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For the rest of time. Yes. Okay. Good.

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.

Xi 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 1960, 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.

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