Hi, I'm Joe Wiley. And I'm Soie Ball. And we're here to tell you about a brand new podcast, Digit.

Digit is all about the things that Joe and I love. From the kids to the parents and all the stuff in between.

There's a lot going on when you get to this age. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch every episode on Spotify. Dig it. Every week. Every week.

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

This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batscher, visiting with Joseph Tarigian.

His book, The Party's Interest Come First, is the life of Xi Jinping's father,

Zhang Shun.

We're following father and son now because they have a very strong relationship.

We're told that Xi Jinping is the favorite son, the bright one.

There are daughters, there are sons, and they all admit to this.

There are tragedies within the family.

One of the daughters, a half-sister to Xi Jinping, hangs herself surprisingly in a dormitory,

a young woman at the time, and that very much burdens Xi Jinping. But in 1975, he emerges from the countryside for Shinghua University

in Beijing, one of two appointments, I believe, for the whole province or maybe the whole country.

How did he get that job, Joseph?

So during the Cultural Revolution, to get into university, you didn't take a test.

Tests were seen as bourgeois.

So you needed to be seen as politically reliable.

You needed to be someone who got a good recommendation. And so there

was someone at Tsinghua University, a quite prominent figure actually who saw Xi Jinping's

application and brought him there. So it was essentially a case of the system deciding who it

wanted to bring in for political considerations as opposed to a merit-based system.

...