This is CBS. I on the world. I'm John Bastog, continuing a conversation with Joseph Tarigian,

a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, his new book. The party interests come first. The title is Mao Tse Tong's

opinion of our protagonist, Xi Zhongshun, the father of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the People's Republic of China.

It is fall of 1935, and here comes Mao and the long marchers.

They've been wandering around without a sure destination, and Joseph tells me that Mao read about

Shanzhi province in a newspaper.

Mao shows up and where's our hero.

Joseph, why was he detained at this point when Mao wrote in with the long marches?

What did he done?

Xi.

So this is certainly a dramatic moment in the life of Xi Zhongshin, the father of Xi Jinping.

Xi Zhongshin was a revolutionary in the northwest. But during this period, there was a lot of

mistrust among the communists. And some of them thought they should be more ambitious and aggressive,

and some of them thought they should be more careful and not get themselves killed.

And normally this would just be a dispute among people with reasonable different of opinions,

but in the Chinese Communist Party, it wasn't that simple.

When you disagreed with someone, you accused them of ideological heresy and you feared that

they were doing something different from you because

they were a traitor because they were working for the enemy. So Xi Zhongshun is accused of being a

rightist. He's thrown in jail. He thinks that he might be facing execution. At least that's the

story that he told decades after. And then suddenly Mao and the other long marchers,

who's been kicked out of Jiangxi in the south of China and have been marching throughout the

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