon Sine: I have it off the top of my head. She’s in this group, they basically show up, and they all start pointing to Xi Zhongxun and say…
Joseph Torigian: “This is the guy.”
Jon Sine: She has a shy girl reaction, runs away, and they chase her. Maybe you could pick it up from there — how that eventually ends rather swiftly in their marriage.
Joseph Torigian: There was extensive, forceful party matchmaking during this period. To put it in context, this was an organization built to achieve revolution, and these relationships were seen as something that should be built on principles of what facilitates the revolution. That led to pressure on people to marry people they didn’t know well or might not have even liked.
Jordan Schneider: How does getting married help revolution in the first place?
Joseph Torigian: To move on to the relationship between Xi Zhongxun and Qi Xin 齐心, it’s very striking how much he doesn’t want to be distracted by her, especially during dicey moments for the party, as the Nationalists were tearing up and breaking up much of what had been the Yan’an base area in the second half of the 1940s. When he meets Qi Xin, he tells her, “Why are you coming to see me? We’re in the middle of fighting this war. It’s just a distraction.”
The party was supposed to break down personalistic relationships so people wouldn’t put romance first — they put revolution first. This was something they all understood and intuited. I can’t remember if I left it in the book, but there was one time when Xi Zhongxun facilitated a meeting between Peng Dehuai and Peng Dehuai’s wife, and Peng yelled at him, saying he needed to focus on bigger things than setting up an occasion for him to see the woman he was married to.
Jordan Schneider: This reminded me of arranged marriages where the woman meets this man who’s in good standing with the party, and they get married the next day — like ISIS. ISIS would arrange marriages with women they captured as spoils. On one hand, Joseph, these guys like sex, which you bring up, but at the same time, you have these women who are incredibly conscious and want to contribute to the party. They’re also annoyed by the fact that they have to do all the childbearing. We end up in this weird dynamic where, because Xi Jinping’s mother is a very active person, they just don’t do parenting for six days a week. It shows how dedicated and religious they are — the family stuff and sex are there because they’re human beings, but they’re subordinating this to the broader goal of making revolution and having the party flourish.
Joseph Torigian: Some more context that’s not directly relevant to what you’re saying, but that we saw very commonly in Yan’an, is that the old revolutionaries had wives they had married years before getting to the base area. Many of those wives had their own seniority, prestige, and status because of when they had joined the revolution and what they had done for it. But then these men left their wives for younger party cadres — women often from more privileged backgrounds with more education. Xi Zhongxun’s two marriages were something quite common in Yan’an — they divorced their first wives and married younger wives. Sometimes that was quite controversial.
For example, in Yan’an, Mao was married to a woman who had contributed and sacrificed a lot for the revolution, and he married another person who was an actor from Shanghai who had been in movies and whose life had been affected by rumors about her love life. When Mao started courting her, some people were unhappy about that. This was another element of the social fabric of what was happening in Yan’an during this period.
Jordan Schneider: It’s funny because Xi Jinping almost goes in the other direction where the first wife is too educated and too into the Western world, ends up moving to the UK and living out a global cosmopolitan lifestyle. Then he finds this woman whose background and worldview much more echo what he had from the perspective of coming into the party and forging and suffering.
But we shouldn’t jump that far ahead. Jon, bring us back.
Jon Sine: On the topic of Xi Zhongxun maybe not being that high-ranking at the time, in the late thirties and forties, he’s maybe just an alternate Central Committee member. He’s the head of a county called Suide 绥德, a sub-region of the Northwest.
Joseph Torigian: It was northeast of Yan’an. The first big jump of his life was really in 1945 when he became a candidate member of the Central Committee — he was very young. Then the next huge jump was when he became head of the Northwest Bureau that same year. Peng Dehuai and He Long (贺龙) were also very important figures in the Northwest, but for someone that young to have a position that weighty is one of the more striking parts of his story. He repeatedly was the youngest person in these very delicate positions. He kept winning over older people to support him. He had this habit of collecting big brothers — that’s something that marked his life.
Jon Sine: I wanted to talk about the Suide period when he was there. You’re pulling out these threads of contradictions and tensions that exist within this individual, as opposed to other biographies that might have more of a clear arc for narrative reasons. But it’s a through line — is he a reformer, is he conservative? These tensions run through land reform there, they run through political rectification that he goes through. Sometimes he seems to tone it down, but sometimes he also seems to be turning it up, which just actually means purging, potentially killing, leading to the deaths of people. How do you see that period, if we linger on that, as a harbinger of some of these contradictions?
Joseph Torigian: During the rectification in 1942, at this period, it focused on transformation and education. Xi Zhongxun was the dean of a university in Yan’an for a few months. Then in 1943, he went to the Suide sub-region, which you just mentioned. Their rectification turned into something called the Confession Movement or the Rescue the Fallen Campaign. Now it was looking for spies — it wasn’t just about taking these young people and turning them into good communists, but finding which ones were spies so they could be rescued. That required a whole new level of investigation, persecution, sometimes even torture, and it completely went off the rails.
Xi Zhongxun had a reputation for being more humane and pro-reform, but the Confession Campaign — the Rescue the Fallen Campaign — was really a case of political radicalism that Xi Zhongxun seems to have been pushing and we should ask why that was the case. In some ways, it’s a puzzle because just a few years earlier, he himself had been persecuted largely on trumped-up charges that resulted from people being forced to give false confessions. He knew this would happen.
Part of it was that the party told him to find spies, and of course he was going to find spies. Part of it was war hysteria — there was fear in 1943 that the Nationalists were going to invade. Also, the Communists had their own spies, making it easy to imagine that the Nationalists were sending agents into this region.
Xi Zhongxun had reasons to be loyal to and grateful to Mao for what we just described — Mao’s new version of history that must have been thrilling to the Northwesterners, crediting them as being on the right side of history along with Mao Zedong.
But Xi went very far, and the form these campaigns took in Suide were very interesting because they focused on a school and included lurid details about many of the young women allegedly being spies sent by Nationalists to infiltrate the party by essentially being honey traps.
Jordan Schneider: To be clear, by young, we mean one of the women who ended up getting caught up in this purge was fourteen. She’s supposedly some prostitute for the Nationalists who can barely write her name.
Joseph Torigian: They had mass rallies where these young people went up and lied about having been spies and having been sent on these missions. What’s interesting is that the target of these campaigns in Suide was this school, and Qi Xin was a student at this school. That’s when Qi Xin and Xi Zhongxun first started to get to know each other. He showed off this inscription that Mao gave him that said, “The party’s interests come first” — something she never forgot.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah. Relationships that start in high school purges tend to be the ones that really see you through the decades.
Joseph Torigian: You can see it was an electric atmosphere. That’s one way of putting it. But he also told her to be careful, otherwise she would be caught up in it. On one occasion, she visits one of the students being persecuted and even interviews her. It was a messy scene.
Post-1945: Surrogate Fathers and Succession
Jon Sine: We can move forward to the part where the Japanese are defeated in 1945. At some point, maybe two or three years into the Civil War, the Nationalists chase the Communist leadership out of Yan’an. What happens to Xi Zhongxun at this point?
Joseph Torigian: 1947 was a really interesting moment. Yan’an had been the Communist capital for many years and was a symbol of the Chinese Communist Party. Then the Nationalist General Hu Zongnan (胡宗南) attacked, and Xi Zhongxun was on the front line. He screwed up a really key battle, and the party was facing a real crisis. Peng Dehuai, a very famous military figure in Chinese history, was plucked from the Central Military Commission and ordered to command the Northwest forces. Xi Zhongxun worked for him. In the subsequent battles, it looks like the two of them basically got along.
Later in the 1940s, Xi Zhongxun also spent time on governance, civilian work, logistics, and land reform, where he worked under He Long 贺龙. On the military side, he worked under Peng Dehuai, and on the civilian side, he worked under He Long. These were very weighty positions, especially for someone young.
I want to dwell on this moment for just another second — how emotional it must have been for Xi Zhongxun in March 1947. He’s in Yan’an, the Nationalists are coming, and Mao refuses to leave. Mao was really frightening the people around him by staying in the city even as the Nationalists were at the very gates. It was Peng Dehuai and Xi Zhongxun who finally saw him off and then tried to create this rearguard action to hold off the Nationalists to ensure the Central Committee could escape. To have spent that much time building up Communist forces in this area and then see them destroyed by the Nationalists must have been another very emotional moment in his life.
Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun and Peng Dehuai, serving together, would be sleeping in the same room. Apparently Xi Zhongxun was quite the snorer. You write that Peng Dehuai would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and put his shoe on Xi Zhongxun’s face to wake him up and stop him from snoring.
Joseph Torigian: Comrades-in-arms.
Jordan Schneider: Dude, that’s sleep apnea. That’s serious.
Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai was famously mean to people under him, and Xi Zhongxun sometimes acted as a peacemaker, a mediator between Peng Dehuai and whoever Peng was mad at. Xi Zhongxun’s ability to manage interpersonal relationships was emerging here. Even though Peng could really yell at people and get agitated, he also had this communist egalitarian ethos. In that sense, it’s not surprising that he would be sleeping right next to Xi Zhongxun and waking him up with his shoes. It was this interesting mix of hierarchy and egalitarianism that we see in Peng Dehuai.
Jordan Schneider: He does have this LBJ energy to him.
Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting — a few years later, there were tensions between Xi Zhongxun and Deng Xiaoping over Tibet. Xi Zhongxun was very close to Peng Dehuai and one of his protégés. Xi Zhongxun went to complain to Peng about something, and Peng said to him, “You need to be careful because Peng likes to fire cannons.” Then of course, Peng fired a cannon in 1959 at the Lushan Plenum that led to people doubling down on the Great Leap Forward in tragic ways. Xi Zhongxun could read people pretty well sometimes.
Jon Sine: People who have heard of Peng Dehuai, maybe in the China field, probably remember him from the Great Leap Forward, which we will get into. But it speaks to this — at least to me—because my conception of him is drawn from this idea of good versus bad guy. He was the good guy who tried to stop the Great Leap Forward, and people read this back into history. But when you go through the details, you realize he was a very complex person who would be very angry. Everyone at this time was a killer.
Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai, too, if you read this wonderful book by Yen-Lin Chung, which is a biography of Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution. Shortly before Peng Dehuai was targeted in 1959, there had been a campaign of anti-dogmatism in the People’s Liberation Army. Peng was just brutal to people. He especially went after this very famous general named Su Yu 粟裕. Peng was a victim, but very shortly before that, he was a victimizer — another very complicated figure.
Jordan Schneider: The LBJ thing I was going for was this cultivating of older men and having these surrogate father figures.
Joseph Torigian: I could give a whole list for Xi Zhongxun. Even later in his life, he was still making new friends older than him, like Ye Jianying 叶剑英, a man with whom he had no historic ties, no career ties. Suddenly, Ye Jianying took a shine to him, sent him to Guangdong, and became a patron to him. It’s very interesting. Apparently in 1959, the person who nominated Xi Zhongxun to become a vice premier was Chen Yi 陈毅, another very powerful marshal who apparently only really worked with Xi Zhongxun on the State Council for a few years in the 1950s but seems to have liked him. It’s really interesting.
There are reasons this might have been the case. Xi Zhongxun could be charming. These older men who liked to drink — Xi Zhongxun could roll with them in a lifestyle sense. He was good at his job, good at intuiting what people wanted, and could manage personal relations. That’s why he did United Front work. He was a Northwesterner — he wasn’t a Long Marcher. He had been orphaned, essentially, when Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, and then Gao Gang were gone. He was looking for big brothers. He needed big brothers. Maybe these big brothers didn’t really feel threatened by him because the Northwesterners as a group weren’t really that frightening.
Jordan Schneider: He was young, too.
Joseph Torigian: They were thinking about succession — how are we going to hand over the reins to somebody who knows what they’re doing? We need to test these people and give them an opportunity to show whether they’re good at it and gain experience. He was the youngest vice premier in 1959, the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee in 1945, and the youngest major figure from a regional bureau brought to Beijing in 1952. Then, when he went back to work in the 1980s, he never quite reached the top. In fact, he was sent to work for Hu Yaobang, who was much younger than him and had much less revolutionary prestige. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll pick up the story in 1949.
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I learned so much from Torigian’s book, especially about the CCP and intra-party politics and how hard it is to maintain power and favor in the party hothouse. Nuanced portrait of Deng, too. This interview feels like… what would I compare it to… sipping an ice-cold classic Daiquiri on a hot day. We live in a time when Caro and Kotkin are alive and working… and scholars like Torigian are the next generation. What a privilege.
wow great article thanks. Gotta get the book.
Politicians the world over huh? Wherever you go...