The Making of Xi Jinping

Aaron MacLean (0:00)

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You instructed me that in your entire life, you never persecuted people, and you always maintain the truth. No matter whether it was the era of the White Terror, or the period of extreme leftism. No matter whether you were liable against, or you were in a difficult situation, in your heart, there was a bright lantern that always kept you on the correct path forward. When people yelled at us for being bastards, I always stubbornly believe that my father was a great hero. That he was a father most worthy of feeling proud.

Those words were written by Xi Jinping, the leader of China, in a letter to his father, Xi Zhongxun, a man who in his own life ascended to the highest reaches of Chinese Communist Party power and intimate of Mao Zedong, a man who helped govern China through the famine of the Great Leap Forward. By the way, for somebody who claims never to have persecuted anybody, bore some substantial responsibility for those millions of deaths. And then only to be all but destroyed by the madness of the Cultural Revolution, which saw Xi the father thrown into solitary confinement, his daughter commit suicide and his party princeling son, Xi Jinping, exiled to the countryside, where he lived in a cave reading revolutionary literature.

Today, on School of War, the life and times of Xi Jinping's father, a man whom the party betrayed, but who never betrayed the party. Let's get into it.

Joseph Torigian (2:13)

It is the prescription for war.

Aaron MacLean (2:47)

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Joseph Torigian. He is Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also teaches at American University's School of International Service, amongst other affiliations. His book that we're gonna be discussing today is really magnificent. It's called The Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. And he's gonna politely not correct my pronunciation to any kind of notable degree.

Joseph, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Joseph Torigian (3:21)

Thanks so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast.

Aaron MacLean (3:24)

Thank you for saying so. The book really is outstanding. And I really encourage really anybody who's watching the show or listening to the show who wants to understand China today to read it, which is a weird thing to say in a way because it's not a biography of Xi Jinping. It's a biography of his father. But I sort of harbored the prejudice that to understand people, you have to understand their parents. I think to understand men in particular, it's helpful to understand their fathers because fathers kind of have you trapped. You're either spending your life emulating them or spending your life running from them or often some complicated combination of the two. And your survey here is just kind of magnificent. And I want to open with a very broad question for you.

And then we'll kind of go through the father's life. But it's sort of ironic seeming if what you know about communism is that it seeks on some level, well, to level the human experience and it exists in great tension with institutions like the family.

That what you document here is a family relationship that is at the core of the story of the Communist Party in China and indeed an interlocking series of family relationships and personal relationships that sort of dominate the history of the policy. You've reflected on this irony yourself at various points. How would you help us make sense of it?

Joseph Torigian (4:54)

You know, it's funny, Aaron, I've done a couple podcasts on the book and often I get the same questions. And this is the first time I've been asked this.

What does it mean to have a book about a family that is a Communist family? And one of the things that I tried to draw out in the book, sometimes more explicitly, sometimes less, is the ways that the Communist Party and the family are similar to each other and ways that they clash against each other, right? And so Xi Jinping, he has this idea that the family is the first place where you should learn values that coincide with Communism. Because for him, the meaning of life is to put something bigger than yourself at the center of it. It's basically a message of collectivist values, right? It's about sacrifice, it's about authority, it's about getting along with people that maybe you don't want to get along with, and it's about knowing what your role is and having respect for that role, right? These are quite conservative values. And so for the Xi family, Xi Jinping's father was very strict, right? And it was rooted in this idea that was both a peasant family, essentially, but linked with this Bolshevik worldview that suffering was good for you, right? That discipline was good for you because it revealed how serious you were and made you tougher, right? And so for Xi Jinping, that was the milieu in which he grew up in the family. But he also grew up in the milieu of the Chinese Communist Party, right? So he was going to a school that was primarily for offspring of high-ranking military leaders. And there too, he was taught about the value of doing what you're told and how that's life's highest meaning, and that even if you are told to do something that you profoundly disagree with, when that happens, you need to ask yourself, what's wrong with you, not what's wrong with the party? And so there were these actually theorists, both in the Soviet Union and in China, of what kind of family values were the best for inculcating a good communist. But in your introduction, you raised something very interesting, right? Which is, in that kind of environment, there are lots of people who say, yeah, I do want to be an inheritor to the revolution. It's so exciting that my father regaled me with all these legends, and I want to be just like that. I want to continue to bring the revolution to its final stages, and I want to achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese people. But other people who were treated poorly, both by their own family and by the party, decided that they didn't want to put up with it any more, and they reflected in different ways, and they reacted in different ways, right? And so you can be a reflection or a reaction, or some mixture of the two.