I'm John Batchezer with Joseph Tarigian.

The book is The Party's Interest Come First.

I highly recommend it to those of us who routinely have to generalize about China.

This is the man himself, Xi Jinping's father.

And the elements of mystery here are everywhere.

I go to one particular night. Another

scene out of a novel. She Jinping is a teenager and he's with his family and he escapes one

night from the persecution he's suffering and runs to his mother. She leaves him and denounces him. He's hungry. They don't feed him.

It's a flabbergasting. I believe this is 1916, 1979. I'm not sure the date, Joseph. That is

very strange conduct, especially by his mother, who otherwise in your story comes across, is holding the family together.

What was going on in the family at that point?

Well, I think maybe counterintuitively she was doing that to hold the rest of the family together,

because she is taking care of other siblings, other children.

And she's afraid that if she protects Xi Jinping after he's fled from this incarceration,

that she would be punished and that it would be even harder for her to take care of her family.

So we have to remember the political situation in which the family found itself.

It's one in which the party is putting pressure on everyone to betray their own family.

And so it puts them in extraordinarily difficult situations.

And so they have to question whether or not

they're going to condemn their wives or their husbands

and how to also protect themselves

so that they can continue to help the people that they can.

...