The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

The Party’s Interests Come First is the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping. It is both a story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People’s Republic of China and a personal account of developing one’s own sense of identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian introduces Xi Zhongxun. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, worked closely with top leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang, and oversaw the Special Economic Zones that launched China’s reform era. 

In an interview conducted on August 21, 2025, Joseph Torigian, in conversation with Victor Shih, explores the organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the Chinese Communist Party through the life of Xi Zhongxun – and the huge cost in human suffering that accompanies it.

Speaker

Joseph Torigian

Joseph Torigian is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., and an associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was a visiting fellow at the China in the World Program at Australian National University, a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a postdoctoral (and predoctoral) fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. His first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, was published in 2022.

Moderator

Victor Shih

vVictor Shih, a professor of political science, holds the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego, and is director of the 21st Century China Center. He is an expert on the politics of China’s fiscal and financial policies, as well as the elite politics of China. Dr. Shih is the author of two books published by the Cambridge University Press: Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation and Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi. An active member of the China Data Lab, he is also constructing a large database on biographical information of elites in China, as well as the activities of the elite. Dr. Shih is a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program fellow.