I'm John Batchel with Joseph Tariggy and the author of the new book, The Party's Interest Come First.

I highly recommend it to those of us who have to make generalities about China because this makes it a family affair.

You pay attention to what Xi Jinping learned as a child, as a young man, as a success.

And the success comes almost in Shakespearean fashion within moments. learned as a child, as a young man, as a success.

And the success comes almost in Shakespearean fashion within moments of the death of the father.

In 1999, the father returns.

Deng Xiaoping is dead so he can come back to the capital.

Cancer is discovered, I believe, in 2001.

And in 2002, the father dies of cancer.

Is Xi at his deathbed or was he busy at the top?

I don't remember.

Was he in America?

Where was Xi Jinping, the son?

Xi Jinping was in one of the southern provinces.

Right.

And Xi Jinping had spent his last weeks in Beijing.

He had moved back there when they discovered the cancer in his body for treatment.

It was a very sudden death.

The family was quite shocked by how quickly it happened. This is a very senior figure with an institutional memory, having been through

all sorts of blows to his family, to himself, to having to recant things that he knew were true,

and yet he leaves, what is it, a poem that's on his gravestone, a life of, a life of, is that the word struggle?

A life, no, a life of happiness.

...