This is CBS I on the World. I'm John Batser, 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.

So it was the princeling that made the application.

Is that correct?

At that time, they had that concept?

So it was, I think, more the case that Xi Jinping was someone who had spent a lot of time in the countryside,

someone who had joined the party and had shown some competence, but whether or not the fact that he was a princeling had an impact,

I think that's possible, but it wouldn't have been an official consideration then. And of course,

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