The Party's Interests Come First

Selected as a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, BBC History Magazine, New Indian Express, and Marginal Revolution

"[A] masterly biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's present-day president, Xi Jinping.... [A] scrupulously researched and keenly perceptive account of an important but, in the West, little-known historical figure."—Robert B. Zoellick, The Wall Street Journal

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world—and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.

The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the party's demands. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping's father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP—and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.