1/8 The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of XI Zhongxun, Father of XI Jinping Hardcover – 3 June 2025 by Joseph Torigian (Author)

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 7 June 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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1/8 The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of XI Zhongxun, Father of XI Jinping Hardcover – 3 June 2025 by Joseph Torigian (Author)

https://www.amazon.com.au/Partys-Interests-Come-First-Zhongxun/dp/1503634752/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one Cf the most powerful individuals inCtheCworld--and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the Party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.

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.
1910 MAO

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0:00.0	This is CBS Eye on the World.
0:08.0	Here's John Batchelor.
0:10.0	This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Batchel.
0:15.0	Xi Jinping, much in the news, the General Secretary of the People's Republic of China
0:20.0	for an unprecedented third term
0:22.2	in the 21st century.
0:24.9	We travel now to the 20th century, very early in the second decade, thanks to Joseph Tarigian.
0:31.8	His new book, The Party Interest Come First, is a biography of Xi Jinping's father, a profile of his family, and a glimpse
0:41.3	through the eyes of the protagonist, Xi Zhang Shun, of the transformation of China into
0:49.3	the success today except. The unknowns are very large, and Joseph helps me understand some of them.
0:58.5	Joseph, a very good evening too.
1:00.2	You are an associate professor at the School of International Service at the American University.
1:07.8	And you've published a book that is overwhelming to me, a first-time reader of
1:13.7	Chinese communist history. I congratulate you and look immediately to understand this without
1:21.4	any Freudianism. I'm not projecting here, but fathers and sons. In the West, we regard this as a profound relationship that explains a deal.
1:32.4	Hence, we have dramas that talk about edible complexes or not. Do they have the same thinking in China about fathers and sons?
1:41.5	Good evening to you, Joseph. Thank you so much for having me. There is a
1:45.8	famous aphorism in Chinese that says if there is a son like that, then he must have had a father
1:52.2	like this. So there is a similar view in China that you can learn a lot from the father about the son.
1:59.3	And of course, it's a Confucian society in which the father plays a
2:02.4	crucial role in the family. So I don't want to project too much, but wow, the drama here.
2:08.6	Let's begin. 1913, our protagonist, whose name is Zhang Shun, first name, Xi, is born into what he describes himself as a poor peasant family
	...

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