Orville Schell
Given the flood of books on China that has poured forth in recent years, one might think the rest of the world would have figured out that provocative country by now. But much of China’s historical evolution continues to defy Western understanding, and many of its leaders remain tantalizing conundrums—few more so than Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China. Having watched him up close on official trips, once in 2015 with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and once during U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 trip to China, I’ve encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little about what’s going on inside their heads. With a Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile permanently etched on his face, Xi’s mien is hard to read.
Opacity may have been a skill Xi learned as a child, according to Joseph Torigian’s prodigiously researched epic The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. Torigian quotes the Chinese historian Gao Wenqian, who suggests that after watching his father’s fall from grace within the CCP, Xi learned the art of “forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.” Xi Zhongxun, a close colleague of Mao Zedong’s, had been intensely loyal to both the party and its revolution, only to be repaid with political persecution, abuse, imprisonment, and domestic exile. This was the world in which Xi Jinping came of age.
As Torigian observes, the history of internal CCP dynamics confronts scholars, especially those not from China, with “one of the most difficult research targets in the world.” Not only do they have to contend with the formidable language barrier, but the CCP is so sensitive about having its dirty laundry aired in public that it goes to great lengths to distort its historical record with propaganda and to keep embarrassing documents off-limits. The result is an official history that is immaculately well scrubbed and ordered lest it reveal any fallibility.
But peek behind the veil, and a different reality reveals itself: a dog-eat-dog world of power struggles, artifice, hubris, treachery, and duplicity—yet also an enormous amount of sacrifice. By limning the life of Xi Zhongxun in such extraordinary detail, Torigian helps readers see behind the veil and understand the political crucibles in which father and son were “forged,” the term both use to describe how they were shaped by revolutionary hardship and struggle.
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