Book Talk | The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

The Party’s Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People’s Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one’s own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party’s demands. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping’s father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP—and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.

Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He has previously held positions  at Stanford's Hoover History Lab, the China in the World Program at Australian National University, the Council on Foreign Relations, Princeton-Harvard's China and the World Program, Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, George Washington University's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and Fudan University in Shanghai. His books include Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao (Yale University Press, 2022) and The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025).