One way to examine the thinking and ruling style of Chinese President Xi Jinping: his father’s role in the rise and evolution of Chinese-brand communism. Hoover research fellow Joseph Torigian, author of the recently released The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, discusses how the elder Xi’s involvement in the Red Army, economic political reform, working alongside Zhou Enlai and dealing with ethnic minorities and organized religion – plus years of political exile after running afoul of Maoist sensibilities – all play into how his son runs the modern-day Chinese Communist Party.
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>> Bill Whalen (00:03):
It's Friday, July 25, 2025.
And welcome back to Matters of Policy andPolitics, a Hoover Institution podcast
devoted to governance and balance of powerhere in America and around the world.
I'm Bill Whelan.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution.
I'm not the only Hoover fellowwho's podcasting these days.
And if you don't trust me, go to ourwebsite, which is hoover.org/podcast, and
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you'll see the wholelineup of podcasts there.
That includes, by the way, the audioversion of the Goodfellows show that we do
for YouTube with Neil Ferguson,John Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster.
So definitely check that out.
Today we turn our attention tothe other side of the Pacific Rim, and
that would be China, specifically Chineseleadership and the man behind the man,
if you will, the father ofthe current president of China.
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And joining me today forthis conversation is Joseph Turigian.
Joseph Turigian is a Hoover Institutionresearch fellow as well as an associate
professor at American University Schoolof International Service.
He is the author of the recentrelease book titled
the Party's Interest Comes First.
It's a biography ofa gentleman named Xi Jeongjun,
the father ofChina's President Xi Jinping.
Joseph, thanks for coming on the podcast.
>> Joseph Torigian (01:08):
Thanks so much for having me.
>> Bill Whalen (01:10):
And I'll apologize for butchering the father's name,
you correct me on that.
The correct pronunciation is?
>> Joseph Torigian (01:16):
Xi Zhongshun.
>> Bill Whalen (01:17):
Thank you. Very, very well done.
>> Joseph Torigian (01:18):
You were close.
>> Bill Whalen (01:19):
Thank you. Well-
>> Joseph Torigian (01:20):
Very close.
>> Bill Whalen (01:21):
I tried.
One thing I did mention in the intro isthat one of the things you do at Hoover is
you are involved in Hoover's history lab.
Can you tell us a bitabout the history lab?
>> Joseph Torigian (01:29):
Yeah. So Stephen Kotkin created
the Hoover History Lab because he thought,like the people that he has been bringing
to the lab, that you can learn a lot fromhistory to understand what's going on.
Today, I've taught as part of this labat Stanford, a class on Chinese and
Russian politics and foreign policythat combines history with theory and
method and tries to give people a senseof what happened in the past so they have
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the analytical lens to get a sense ofwhat's going on in those countries today.
>> Bill Whalen (01:59):
And I should point out that this book is actually part of
a Stanford Hoover series onauthoritarianism, correct?
>> Joseph Torigian (02:06):
That's correct.
And there's another synergy here,which is that I used many,
many materials from the Hoover archives,including the spectacular diaries
of a man named Li Ray who worked directlyfor Mao Zedong and knew the Xi family.
>> Bill Whalen (02:20):
Okay, so let me ask you a question.
At summertime, people are takingbooks with them when they travel.
If I ask you to give me three books onauthoritarianism in addition to yours,
three more book books,Suggest three books for me.
Would you give me, say,Steve Calkins books on Stalin?
>> Joseph Torigian (02:36):
You took one away from me.
I certainly would havesuggested his books.
I also love David Holloway's books and
he is emeritus at Stanford,especially his Stalin and the Bomb.
I think that is a wonderful book.
I also am a big fan of Fred Tevis andWarren Sun.
Their last book is about China in the lastyears of the Cultural Revolution.
(02:59):
I think that's a terrific book.
And for the third book, there are somany different possibilities.
I'd have to think about that for a second.
I'm curious while I think,do you have one that you would recommend?
>> Bill Whalen (03:10):
No, I was gonna.
I think I shot my wad with Kotkin andStalin, if you will,
your knowledge on more than me.
But let's take this a different way.
If you were to do a Mount Rushmore ofauthoritarian figures, let's say for
the 20th century,who would you put up there?
You have four choices, let's assumemaybe Mao and Stalin or two of them.
>> Joseph Torigian (03:28):
That's also a really terrific question.
I probably would put one member ofthe Kim family up there in North Korea.
I have done some work on North Korea.
There's another talk that I gave at aparc,
which is also at Stanford,where I reflected on where Russia and
China and North Korea find themselvesthis year for the anniversary and
(03:50):
the parade that Vladimir Putin hadin Moscow in May for the fourth one.
That's a terrific question.
Actually, it's not a book, it's a movie.
But in terms of a cultural product that Iwould suggest for people who want to get
a sense of authoritarianism,there was an Iranian movie.
Your listeners will be able to findit if I give them enough information.
(04:12):
But it's something thatthe Fig Tree that came out,
I think, this year or the year beforeabout authoritarianism in Iran.
And I think that is really a spectacularmovie to watch because it deals with a lot
of the themes that come out in my bookon Xi Zhongfin, generational politics,
how you keep the revolution alive,the relationship between the state and
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society, how you use carrots and sticksat the same time, but most importantly,
what it does to figures who are membersof these regimes when they do have their
own views, but ultimately putthe interests of the regime first.
And what it means morally andwhat it means practically for them and
their families,>> Bill Whalen: right?
So, Joseph, Fathers and sons is a favoritetrope of American political journalist.
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If you were to run for the presidency andgetting traction and getting somewhere,
invariably somebody would run a piece and
they'd want to talk abouthow Joseph Trigian is or
is not a product of his father, how hisold man rubbed off on him, and et cetera.
I would contend this is a very hit or
miss proposition when itcomes to American politics.
If you want to try topsychoanalyze Donald Trump.
(05:18):
I'm not sure if Fred Trump is where Iwould go for Trump being his father, but
if I were psychoanalyzing John F.
Kennedy, andI've been reading Kennedy books lately,
yeah, I would make a beelineto Joseph Patrick Kennedy.
But in this case, it's very easy to do, inpart because there is a treasure trove of
information Jon Joe Kennedy,JFK, the Kennedys in general.
You could go to the Kennedy library,you could go to the FDR library,
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as the elder Kennedy washis ambassador to Britain.
You could go to newspaper archives.
You could find just a tonof books to write on.
Pretty easy stuff.
But I'm assuming when you'rewriting about Xi Jinping's father,
it's not like there's a lot ofinformation there in front of you.
So tell us where you went digging.
You mentioned, for example,the Hoover archives.
Well, you're right. When you write a book about a political
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family, the psychologicalelement has to be there.
You have to at least broach it,
because otherwise the people who read yourbook are going to be very disappointed.
And so many people who've reviewedthe book, they focused on this, Right.
Like what it meant for Xi Jinping asa young person to grow up in this family.
But, you know, what I tried to do withthe book as well was to depict what it
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was like to be a member of the ChineseCommunist party during the 20th century
and to use the story ofXi Jinping's father to get
a sense of what its membershipwent through and what.
And what the country went through.
And the other reason, I think, you know,
we need to be careful withthe psychological aspect,
especially for the book that I just wrote,which is that the details are scarce.
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Right.And so when you talk to professionals who
work in mental health,they refuse to diagnose people from afar.
Right.It's part of their guild.
And I'm not even trained in mental health.
Right.So I included the material that I did know
about, but I didn't want to essentializethe whole story of Xi Jinping
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down to what he experienced when he was,was a young person.
And so, what do you do whenthe evidence is so scattered?
Well, it's not just scattered forXi Jinping for
reasons that emerge from my book.
He thinks about history all the timebecause he has this view that one of
the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed isthey lost control of their history and
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nobody believed in it anymore.
And so for Xi Jinping, a member ofa Leninist party, he has this idea,
this fixation that if you don't seethe past as one victory to another,
people won't sacrifice forthat kind of an organization.
And for him the party is all about puttingthe interests of the organization ahead of
your own right.
And so you can't just go to onearchive and collect the evidence and
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then write it up.
You need to have a sensitivity topossibilities and not limitations, and so
bring a sort of detective.
Detective mindset, ormaybe a journalist mindset, and
just keep collecting materials that are ofa variety of different backgrounds and
spend a lot of time on it,contextualize everything that you have and
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then create a mosaic where you havesome things colored in better, but
other elements remain a little bit lessunderstood or even a bit of a mystery.
So one thing that I did is I made a listof every time Xi Jinping's father met with
a foreigner and I interviewed thatforeigner or I went to their archives.
There was a lot of material publishedoutside of mainland censorship in
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Hong Kong and Taiwan.
There was an ability to go to China tocollect materials and speak to people.
Even their official sources canbe quite significant, right?
So in terms of just mining biographicaldetails, or you take that kind of thing
and put it in the context of somethingyou got from somewhere else and
suddenly it's very meaningful.
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And then finally you have material that'skind of gotten out of the party in one
way or another that's intended forinternal circulation.
I mentioned the Lee Ray diaries earlier,but there's actually also a lot of
documents that are available at placeslike Stanford and Princeton that because
they lost control over their archivesduring the Cultural Revolution,
are actually now more available inthe United States than they are in China.
>> Bill Whalen (09:21):
You know, American politics changed vastly in 1992,
Joseph, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore ranon the Democratic ticket, both gentlemen
were more than happy to stretch themselveson the couch and talk about their fathers.
In Clinton's case,it was the biological father.
He never knew.
Remember, his father died in a car crash.
Al Gore's case, his father was a senatorand was apparently very hard to please.
So the younger Gore talkedabout inadequacies and
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trying to live up tothe old man's expectations.
But I, I assume that there is no suchequivalent of People magazine in China.
And I don't think you're going tofind Xi Jinping on record talking
much about his father.
>> Joseph Torigian (09:53):
So he does talk about his
father,>> Bill Whalen: does he?
And so, but we have to understand that when you have figures like
Xi Jinping or other high ranking membersof the elite, they have their own views,
and then they have the views that theythink that they express publicly.
And we can't immediately assumethat everything is a lie.
(10:13):
And it's also meaningful to thinkabout why they portray the past in
a particular way.
And so when I look at whatXi Jinping said about his father,
even when he is mischaracterizingthings to a more or less extent,
that itself also is very revealing.
>> Bill Whalen (10:29):
Let's talk about the father.
So the father is born in October of 1913.
He dies in May of 2002.
So he lives about 90 years.
Good run.
He joins the Communistyouth league in 1926.
So he is 12 going on 13 at the time.
Why would he jointhe Communist Youth League at that time?
Was it the cool thing to do?
Was he running away from something?
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Was he running towards something?
>> Joseph Torigian (10:52):
Yeah. So let's talk about what kind of milieu he
was growing up in.
He was born two years afterthe collapse of the Qing Dynasty.
He was born Shanxi, near the city of Xi'.
An.
Xi' an had been the capital from whichChinese emperors had ruled for millennia.
Many of your listeners probably haveheard of the terracotta soldiers.
That's why they are in Xi',
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an, is because the first unifiedChinese state was created there.
But by the time xijungfinha was born,this was an area that
had suffered years of banditry andfamine and civil war.
And the whole country, of course,
was facing encroachments from the west andJapan.
And so there was a sense thatsomething needed to change.
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There was a sense thatthe country needed to be saved.
And interestingly enough,in his early years,
the Communists were in an alliancewith the Nationalists, right?
So they were working together throughmuch of the 1920s against the warlords.
And so there was an opening forXi Zhongshun to read Communist literature.
(11:56):
Now, use the word cool.
That's actually quite a good term to use,because at this age,
he didn't really understand Marx.
He didn't really understand Das Kapital.
He wasn't really ruminating onthe finer points of this ideology,
but there was a sense that radicalism and
being more radical was betterthan being less radical.
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And so when you're a student and
your country is facing those kindsof extraordinary challenges,
it's conducive to you to thinkin this kind of way, I think.
And that's what happened to Xi Zhongxun>> Bill Whalen: in the 1930s.
He joins the Red Army.
So he joins the Chinese Communist Party in prison.
And then the Nationalists, of course,did betray the Communists butchered and
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massacred many of them,including within Shaanxi.
And then Xi Zhongshun, even though he'sa wanted man, is sent to join the local
Nationalist force undercover in hopes ofconvincing them to do an insurrection.
The insurrection is another failure.
And then he goes to the base areasbecause the Party realized that you're
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not going to win in the cities.
The cities are just not the rightplace for you to eke victories.
And so they start to gradually move inthis direction of first building up
their forces in areas that are muchharder for the Nationalists to control.
>> Bill Whalen (13:20):
And how does he fit into the greater scheme of the army?
What is his specialty?
What is his forte?
>> Joseph Torigian (13:24):
You know, it's interesting, right?
So he wasn't a military figure and
he wasn't really the onewho was devising campaigns.
And that doesn't mean that hewas an insignificant person.
It does mean that he wasn't.
You know, he didn't.
You got a lot of prestigious statusby being a good war fighter, right?
I mean, that's how Mao Zedong andDeng Xiaoping became so respected.
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But he was good at logistics,he was good at governance,
but he was especially good on at the socalled united front.
So what's the United Front?
Well, it's what the party callsits efforts to empower and
work with allies that are not membersof the party and then co opt and
win over people whoare sort of in the middle.
(14:09):
And so during the revolution,Xi Jin was really good at, or
at least he became better and better.
It was not exactly easy at findingNationalists who he could convince to
either work for the communists orat least not actively work against them.
And so what he took the greatest pride induring the war against the Nationalists
(14:29):
was his ability essentially to usepolitical operations, of course,
in conjunction with military forceto affect those kinds of outcomes.
>> Bill Whalen (14:38):
Okay, he has a connection to Zhou Enlai.
>> Joseph Torigian (14:41):
Yeah, so Zhou Enlai, of course, maybe along with Mao and Dong,
one of the most famous members of theChinese Communist party during the 20th
century.
And you know, there's this idea I think,among a lot of people who watch China from
the outside, that it's a storyof good guys and bad guys.
And as more evidence is coming out,
Zhou is coming out asa more complicated figure.
(15:03):
And that is part of whatwe see in my book as well.
So Xi Zhongshun was sort of Zhou Enlai'sright hand man for much of the 1950s,
early 1960s.
And Xi Zhongshun wouldhave seen certain things.
He would have seen how Mao ritually andregularly humiliated Zhou Enlai.
He would have seen how whenthe Great Leap Forward started,
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Zhou Enlai was forced to givea very long self criticism.
He would have seen how Zhou Enlai wouldhave facilitated the Great Leap even as it
was becoming increasingly clearthat it was the disaster.
And we see in the 1980s there was thismoment where the party leadership was
debating whether to destroy the documentsthat were the most incriminating about
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Zhou Enlai andXi Chung as part of those conversations,
those documents were destroyed.
And it was around that time,as we know from Li Ray's diaries,
that Xi Zhengxun expresseda somewhat negative opinion of Zhou.
And we don't know.
Exactly what that was, but he knewJoe well and he saw those documents.
>> Bill Whalen (16:05):
And he also works for someone who's less of a Chinese household
name, and that is Hu Yao Bang, but he isinvolved in economic political reform.
>> Joseph Torigian (16:12):
So, yeah, it's very interesting.
Right.So Joan Lai was the chief implementer for
mao in the 1950s, and Huyaobang wassort of the chief implementer for
Deng xiaoping in the 1980s.
And Xi Jinping was the right-hand man forboth of those periods, so
it was really a front row seatto seeing how the elite works.
And history kind of repeatsitself both in the 50s and 80s,
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where you have these deputies,Zhou Enlai and then Hu Yaobang,
who are both totally loyal to Mao,totally dedicated to Mao, and then.
And then to Deng again in the 1980s.
And there are different figures,Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang.
Zhou Enlai was very careful.
Hu Yaobang was a little bit less careful.
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But they both really,
really struggled to manage theirrelationship with the top leader.
Part of that was relatedto succession politics.
Part of that was related to the factthat Mao and Dong weren't always
exactly sure what they wanted to do andthat they changed their mind and
that there were other competitorswithin the elite that didn't like them.
And Xi Zhongsheng wouldhave seen all of it.
And I write about it in my book.
>> Bill Whalen (17:15):
Okay. Two other aspects
of his career that caught my eye.
He's involved in the party's efforts withethnic minorities, Uyghurs, for example.
>> Joseph Torigian (17:22):
Yeah, in a way.
The book is also a book abouthow China at different times,
has thought about different models forits relationship with ethnic minorities.
And so in the last years of the 1940s andearly years of the 1950s,
Xi Zhongshun was the leader of the socalled Northwest Bureau,
which included a huge part of what isnow the People's Republic of China,
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including Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as well asTibetans who lived in Gansu and Shanghai.
And Xi Jinping was sortof figuring things out.
He was trying to figure outwhen you use repression, but
also when you try to win peopleover by empowering them and
co opting them and bringing theminto the regime as supporters.
And the story of the 1950s is a storyof gradually moving away from that.
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And by 1958, it's literally a war bythe party against its own people.
And precisely these areas that Xi Zhongxunhad helped incorporate into the PRC.
And then in the 1980s, Xi Zhongshunwhen he's working for Hu Yaobang,
one of his primary tasks is managingrelations with ethnic minorities.
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And so we see him negotiating withthe Dalai Lama's emissaries in Beijing.
We see him purging the leadersof the Tibet Autonomous Region
because he thinks they'retoo conservative.
And we also see by the end of the 1980s,the party deciding that this model that
they had experimented with after theCultural Revolution of economic growth and
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bringing religion into the open to bettercontrol it and co opting grievances,
that in their mind it just empoweredpeople to hurt the party as opposed to,
as opposed to win them over.
And that's a problematicconclusion to draw.
But Xi Junction was at the verycenter of those debates.
>> Bill Whalen (19:09):
And at one point, Joseph,
he is the party's point personon Catholicism in China.
Can you explain how organized religiongets along with a state like China,
which does not believe in religion,just does not want to encourage religion?
How do the two coincide?
>> Joseph Torigian (19:26):
Yeah. You know, it's funny,
when I give talks about Xi Zhongsheng,one of the themes that I discuss is how
this is a person who saw a lot ofmeaning in forging and suffering, right?
And that he would take pride in the factthat he suffered more than others.
He saw it as a kind of way ofcredentialing his status within the party.
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And sometimes people whowent to Catholic school for
high school will come up tome after my talk is over and
say there's certain things thatare a little bit familiar to me.
And so when Xijong hin was dealing withCatholics, even in these party texts,
you get a sense that they see something alittle familiar there, which is, you know,
a group of people for whom religion,by which I mean, you know, the Catholics,
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that that is the definingfeature of their lives.
It's very hierarchical, right?
You have the Pope and everyone issupposed to listen to the Pope.
You have these set of texts, but then youalso need to discern what the texts mean.
And so she andthe other people around him are like, wow,
these are not easy people to deal with.
(20:29):
And they talk about howthey're very well organized,
how they're the onesinfiltrating the party.
And so they, they struggle withwhat the right approach is, right?
Because on the one hand,what you can do is think about how
you recognize what the Catholic'sown challenges are,
and then you work with themto better co opt them.
And you need to figure out who's on yourside and empower them and who's not and
(20:50):
weaken them, and you also need to figureout what to do about the Vatican, right?
Like, this is reallythe sticking point for
them because they see the Catholic Churchessentially as a tool of the imperialists,
especially American imperialists.
And so you have these wild speechesby people like Xi Zhongshun,
where you have a very sort of thoughtfulset of remarks about that sort of show
that he intuits what kind of situationthe Catholics find themselves in.
(21:15):
And then you see this really radical,leftist, communist,
you know, aggressive sort ofsometimes in the same speech, right?
And what's interesting is he also at onepoint said about some priests that they
needed to be more devout so that theycould act as better representatives of
the party within their own communities,right?
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And so then when you look at the Catholicsand they're in a moral quandary, right,
because they want to be loyal to theVatican, they want to be loyal to their
beliefs, but at the same time,they want to protect their flock, and
they want to make sure that there'sspace for what they're doing.
And so they're put in this very, verydifficult position both in the 1950s and
(21:57):
then, and then again in the 1980s when,which are the two periods
in which Xi Zhongsheng is mostprominently involved in Catholic affairs.
>> Bill Whalen (22:06):
What would happen today if you were Chinese and
you walked around Shanghai orBeijing with a cross around your neck?
>> Joseph Torigian (22:12):
I think you would.
You would be okay.
There is now actually an agreementbetween the Vatican and Beijing.
And so the details are scarce.
We don't know a lot about them, butit seems that there is some kind of
an understanding about the,I mean the crux is who selects bishops and
(22:35):
cardinals and how they're consecrated,that is the central issue here, right?
And so it seems like theresome bumps in the road.
Right.
But technically, as opposed to a fewyears ago, if you go to an open church,
as opposed to an underground church andtake communion,
that that's considered approvedby the Catholic Church.
(22:56):
Right.And so people have been skeptical or
critical of certainelements of the agreement.
I've heard stories that that mighteven have affected a little bit
of the deliberations about the new pope,although I'm not an expert on that,
but on the.
And so it's interesting, too, right,
because it speaks to this theme that keepscoming out in our conversation, Bill,
(23:18):
which is the party has always hadthe soft side, but also a hard side.
Right.Because we've also seen churches in
Zhejiang province have the,the crosses ripped down.
Right.
So and we also know that Xi Jinping hasbrought a very much more conservative
approach to religion more generally.
Nevertheless, it's under his leadershipthat an agreement with the Vatican
was struck.
(23:38):
Right.So
you have this sort of like,if you're good to me, I'll be.
I'll be good to you, and if you're badto me, I'll be, I'll be bad to you.
And.And you can see how that works in theory.
But sometimes it's hard to get right,right?
Because if you're too tough, then thefriendly things don't work, and if you're
too friendly, then people, you're afraidthat people might take you for a ride.
(23:58):
And so this is just kind of a central.
Dilemma that has been inthe party from the very beginning.
And one that's particularly hard, I think,between the party and Catholics for
all of these reasons thatI just discussed with you.
>> Bill Whalen (24:09):
And I want to build on more of that in a minute, but
let's close out withmore on the father here.
So throughout his long and we'd agree,storied career with China,
the Chinese Party,this phrase is applied to him.
It's the phrase is, quote,top deputy to the top deputy.
Why was he never the top deputy?
>> Joseph Torigian (24:27):
Yeah, that's a good question.
So Xi Junction's age is alsoworth talking about, right?
Because he kept, formuch of his life, up until his 40s,
was the youngest person at the highestlevels that he reached, right?
>> Bill Whalen (24:47):
Yeah, he's between.
He's between generations.
He is because.
>> Joseph Torigian (24:50):
Exactly.
>> Bill Whalen (24:51):
Man was born about what, 20 years before him, right?
>> Joseph Torigian (24:55):
So he was the youngest candidate member to the central committee
in 1945 at the seventh party congress.
He was the youngest of the so calledfive horses that entered the capital.
For your listeners, this is a veryimportant and famous moment in Chinese
history when these majorregional figures went to Beijing.
(25:15):
Deng Xiaoping was another one of them.
He was another one of the big horses.
And then in 1959, Xi Zhongsheng becameby far the youngest vice premier.
And that meant he was reallyat the center of power.
And then in the 80s,he starts working for Hu Yaobang.
But his seniority and status and
experience vastly outweighs Hu Yaobang,Right?
(25:37):
And then the question becomes, why wasn'tXi Zhongshun the General secretary?
And I think that we can only guess, but itprobably had something to do with the fact
that Deng Xiaoping likely did notcompletely trust him because they had had
these differences over a varietyof issues over the 1950s and
early 1960s, possibly because Xi Junctionwas not a long marcher, right?
(25:59):
As I said before,he was from the northwest.
He was there when the Long March arrived.
And so he didn't have this kindof cachet that other people did.
He also was a little excitable sometimes.
So that also might have hurt his chances.
But there were all of these rumorsthroughout the 1980s that he would maybe
not be like the top leader, like a dong,but at least maybe, maybe like a leader of
(26:21):
the Chinese legislature or the Generalsecretary, if not the top leader, but
maybe the chief implementer orone of the chief implementers.
But that never happened.
And in fact, that rankled him because thisis a system in which your position is
supposed to reflect your status thatis rooted in when you joined the party,
what you did for the party, and how youwere at these various congresses and
(26:43):
what you were selected to.
>> Bill Whalen (26:45):
Now, at one point, he falls into a very bad pothole.
He falls out of favor with the Party.
He is confined in nearisolation in Beijing.
I believe you're right.
It's a room of 7-8 squaremeters at the most.
What did he do to earn this punishment?
>> Joseph Torigian (26:58):
Well, the quick answer,
>> Bill Whalen (27:00):
more to the.
Point, why did they decideto punish him like this?
>> Joseph Torigian (27:04):
Yeah.
So the answer is that hefacilitated the writing of a novel.
And of course, to explain why facilitatingthe writing of a novel would lead to
16 years of political persecutionthat included exile, struggle,
sessions, incarceration, you need tolook at several different things.
(27:25):
One is,you know what this novel was about?
Well, as I said earlier, Xi Zhongshunwas from the Northwest, right?
And one of his great mentors therewas a man named Liu Zhudan, and
Leo Zhedong was killed in the 1930s.
It was probably killed becausethe party didn't completely trust him,
and he wanted to provehow dedicated he was.
(27:46):
This is a theme that emerges in the bookover and over, that when the Party is bad
to you, you're even better to the Party sothat you can turn things around.
It's actually a source of motivation andnot alienation.
But not everyone fromthe Northwest liked Liuchidan.
There were all.
There was all this infighting.
Right.And so when this novel appeared,
some people thought that it was notreflective of what the history was
(28:08):
all about.
And sothey complained to the top leadership, and
then Mao reacts very strongly.
So why would Mao react sostrongly to this?
Well, Mao had this idea that inthe aftermath of the Great Leap Forward,
people weren't intuiting what he wanted.
Well, and he didn't see this as justa natural divergence of objective people.
(28:31):
He saw it as a manifestation of what.
Of what he called class struggle.
And so there were all of these figureswho were clamoring for rehabilitation.
One of them was quite close to Xijongshin,a man named Peng Dehuai,
who was the defense Minister purgedin 1959 because of expressing in
cautious terms concerns aboutthe trajectory of the leap.
(28:53):
But there was also otherpeople who didn't like Xi or
wanted to go after Xi ina way that would impress Mao.
One of those people's peoplewas Deng Xiaoping, actually.
And so Mao Zedong made this reallycurious and interesting remark,
which is that, isn't it interestingnow that people have invented
(29:15):
the use of novels toengage in party struggle.
And people are using things like novelsto create the conditions for a coup.
And I don't know if Maoactually believed that or
he decided that talking about itin a particular way was useful for
a political purpose, but it signifiedXi Zhongshun's purge from the leadership.
>> Bill Whalen (29:36):
The younger Xi Joseph would have been about, what, nine,
ten years old when this happened.
>> Joseph Torigian (29:41):
So he was born xi Jinping in 1953, in June.
And these terrible things began happeningto xijongshin over the summer and
fall of 1962.
So Xi Jinping would have been very young.
>> Bill Whalen (29:54):
Very young.
The family is leaves Beijing.
They end up living in a.
In a cave, the house carved into a cave.
My question is this.
You see this happen to your father.
Your father is a political prisoner forthe better part.
Mention of a decade and a half.
Why do you want to join a partythat does that to your father?
>> Joseph Torigian (30:12):
Well, you know, what meaning you find in suffering
is both a personal thing anda sociological thing, right?
So we can think about thisin generational terms, but
also how people react to something likethat is very revealing about them as
an individual at the same time.
And so many people went through suffering.
Many people saw whathappened to their family.
Now, Xi Jinping said he suffered more thanmost, right, because his father was purged
(30:35):
in 1962, which was several yearsbefore the Cultural revolution,
when most of the other people werefrom the top elite were persecuted.
You know, some of the children who weregrowing up during the Cultural revolution,
they came out of this and said,I don't believe in anything anymore.
I want to make money.
I want to have fun.
I want to study overseas.
(30:56):
Others said we need to figure out a wayof making sure this never happens again.
And the answer is preventing anotherstrongman leader from appearing and
using the rule of law toprotect individual rights.
And Xi Jinping, he has admitted that afterhe went through all of these terrible
hardships in the Cultural Revolution,that he had a moment of doubt, but
that because he went through that doubtand returned to it, that his faith in
(31:19):
the cause is even stronger than anyoneelse's, and that it's only the party that
can hold China together to stop anotherCultural Revolution from happening, and
that you need a strong leader to holdthings together, and that's more necessary
than constraining a strong leader who hasthe power to start a Cultural Revolution.
Which is an interesting reaction, right?
But it's also the same reactionthat Deng Xiaoping had.
(31:42):
But remember, this is a Leninist.
Systems are organizational weapons.
Right.And so they're designed so
that you have a leader that's firewalledfrom political considerations, so
that he can rally people up and force themto do things that may not be popular.
That's what the organization is all about.
And we can see how powerful.
That kind of an organization is.
But we can also see why it canalso lead to tragedies like the.
(32:06):
Cultural Revolution,>> Bill Whalen: to the adage of like
father, like son.
How does that apply here with Xi Jinping?
So there was this understanding of Xi Zhongshen among many
in the elite and intellectuals andeven some regular Chinese, that he was
the most humane, reformist kind offigure that the party could produce.
(32:27):
And there were even some suggestions thatone of the reasons Xi Jinping was Was
elected to be the successor had somethingto do with his father's reputation.
And we see after 2012,when Xi Jinping is the leader,
that a lot of individuals who watched whathe was doing still thought that sooner or
later he would become a reformerpartly because of who his father was.
(32:51):
And when that didn't happen, they thenused their memory of his father as
a weapon against Xi Jinping, saying that,for example, one quote from one Chinese
dissident intellectual who lives in thestates, that it turns out that Xi Jinping
is not the son of Xi Zhongshun, butthe grandson of Mao Zedong, right?
So in that sense, people are saying thathe's very different from the father, and
(33:14):
they use it in a way that theyhope hurt him politically.
But, you know,the question then becomes, is that true?
And is that how Xi Jinpingthinks about himself?
Does Xi Jinping think thathis father was a failure and
therefore he's doinga different direction?
I don't think so.
In fact, I probably think Xi Jinping hatesit when people use certain things that his
father said as a way of criticizing him.
(33:36):
I think that Xi Jinping probablythinks that his father was totally
dedicated to the revolution andthat the question is,
how could I betray the revolution forwhich my father suffered so much?
And so he wants to figure out a wayof getting the regime back into
a better position.
And he may be doing things thatare different from what was going on when
(33:59):
his father was in power.
And you can maybe guess thatin some ways he thinks, yeah,
my father didn't quite get this right.
But he also, Xi Jinping openly reflectson the relationship between legacy and
innovation.
And he says that the true way ofrespecting legacy is by innovating,
because if all you do is what yourforebears did, you're not adapting,
(34:19):
you're not meeting the new situation.
And the situation does change.
And of course, he needs to tell a messageabout what he's doing differently and
better than his predecessors asa part of legitimation narrative.
So my own guess is that Xi Jinping doesn'tbelieve that he is rejecting his father's
cause, but thinks that the big pictureis still the same, even as he is doing
(34:40):
certain things differently becausethe situation demands it or
because the party is learning new things.
>> Bill Whalen (34:46):
Speaking of like father, like son, Joseph,
does Xi Jinping have sons of his own?
And if so, did any of them showsigns of political aspirations?
>> Joseph Torigian (34:54):
He has a daughter who went to Harvard, actually, and
I learned many years later that she andI were in the same room at one point.
So I was doing my dissertation at mit, but
I was a huge fan of a Harvardprofessor named Roderick McFarquar,
and he was on a panel todiscuss the fall of Bo Xilai.
You might have heard that name before.
(35:15):
He was this brawler who wasthe leader of Chongqing,
a megacity in China's southwest, whosefather knew Xi Zhongshun, by the way.
But this panel was about the fallof bo Xilai, and McFarlane and
others were talking about Chinese politicsas this sort of dog eat dog world of,
you know, and I would have loved to know,you know, what she was thinking when she
(35:36):
was hearing these people talk about herfather and the nature of the party.
She appeared indirectly in a newspaperarticle around 2008, when there were.
I think that's the right date,
when there were theseearthquakes in Sichuan province.
And Xi Jinping's wife was talkingabout how their child went to
engage in forging and to be one withthe people by going to help these
(36:00):
Sichuanese who had sufferedbecause of the earthquake.
And she's mysterious, but she did.
Her name did reappear again recently in a.
In a curious way, which was thatthe Belarusian news media reported
that she was present when Lukashenka metwith Xi Jinping just a few weeks ago.
(36:23):
And people have beenwondering what that means.
Who knows?
I don't.
>> Bill Whalen (36:27):
Does gender rule her out for holding power?
>> Joseph Torigian (36:31):
We're really getting into conjecture here, right?
I think probably the more interestingperson to watch right now is Peng Liyuan,
who is the wife of Xi Jinping.
She seems to have a meaningful politicalrole that people are curious about.
It would be quite something if Xi Jinpingis moving in the direction of installing
his daughter.
You know, she's married,at least that's my understanding.
(36:54):
And there's other male heirs.
But my own sense is that helikely would have the power
to do what he wants, but that it would be.
It would.And
you could see why he would wantto trust his own family members.
But at the same time,
the reputational costs within the partythat even if he could, you know,
(37:16):
engineer that kind of outcome, it may notbe useful to him given all of the other
disadvantages that would come fromturning China into another North Korea.
Coincidentally,>> Bill Whalen: speaking of North Korea,
there's speculation.
That, you know,Kim's sister could somehow take over.
Take over.
Or his daughter.
Or his daughter.
>> Bill Whalen (37:36):
But it would not be, would not be a clean process, would it?
>> Joseph Torigian (37:39):
Well, you know what's interesting too, right, Is if you read my
book in the 1980s, I talk about howwhen Kim Il Sung went to Beijing and
said I want to have a handoff to my son,the Chinese were initially skeptical.
And when the Chinesedecided to support it,
who did they send to Pyongyangto signal it was Xi Junction?
And when Kim Jong Il visited China forthe first time, who hosted him for
(38:03):
certain events?
Xi Zhongshun.
There's a really interesting videoyou can find of Xi Zhongshen
sitting next to Kim Jong Ilwatching Pang Liyuen sing Arirang.
And this was several years beforePeng Liyuan and Xi Jinping even met.
And Xi Jinping showed that video toKim Jong Un when he visited Beijing a few
(38:23):
years ago.
It's a family business in some ways.
>> Bill Whalen (38:26):
Let's close out Joseph with a few thoughts on generational
leadership in China.
Here in America, we have beengoverned by baby boomer presidents.
My gosh, going back to Bill Clinton.
The entire post Cold War era in Americahas had Presidents born between 1946
and 19.
Let's see, Obama's born in 61,I believe so Cold War presidents.
China, though in theory, like America,
(38:48):
will at one point turnto younger leadership.
And here's my question for you.
Going back to Joseph Kennedy.
Joe Kennedy groomed his son forpolitical office.
He going back to running forthe House, the Senate, the presidency.
The father was always thereproviding money, pulling strings,
making things happen.
Is political grooming possible in China?
Is political grooming done in China?
(39:08):
Let's say that you were wealthy,you had political aspirations.
Could you send your son toan American college and
put that son on a political path oris it done in a different way?
>> Joseph Torigian (39:16):
Point well, Xi Jinping and the his relationship with other so
called princelings.
My understanding is that it'ssomewhat fraught, right?
So I think that it's now harder forsenior figures
to promote their childrenthan it was in the past.
(39:37):
And even in the past when they did it,it was still very deeply unpopular and
costly for the party's reputation.
In this kind of system,you need to be clever right?
And Xi Jinping is a good example of this,
because nobody really knew what hethought until he became the top leader.
And so he was ambitious, butit was a careful ambition.
(39:59):
So again, to refer to.
To Li Ray, he met with xi Jinping in 2002after a big promotion that Xi Jinping won
and said, you know, you should speakout more, your position is different.
And Xi Jinping said, no,I don't know how to do it like you,
you know how to hit the ping pong, just soit hits the edge without going over.
So in that sense, you.
(40:19):
The way to rise in this kind of systemis to get a good sense of what the top
leader wants anddoing it better than anyone else,
while also not completely screwing upwhatever it is that you are tasked with.
So, so in that sense, the rise topower is a little bit different
in China than it is in other places,I think, at least now and then.
>> Bill Whalen (40:41):
Finally you mentioned that Xi Jinping, I don't want to call
it cautious leadership, butyou suggest it's a measured leadership,
especially in terms of dealing withthe Catholic Church, for example.
This generation andthe next generation, I assume,
may avoid big sweeping thingslike the Cultural Revolution.
Do you think that's the case?
>> Joseph Torigian (40:58):
You know, it's interesting.
Xi Jinping is someone whose lifewas two lessons in one way.
One is what happens when youcare about ideology too much and
what happens when you don'tcare about ideology enough.
And it gets to a philosophical question,
which is what kind of suffering inspiresyou, toughens you, dedicates you, and
what kind of suffering is a turn off andpushes you away?
(41:21):
And Xi Jinping, his ambitions are quitebreathless when you really look at what he
says he's trying to do, which is to breakthe cycle of one dynasty collapsing after
another by taking 5,000 years ofChinese traditional culture and
baptizing it in the legacy of therevolution, what he calls self revolution,
which means inspiring people withthe story of the Party as moral education.
(41:44):
But the story of the Partyis one of suffering, right?
It's one of putting the nation's interestsfirst, the Party's interests first.
And I can see how formany young Chinese people,
that is something that is meaningful,right?
But for other Chinese, maybe they don'twant to go on the merry go round again.
And I think this is somethingXi Jinping really worries about, right,
because the revolution toughened the firstgeneration, the Cultural Revolution
(42:07):
toughened the second generation, orat least the toughened Xi Jinping.
But how do you toughen the thirdgeneration in a way that's effective and
that's something they'retrying to figure out.
And one way they do that is bytalking about Party history.
And if you read my book, you actuallySee that they did a lot of things wrong.
And so that's also something that'seffective but also problematic.
>> Bill Whalen (42:29):
And it really is a great book.
Final question for you, Joseph.
If I could get you 10 minutes of FaceTimewith Xi Jinping, what would you ask him?
>> Joseph Torigian (42:36):
I'd ask him if he read my book, maybe I've reflected on this so
much that I don't evenreally know where to start.
Right, I think that probably Iwould ask him about June 4, 1989,
whether he was communicating withhis father during those days and
what his father was saying.
>> Bill Whalen (42:59):
It's a question to ponder because you get only a few minutes of
the leader, and you see this happenin American politics all the time.
If they don't like the question,what do they do?
They don't answer it.
They run out the clock,>> Joseph Torigian: you know?
Yeah, I interviewed the Dalai Lamafrom my book, and it wasn't.
Yeah.And it was very challenging, right,
Because I felt this burden of being oneof the few people who had looked at
(43:19):
the material, both in Chinese, but I alsohad a lot of Tibetan materials translated.
And I had interviewed Tibetan people whohad interacted with Xi Zhongshen and
his secretaries counseled me.
They told me how to go about it, andthey gave me all of these suggestions.
But, you know, how you phrasethe questions to get a good answer and
(43:41):
how you.
Not to get away a state secret here but
how do you reach the Dalai Lama?
I assume he's not@lamail.com,how do you find him?
>> Joseph Torigian (43:49):
When I once I did get in touch with one of his secretaries,
it took me years to actually schedulea meeting because he's so busy.
But on the other hand, I think the DalaiLama and the people around him recognize
that outreach to people is essential forthem to get their message out.
Now, at the same time,it's interesting, like,
(44:09):
I didn't get the sense thatthey were trying to curate for
me my interactions with him fora political purpose.
I was actually quiteimpressed by his secretaries,
by the sense that I did get the sense thatthey wanted me to get what was useful for
me to tell the historical story.
Right.
Which I found quite meaningful,actually, to be honest with you.
>> Bill Whalen (44:25):
And I apologize.
I cut off the rest of what you're gonnasay about your time at Xi Jinping.
>> Joseph Torigian (44:29):
I'd have to go back and reflect,
because you're right, which is youhave what you really want to ask, but
then you have to figure out how to ask it.
And to be honest, to be Frank with you.
I would love to speak with the,I didn't write this book to.
With any particularpolitical purpose in mind.
I wrote it, for one, because I think thatthere is an inherent value to doing good
history andthat it doesn't need an instrumentality.
(44:52):
I wrote it because I thought thatthe people's lives deserved to be told.
Right.
And also because I thoughtthat people needed to know how
the Chinese Communist Party works.
And so I have my own views.
But the purpose of the book wasto facilitate a conversation.
And to the extent that he or anyone elsein the party would want to be a part of,
that is something that, of course,I would always be open to.
>> Bill Whalen (45:14):
Are you going to write a bio on him at some point?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:16):
I'm not planning on it right now.
I won't say I will never do it, but that'snot in the cards in the immediate future.
>> Bill Whalen (45:22):
Okay.
By the way, I think the worst questionever asked to the Dalai Lama was,
has he ever seen Caddyshack?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:27):
Did somebody really ask him that?
>> Bill Whalen (45:29):
Someone actually asked at one point,
has he seen the movie Caddyshack?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:32):
Wow.
We'll have to look that up.
>> Bill Whalen (45:35):
Yeah, >> Joseph Torigian
I didn't ask him that.
Hopefully my questions were.
Maybe it would have loosened them up,
maybe it would have facilitated a more,a better conversation, but you never know.
Exactly Joseph, great conversation.
I neglected to mention the introductionthat you're actually back in Michigan.
Why you have left Palo Altoin the summertime.
It's 70 degrees here today, my friend, so.
>> Joseph Torigian (45:56):
Well, you know, this is one of the last things I'll be doing as
a research fellow atthe Hoover Institution.
And so this is a great coda tothe two years that I spent out there.
And I do love California,but Detroit is still home.
So I'll be spending the lastmonth of the summer back here.
>> Bill Whalen (46:15):
Okay, well, thanks for all the great work, and
I hope you enjoy your timeat the history Working lab.
And it really is a great thingthat Kotkin and Neil Ferguson and
Victor Davis Hansen have cooked up.
>> Joseph Torigian (46:25):
It's a wonderful program.
And the book would not have been the bookif I hadn't had that time and space and
access to the archives.
And so I'm very grateful to Steve forhaving me at the lab.
>> Bill Whalen (46:37):
Okay, Joseph, great conversation.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Joseph Torigian (46:40):
Thank you.
>> Bill Whalen (46:40):
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(47:01):
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(47:21):
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[MUSIC]
>> Bill Whalen (00:03):
It's Friday, July 25, 2025.
And welcome back to Matters of Policy andPolitics, a Hoover Institution podcast
devoted to governance and balance of powerhere in America and around the world.
I'm Bill Whelan.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution.
I'm not the only Hoover fellowwho's podcasting these days.
And if you don't trust me, go to ourwebsite, which is hoover.org/podcast, and
(00:25):
you'll see the wholelineup of podcasts there.
That includes, by the way, the audioversion of the Goodfellows show that we do
for YouTube with Neil Ferguson,John Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster.
So definitely check that out.
Today we turn our attention tothe other side of the Pacific Rim, and
that would be China, specifically Chineseleadership and the man behind the man,
if you will, the father ofthe current president of China.
(00:47):
And joining me today forthis conversation is Joseph Turigian.
Joseph Turigian is a Hoover Institutionresearch fellow as well as an associate
professor at American University Schoolof International Service.
He is the author of the recentrelease book titled
the Party's Interest Comes First.
It's a biography ofa gentleman named Xi Jeongjun,
the father ofChina's President Xi Jinping.
Joseph, thanks for coming on the podcast.
>> Joseph Torigian (01:08):
Thanks so much for having me.
>> Bill Whalen (01:10):
And I'll apologize for butchering the father's name,
you correct me on that.
The correct pronunciation is?
>> Joseph Torigian (01:16):
Xi Zhongshun.
>> Bill Whalen (01:17):
Thank you. Very, very well done.
>> Joseph Torigian (01:18):
You were close.
>> Bill Whalen (01:19):
Thank you. Well-
>> Joseph Torigian (01:20):
Very close.
>> Bill Whalen (01:21):
I tried.
One thing I did mention in the intro isthat one of the things you do at Hoover is
you are involved in Hoover's history lab.
Can you tell us a bitabout the history lab?
>> Joseph Torigian (01:29):
Yeah. So Stephen Kotkin created
the Hoover History Lab because he thought,like the people that he has been bringing
to the lab, that you can learn a lot fromhistory to understand what's going on.
Today, I've taught as part of this labat Stanford, a class on Chinese and
Russian politics and foreign policythat combines history with theory and
method and tries to give people a senseof what happened in the past so they have
(01:53):
the analytical lens to get a sense ofwhat's going on in those countries today.
>> Bill Whalen (01:59):
And I should point out that this book is actually part of
a Stanford Hoover series onauthoritarianism, correct?
>> Joseph Torigian (02:06):
That's correct.
And there's another synergy here,which is that I used many,
many materials from the Hoover archives,including the spectacular diaries
of a man named Li Ray who worked directlyfor Mao Zedong and knew the Xi family.
>> Bill Whalen (02:20):
Okay, so let me ask you a question.
At summertime, people are takingbooks with them when they travel.
If I ask you to give me three books onauthoritarianism in addition to yours,
three more book books,Suggest three books for me.
Would you give me, say,Steve Calkins books on Stalin?
>> Joseph Torigian (02:36):
You took one away from me.
I certainly would havesuggested his books.
I also love David Holloway's books and
he is emeritus at Stanford,especially his Stalin and the Bomb.
I think that is a wonderful book.
I also am a big fan of Fred Tevis andWarren Sun.
Their last book is about China in the lastyears of the Cultural Revolution.
(02:59):
I think that's a terrific book.
And for the third book, there are somany different possibilities.
I'd have to think about that for a second.
I'm curious while I think,do you have one that you would recommend?
>> Bill Whalen (03:10):
No, I was gonna.
I think I shot my wad with Kotkin andStalin, if you will,
your knowledge on more than me.
But let's take this a different way.
If you were to do a Mount Rushmore ofauthoritarian figures, let's say for
the 20th century,who would you put up there?
You have four choices, let's assumemaybe Mao and Stalin or two of them.
>> Joseph Torigian (03:28):
That's also a really terrific question.
I probably would put one member ofthe Kim family up there in North Korea.
I have done some work on North Korea.
There's another talk that I gave at aparc,
which is also at Stanford,where I reflected on where Russia and
China and North Korea find themselvesthis year for the anniversary and
(03:50):
the parade that Vladimir Putin hadin Moscow in May for the fourth one.
That's a terrific question.
Actually, it's not a book, it's a movie.
But in terms of a cultural product that Iwould suggest for people who want to get
a sense of authoritarianism,there was an Iranian movie.
Your listeners will be able to findit if I give them enough information.
(04:12):
But it's something thatthe Fig Tree that came out,
I think, this year or the year beforeabout authoritarianism in Iran.
And I think that is really a spectacularmovie to watch because it deals with a lot
of the themes that come out in my bookon Xi Zhongfin, generational politics,
how you keep the revolution alive,the relationship between the state and
(04:35):
society, how you use carrots and sticksat the same time, but most importantly,
what it does to figures who are membersof these regimes when they do have their
own views, but ultimately putthe interests of the regime first.
And what it means morally andwhat it means practically for them and
their families,>> Bill Whalen: right?
So, Joseph, Fathers and sons is a favoritetrope of American political journalist.
(04:57):
If you were to run for the presidency andgetting traction and getting somewhere,
invariably somebody would run a piece and
they'd want to talk abouthow Joseph Trigian is or
is not a product of his father, how hisold man rubbed off on him, and et cetera.
I would contend this is a very hit or
miss proposition when itcomes to American politics.
If you want to try topsychoanalyze Donald Trump.
(05:18):
I'm not sure if Fred Trump is where Iwould go for Trump being his father, but
if I were psychoanalyzing John F.
Kennedy, andI've been reading Kennedy books lately,
yeah, I would make a beelineto Joseph Patrick Kennedy.
But in this case, it's very easy to do, inpart because there is a treasure trove of
information Jon Joe Kennedy,JFK, the Kennedys in general.
You could go to the Kennedy library,you could go to the FDR library,
(05:40):
as the elder Kennedy washis ambassador to Britain.
You could go to newspaper archives.
You could find just a tonof books to write on.
Pretty easy stuff.
But I'm assuming when you'rewriting about Xi Jinping's father,
it's not like there's a lot ofinformation there in front of you.
So tell us where you went digging.
You mentioned, for example,the Hoover archives.
Well, you're right. When you write a book about a political
(06:00):
family, the psychologicalelement has to be there.
You have to at least broach it,
because otherwise the people who read yourbook are going to be very disappointed.
And so many people who've reviewedthe book, they focused on this, Right.
Like what it meant for Xi Jinping asa young person to grow up in this family.
But, you know, what I tried to do withthe book as well was to depict what it
(06:21):
was like to be a member of the ChineseCommunist party during the 20th century
and to use the story ofXi Jinping's father to get
a sense of what its membershipwent through and what.
And what the country went through.
And the other reason, I think, you know,
we need to be careful withthe psychological aspect,
especially for the book that I just wrote,which is that the details are scarce.
(06:44):
Right.And so when you talk to professionals who
work in mental health,they refuse to diagnose people from afar.
Right.It's part of their guild.
And I'm not even trained in mental health.
Right.So I included the material that I did know
about, but I didn't want to essentializethe whole story of Xi Jinping
(07:06):
down to what he experienced when he was,was a young person.
And so, what do you do whenthe evidence is so scattered?
Well, it's not just scattered forXi Jinping for
reasons that emerge from my book.
He thinks about history all the timebecause he has this view that one of
the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed isthey lost control of their history and
(07:28):
nobody believed in it anymore.
And so for Xi Jinping, a member ofa Leninist party, he has this idea,
this fixation that if you don't seethe past as one victory to another,
people won't sacrifice forthat kind of an organization.
And for him the party is all about puttingthe interests of the organization ahead of
your own right.
And so you can't just go to onearchive and collect the evidence and
(07:52):
then write it up.
You need to have a sensitivity topossibilities and not limitations, and so
bring a sort of detective.
Detective mindset, ormaybe a journalist mindset, and
just keep collecting materials that are ofa variety of different backgrounds and
spend a lot of time on it,contextualize everything that you have and
(08:13):
then create a mosaic where you havesome things colored in better, but
other elements remain a little bit lessunderstood or even a bit of a mystery.
So one thing that I did is I made a listof every time Xi Jinping's father met with
a foreigner and I interviewed thatforeigner or I went to their archives.
There was a lot of material publishedoutside of mainland censorship in
(08:37):
Hong Kong and Taiwan.
There was an ability to go to China tocollect materials and speak to people.
Even their official sources canbe quite significant, right?
So in terms of just mining biographicaldetails, or you take that kind of thing
and put it in the context of somethingyou got from somewhere else and
suddenly it's very meaningful.
(08:58):
And then finally you have material that'skind of gotten out of the party in one
way or another that's intended forinternal circulation.
I mentioned the Lee Ray diaries earlier,but there's actually also a lot of
documents that are available at placeslike Stanford and Princeton that because
they lost control over their archivesduring the Cultural Revolution,
are actually now more available inthe United States than they are in China.
>> Bill Whalen (09:21):
You know, American politics changed vastly in 1992,
Joseph, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore ranon the Democratic ticket, both gentlemen
were more than happy to stretch themselveson the couch and talk about their fathers.
In Clinton's case,it was the biological father.
He never knew.
Remember, his father died in a car crash.
Al Gore's case, his father was a senatorand was apparently very hard to please.
So the younger Gore talkedabout inadequacies and
(09:42):
trying to live up tothe old man's expectations.
But I, I assume that there is no suchequivalent of People magazine in China.
And I don't think you're going tofind Xi Jinping on record talking
much about his father.
>> Joseph Torigian (09:53):
So he does talk about his
father,>> Bill Whalen: does he?
And so, but we have to understand that when you have figures like
Xi Jinping or other high ranking membersof the elite, they have their own views,
and then they have the views that theythink that they express publicly.
And we can't immediately assumethat everything is a lie.
(10:13):
And it's also meaningful to thinkabout why they portray the past in
a particular way.
And so when I look at whatXi Jinping said about his father,
even when he is mischaracterizingthings to a more or less extent,
that itself also is very revealing.
>> Bill Whalen (10:29):
Let's talk about the father.
So the father is born in October of 1913.
He dies in May of 2002.
So he lives about 90 years.
Good run.
He joins the Communistyouth league in 1926.
So he is 12 going on 13 at the time.
Why would he jointhe Communist Youth League at that time?
Was it the cool thing to do?
Was he running away from something?
(10:50):
Was he running towards something?
>> Joseph Torigian (10:52):
Yeah. So let's talk about what kind of milieu he
was growing up in.
He was born two years afterthe collapse of the Qing Dynasty.
He was born Shanxi, near the city of Xi'.
An.
Xi' an had been the capital from whichChinese emperors had ruled for millennia.
Many of your listeners probably haveheard of the terracotta soldiers.
That's why they are in Xi',
(11:13):
an, is because the first unifiedChinese state was created there.
But by the time xijungfinha was born,this was an area that
had suffered years of banditry andfamine and civil war.
And the whole country, of course,
was facing encroachments from the west andJapan.
And so there was a sense thatsomething needed to change.
(11:34):
There was a sense thatthe country needed to be saved.
And interestingly enough,in his early years,
the Communists were in an alliancewith the Nationalists, right?
So they were working together throughmuch of the 1920s against the warlords.
And so there was an opening forXi Zhongshun to read Communist literature.
(11:56):
Now, use the word cool.
That's actually quite a good term to use,because at this age,
he didn't really understand Marx.
He didn't really understand Das Kapital.
He wasn't really ruminating onthe finer points of this ideology,
but there was a sense that radicalism and
being more radical was betterthan being less radical.
(12:17):
And so when you're a student and
your country is facing those kindsof extraordinary challenges,
it's conducive to you to thinkin this kind of way, I think.
And that's what happened to Xi Zhongxun>> Bill Whalen: in the 1930s.
He joins the Red Army.
So he joins the Chinese Communist Party in prison.
And then the Nationalists, of course,did betray the Communists butchered and
(12:41):
massacred many of them,including within Shaanxi.
And then Xi Zhongshun, even though he'sa wanted man, is sent to join the local
Nationalist force undercover in hopes ofconvincing them to do an insurrection.
The insurrection is another failure.
And then he goes to the base areasbecause the Party realized that you're
(13:04):
not going to win in the cities.
The cities are just not the rightplace for you to eke victories.
And so they start to gradually move inthis direction of first building up
their forces in areas that are muchharder for the Nationalists to control.
>> Bill Whalen (13:20):
And how does he fit into the greater scheme of the army?
What is his specialty?
What is his forte?
>> Joseph Torigian (13:24):
You know, it's interesting, right?
So he wasn't a military figure and
he wasn't really the onewho was devising campaigns.
And that doesn't mean that hewas an insignificant person.
It does mean that he wasn't.
You know, he didn't.
You got a lot of prestigious statusby being a good war fighter, right?
I mean, that's how Mao Zedong andDeng Xiaoping became so respected.
(13:47):
But he was good at logistics,he was good at governance,
but he was especially good on at the socalled united front.
So what's the United Front?
Well, it's what the party callsits efforts to empower and
work with allies that are not membersof the party and then co opt and
win over people whoare sort of in the middle.
(14:09):
And so during the revolution,Xi Jin was really good at, or
at least he became better and better.
It was not exactly easy at findingNationalists who he could convince to
either work for the communists orat least not actively work against them.
And so what he took the greatest pride induring the war against the Nationalists
(14:29):
was his ability essentially to usepolitical operations, of course,
in conjunction with military forceto affect those kinds of outcomes.
>> Bill Whalen (14:38):
Okay, he has a connection to Zhou Enlai.
>> Joseph Torigian (14:41):
Yeah, so Zhou Enlai, of course, maybe along with Mao and Dong,
one of the most famous members of theChinese Communist party during the 20th
century.
And you know, there's this idea I think,among a lot of people who watch China from
the outside, that it's a storyof good guys and bad guys.
And as more evidence is coming out,
Zhou is coming out asa more complicated figure.
(15:03):
And that is part of whatwe see in my book as well.
So Xi Zhongshun was sort of Zhou Enlai'sright hand man for much of the 1950s,
early 1960s.
And Xi Zhongshun wouldhave seen certain things.
He would have seen how Mao ritually andregularly humiliated Zhou Enlai.
He would have seen how whenthe Great Leap Forward started,
(15:26):
Zhou Enlai was forced to givea very long self criticism.
He would have seen how Zhou Enlai wouldhave facilitated the Great Leap even as it
was becoming increasingly clearthat it was the disaster.
And we see in the 1980s there was thismoment where the party leadership was
debating whether to destroy the documentsthat were the most incriminating about
(15:47):
Zhou Enlai andXi Chung as part of those conversations,
those documents were destroyed.
And it was around that time,as we know from Li Ray's diaries,
that Xi Zhengxun expresseda somewhat negative opinion of Zhou.
And we don't know.
Exactly what that was, but he knewJoe well and he saw those documents.
>> Bill Whalen (16:05):
And he also works for someone who's less of a Chinese household
name, and that is Hu Yao Bang, but he isinvolved in economic political reform.
>> Joseph Torigian (16:12):
So, yeah, it's very interesting.
Right.So Joan Lai was the chief implementer for
mao in the 1950s, and Huyaobang wassort of the chief implementer for
Deng xiaoping in the 1980s.
And Xi Jinping was the right-hand man forboth of those periods, so
it was really a front row seatto seeing how the elite works.
And history kind of repeatsitself both in the 50s and 80s,
(16:34):
where you have these deputies,Zhou Enlai and then Hu Yaobang,
who are both totally loyal to Mao,totally dedicated to Mao, and then.
And then to Deng again in the 1980s.
And there are different figures,Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang.
Zhou Enlai was very careful.
Hu Yaobang was a little bit less careful.
(16:55):
But they both really,
really struggled to manage theirrelationship with the top leader.
Part of that was relatedto succession politics.
Part of that was related to the factthat Mao and Dong weren't always
exactly sure what they wanted to do andthat they changed their mind and
that there were other competitorswithin the elite that didn't like them.
And Xi Zhongsheng wouldhave seen all of it.
And I write about it in my book.
>> Bill Whalen (17:15):
Okay. Two other aspects
of his career that caught my eye.
He's involved in the party's efforts withethnic minorities, Uyghurs, for example.
>> Joseph Torigian (17:22):
Yeah, in a way.
The book is also a book abouthow China at different times,
has thought about different models forits relationship with ethnic minorities.
And so in the last years of the 1940s andearly years of the 1950s,
Xi Zhongshun was the leader of the socalled Northwest Bureau,
which included a huge part of what isnow the People's Republic of China,
(17:46):
including Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as well asTibetans who lived in Gansu and Shanghai.
And Xi Jinping was sortof figuring things out.
He was trying to figure outwhen you use repression, but
also when you try to win peopleover by empowering them and
co opting them and bringing theminto the regime as supporters.
And the story of the 1950s is a storyof gradually moving away from that.
(18:10):
And by 1958, it's literally a war bythe party against its own people.
And precisely these areas that Xi Zhongxunhad helped incorporate into the PRC.
And then in the 1980s, Xi Zhongshunwhen he's working for Hu Yaobang,
one of his primary tasks is managingrelations with ethnic minorities.
(18:31):
And so we see him negotiating withthe Dalai Lama's emissaries in Beijing.
We see him purging the leadersof the Tibet Autonomous Region
because he thinks they'retoo conservative.
And we also see by the end of the 1980s,the party deciding that this model that
they had experimented with after theCultural Revolution of economic growth and
(18:53):
bringing religion into the open to bettercontrol it and co opting grievances,
that in their mind it just empoweredpeople to hurt the party as opposed to,
as opposed to win them over.
And that's a problematicconclusion to draw.
But Xi Junction was at the verycenter of those debates.
>> Bill Whalen (19:09):
And at one point, Joseph,
he is the party's point personon Catholicism in China.
Can you explain how organized religiongets along with a state like China,
which does not believe in religion,just does not want to encourage religion?
How do the two coincide?
>> Joseph Torigian (19:26):
Yeah. You know, it's funny,
when I give talks about Xi Zhongsheng,one of the themes that I discuss is how
this is a person who saw a lot ofmeaning in forging and suffering, right?
And that he would take pride in the factthat he suffered more than others.
He saw it as a kind of way ofcredentialing his status within the party.
(19:47):
And sometimes people whowent to Catholic school for
high school will come up tome after my talk is over and
say there's certain things thatare a little bit familiar to me.
And so when Xijong hin was dealing withCatholics, even in these party texts,
you get a sense that they see something alittle familiar there, which is, you know,
a group of people for whom religion,by which I mean, you know, the Catholics,
(20:09):
that that is the definingfeature of their lives.
It's very hierarchical, right?
You have the Pope and everyone issupposed to listen to the Pope.
You have these set of texts, but then youalso need to discern what the texts mean.
And so she andthe other people around him are like, wow,
these are not easy people to deal with.
(20:29):
And they talk about howthey're very well organized,
how they're the onesinfiltrating the party.
And so they, they struggle withwhat the right approach is, right?
Because on the one hand,what you can do is think about how
you recognize what the Catholic'sown challenges are,
and then you work with themto better co opt them.
And you need to figure out who's on yourside and empower them and who's not and
(20:50):
weaken them, and you also need to figureout what to do about the Vatican, right?
Like, this is reallythe sticking point for
them because they see the Catholic Churchessentially as a tool of the imperialists,
especially American imperialists.
And so you have these wild speechesby people like Xi Zhongshun,
where you have a very sort of thoughtfulset of remarks about that sort of show
that he intuits what kind of situationthe Catholics find themselves in.
(21:15):
And then you see this really radical,leftist, communist,
you know, aggressive sort ofsometimes in the same speech, right?
And what's interesting is he also at onepoint said about some priests that they
needed to be more devout so that theycould act as better representatives of
the party within their own communities,right?
(21:35):
And so then when you look at the Catholicsand they're in a moral quandary, right,
because they want to be loyal to theVatican, they want to be loyal to their
beliefs, but at the same time,they want to protect their flock, and
they want to make sure that there'sspace for what they're doing.
And so they're put in this very, verydifficult position both in the 1950s and
(21:57):
then, and then again in the 1980s when,which are the two periods
in which Xi Zhongsheng is mostprominently involved in Catholic affairs.
>> Bill Whalen (22:06):
What would happen today if you were Chinese and
you walked around Shanghai orBeijing with a cross around your neck?
>> Joseph Torigian (22:12):
I think you would.
You would be okay.
There is now actually an agreementbetween the Vatican and Beijing.
And so the details are scarce.
We don't know a lot about them, butit seems that there is some kind of
an understanding about the,I mean the crux is who selects bishops and
(22:35):
cardinals and how they're consecrated,that is the central issue here, right?
And so it seems like theresome bumps in the road.
Right.
But technically, as opposed to a fewyears ago, if you go to an open church,
as opposed to an underground church andtake communion,
that that's considered approvedby the Catholic Church.
(22:56):
Right.And so people have been skeptical or
critical of certainelements of the agreement.
I've heard stories that that mighteven have affected a little bit
of the deliberations about the new pope,although I'm not an expert on that,
but on the.
And so it's interesting, too, right,
because it speaks to this theme that keepscoming out in our conversation, Bill,
(23:18):
which is the party has always hadthe soft side, but also a hard side.
Right.Because we've also seen churches in
Zhejiang province have the,the crosses ripped down.
Right.
So and we also know that Xi Jinping hasbrought a very much more conservative
approach to religion more generally.
Nevertheless, it's under his leadershipthat an agreement with the Vatican
was struck.
(23:38):
Right.So
you have this sort of like,if you're good to me, I'll be.
I'll be good to you, and if you're badto me, I'll be, I'll be bad to you.
And.And you can see how that works in theory.
But sometimes it's hard to get right,right?
Because if you're too tough, then thefriendly things don't work, and if you're
too friendly, then people, you're afraidthat people might take you for a ride.
(23:58):
And so this is just kind of a central.
Dilemma that has been inthe party from the very beginning.
And one that's particularly hard, I think,between the party and Catholics for
all of these reasons thatI just discussed with you.
>> Bill Whalen (24:09):
And I want to build on more of that in a minute, but
let's close out withmore on the father here.
So throughout his long and we'd agree,storied career with China,
the Chinese Party,this phrase is applied to him.
It's the phrase is, quote,top deputy to the top deputy.
Why was he never the top deputy?
>> Joseph Torigian (24:27):
Yeah, that's a good question.
So Xi Junction's age is alsoworth talking about, right?
Because he kept, formuch of his life, up until his 40s,
was the youngest person at the highestlevels that he reached, right?
>> Bill Whalen (24:47):
Yeah, he's between.
He's between generations.
He is because.
>> Joseph Torigian (24:50):
Exactly.
>> Bill Whalen (24:51):
Man was born about what, 20 years before him, right?
>> Joseph Torigian (24:55):
So he was the youngest candidate member to the central committee
in 1945 at the seventh party congress.
He was the youngest of the so calledfive horses that entered the capital.
For your listeners, this is a veryimportant and famous moment in Chinese
history when these majorregional figures went to Beijing.
(25:15):
Deng Xiaoping was another one of them.
He was another one of the big horses.
And then in 1959, Xi Zhongsheng becameby far the youngest vice premier.
And that meant he was reallyat the center of power.
And then in the 80s,he starts working for Hu Yaobang.
But his seniority and status and
experience vastly outweighs Hu Yaobang,Right?
(25:37):
And then the question becomes, why wasn'tXi Zhongshun the General secretary?
And I think that we can only guess, but itprobably had something to do with the fact
that Deng Xiaoping likely did notcompletely trust him because they had had
these differences over a varietyof issues over the 1950s and
early 1960s, possibly because Xi Junctionwas not a long marcher, right?
(25:59):
As I said before,he was from the northwest.
He was there when the Long March arrived.
And so he didn't have this kindof cachet that other people did.
He also was a little excitable sometimes.
So that also might have hurt his chances.
But there were all of these rumorsthroughout the 1980s that he would maybe
not be like the top leader, like a dong,but at least maybe, maybe like a leader of
(26:21):
the Chinese legislature or the Generalsecretary, if not the top leader, but
maybe the chief implementer orone of the chief implementers.
But that never happened.
And in fact, that rankled him because thisis a system in which your position is
supposed to reflect your status thatis rooted in when you joined the party,
what you did for the party, and how youwere at these various congresses and
(26:43):
what you were selected to.
>> Bill Whalen (26:45):
Now, at one point, he falls into a very bad pothole.
He falls out of favor with the Party.
He is confined in nearisolation in Beijing.
I believe you're right.
It's a room of 7-8 squaremeters at the most.
What did he do to earn this punishment?
>> Joseph Torigian (26:58):
Well, the quick answer,
>> Bill Whalen (27:00):
more to the.
Point, why did they decideto punish him like this?
>> Joseph Torigian (27:04):
Yeah.
So the answer is that hefacilitated the writing of a novel.
And of course, to explain why facilitatingthe writing of a novel would lead to
16 years of political persecutionthat included exile, struggle,
sessions, incarceration, you need tolook at several different things.
(27:25):
One is,you know what this novel was about?
Well, as I said earlier, Xi Zhongshunwas from the Northwest, right?
And one of his great mentors therewas a man named Liu Zhudan, and
Leo Zhedong was killed in the 1930s.
It was probably killed becausethe party didn't completely trust him,
and he wanted to provehow dedicated he was.
(27:46):
This is a theme that emerges in the bookover and over, that when the Party is bad
to you, you're even better to the Party sothat you can turn things around.
It's actually a source of motivation andnot alienation.
But not everyone fromthe Northwest liked Liuchidan.
There were all.
There was all this infighting.
Right.And so when this novel appeared,
some people thought that it was notreflective of what the history was
(28:08):
all about.
And sothey complained to the top leadership, and
then Mao reacts very strongly.
So why would Mao react sostrongly to this?
Well, Mao had this idea that inthe aftermath of the Great Leap Forward,
people weren't intuiting what he wanted.
Well, and he didn't see this as justa natural divergence of objective people.
(28:31):
He saw it as a manifestation of what.
Of what he called class struggle.
And so there were all of these figureswho were clamoring for rehabilitation.
One of them was quite close to Xijongshin,a man named Peng Dehuai,
who was the defense Minister purgedin 1959 because of expressing in
cautious terms concerns aboutthe trajectory of the leap.
(28:53):
But there was also otherpeople who didn't like Xi or
wanted to go after Xi ina way that would impress Mao.
One of those people's peoplewas Deng Xiaoping, actually.
And so Mao Zedong made this reallycurious and interesting remark,
which is that, isn't it interestingnow that people have invented
(29:15):
the use of novels toengage in party struggle.
And people are using things like novelsto create the conditions for a coup.
And I don't know if Maoactually believed that or
he decided that talking about itin a particular way was useful for
a political purpose, but it signifiedXi Zhongshun's purge from the leadership.
>> Bill Whalen (29:36):
The younger Xi Joseph would have been about, what, nine,
ten years old when this happened.
>> Joseph Torigian (29:41):
So he was born xi Jinping in 1953, in June.
And these terrible things began happeningto xijongshin over the summer and
fall of 1962.
So Xi Jinping would have been very young.
>> Bill Whalen (29:54):
Very young.
The family is leaves Beijing.
They end up living in a.
In a cave, the house carved into a cave.
My question is this.
You see this happen to your father.
Your father is a political prisoner forthe better part.
Mention of a decade and a half.
Why do you want to join a partythat does that to your father?
>> Joseph Torigian (30:12):
Well, you know, what meaning you find in suffering
is both a personal thing anda sociological thing, right?
So we can think about thisin generational terms, but
also how people react to something likethat is very revealing about them as
an individual at the same time.
And so many people went through suffering.
Many people saw whathappened to their family.
Now, Xi Jinping said he suffered more thanmost, right, because his father was purged
(30:35):
in 1962, which was several yearsbefore the Cultural revolution,
when most of the other people werefrom the top elite were persecuted.
You know, some of the children who weregrowing up during the Cultural revolution,
they came out of this and said,I don't believe in anything anymore.
I want to make money.
I want to have fun.
I want to study overseas.
(30:56):
Others said we need to figure out a wayof making sure this never happens again.
And the answer is preventing anotherstrongman leader from appearing and
using the rule of law toprotect individual rights.
And Xi Jinping, he has admitted that afterhe went through all of these terrible
hardships in the Cultural Revolution,that he had a moment of doubt, but
that because he went through that doubtand returned to it, that his faith in
(31:19):
the cause is even stronger than anyoneelse's, and that it's only the party that
can hold China together to stop anotherCultural Revolution from happening, and
that you need a strong leader to holdthings together, and that's more necessary
than constraining a strong leader who hasthe power to start a Cultural Revolution.
Which is an interesting reaction, right?
But it's also the same reactionthat Deng Xiaoping had.
(31:42):
But remember, this is a Leninist.
Systems are organizational weapons.
Right.And so they're designed so
that you have a leader that's firewalledfrom political considerations, so
that he can rally people up and force themto do things that may not be popular.
That's what the organization is all about.
And we can see how powerful.
That kind of an organization is.
But we can also see why it canalso lead to tragedies like the.
(32:06):
Cultural Revolution,>> Bill Whalen: to the adage of like
father, like son.
How does that apply here with Xi Jinping?
So there was this understanding of Xi Zhongshen among many
in the elite and intellectuals andeven some regular Chinese, that he was
the most humane, reformist kind offigure that the party could produce.
(32:27):
And there were even some suggestions thatone of the reasons Xi Jinping was Was
elected to be the successor had somethingto do with his father's reputation.
And we see after 2012,when Xi Jinping is the leader,
that a lot of individuals who watched whathe was doing still thought that sooner or
later he would become a reformerpartly because of who his father was.
(32:51):
And when that didn't happen, they thenused their memory of his father as
a weapon against Xi Jinping, saying that,for example, one quote from one Chinese
dissident intellectual who lives in thestates, that it turns out that Xi Jinping
is not the son of Xi Zhongshun, butthe grandson of Mao Zedong, right?
So in that sense, people are saying thathe's very different from the father, and
(33:14):
they use it in a way that theyhope hurt him politically.
But, you know,the question then becomes, is that true?
And is that how Xi Jinpingthinks about himself?
Does Xi Jinping think thathis father was a failure and
therefore he's doinga different direction?
I don't think so.
In fact, I probably think Xi Jinping hatesit when people use certain things that his
father said as a way of criticizing him.
(33:36):
I think that Xi Jinping probablythinks that his father was totally
dedicated to the revolution andthat the question is,
how could I betray the revolution forwhich my father suffered so much?
And so he wants to figure out a wayof getting the regime back into
a better position.
And he may be doing things thatare different from what was going on when
(33:59):
his father was in power.
And you can maybe guess thatin some ways he thinks, yeah,
my father didn't quite get this right.
But he also, Xi Jinping openly reflectson the relationship between legacy and
innovation.
And he says that the true way ofrespecting legacy is by innovating,
because if all you do is what yourforebears did, you're not adapting,
(34:19):
you're not meeting the new situation.
And the situation does change.
And of course, he needs to tell a messageabout what he's doing differently and
better than his predecessors asa part of legitimation narrative.
So my own guess is that Xi Jinping doesn'tbelieve that he is rejecting his father's
cause, but thinks that the big pictureis still the same, even as he is doing
(34:40):
certain things differently becausethe situation demands it or
because the party is learning new things.
>> Bill Whalen (34:46):
Speaking of like father, like son, Joseph,
does Xi Jinping have sons of his own?
And if so, did any of them showsigns of political aspirations?
>> Joseph Torigian (34:54):
He has a daughter who went to Harvard, actually, and
I learned many years later that she andI were in the same room at one point.
So I was doing my dissertation at mit, but
I was a huge fan of a Harvardprofessor named Roderick McFarquar,
and he was on a panel todiscuss the fall of Bo Xilai.
You might have heard that name before.
(35:15):
He was this brawler who wasthe leader of Chongqing,
a megacity in China's southwest, whosefather knew Xi Zhongshun, by the way.
But this panel was about the fallof bo Xilai, and McFarlane and
others were talking about Chinese politicsas this sort of dog eat dog world of,
you know, and I would have loved to know,you know, what she was thinking when she
(35:36):
was hearing these people talk about herfather and the nature of the party.
She appeared indirectly in a newspaperarticle around 2008, when there were.
I think that's the right date,
when there were theseearthquakes in Sichuan province.
And Xi Jinping's wife was talkingabout how their child went to
engage in forging and to be one withthe people by going to help these
(36:00):
Sichuanese who had sufferedbecause of the earthquake.
And she's mysterious, but she did.
Her name did reappear again recently in a.
In a curious way, which was thatthe Belarusian news media reported
that she was present when Lukashenka metwith Xi Jinping just a few weeks ago.
(36:23):
And people have beenwondering what that means.
Who knows?
I don't.
>> Bill Whalen (36:27):
Does gender rule her out for holding power?
>> Joseph Torigian (36:31):
We're really getting into conjecture here, right?
I think probably the more interestingperson to watch right now is Peng Liyuan,
who is the wife of Xi Jinping.
She seems to have a meaningful politicalrole that people are curious about.
It would be quite something if Xi Jinpingis moving in the direction of installing
his daughter.
You know, she's married,at least that's my understanding.
(36:54):
And there's other male heirs.
But my own sense is that helikely would have the power
to do what he wants, but that it would be.
It would.And
you could see why he would wantto trust his own family members.
But at the same time,
the reputational costs within the partythat even if he could, you know,
(37:16):
engineer that kind of outcome, it may notbe useful to him given all of the other
disadvantages that would come fromturning China into another North Korea.
Coincidentally,>> Bill Whalen: speaking of North Korea,
there's speculation.
That, you know,Kim's sister could somehow take over.
Take over.
Or his daughter.
Or his daughter.
>> Bill Whalen (37:36):
But it would not be, would not be a clean process, would it?
>> Joseph Torigian (37:39):
Well, you know what's interesting too, right, Is if you read my
book in the 1980s, I talk about howwhen Kim Il Sung went to Beijing and
said I want to have a handoff to my son,the Chinese were initially skeptical.
And when the Chinesedecided to support it,
who did they send to Pyongyangto signal it was Xi Junction?
And when Kim Jong Il visited China forthe first time, who hosted him for
(38:03):
certain events?
Xi Zhongshun.
There's a really interesting videoyou can find of Xi Zhongshen
sitting next to Kim Jong Ilwatching Pang Liyuen sing Arirang.
And this was several years beforePeng Liyuan and Xi Jinping even met.
And Xi Jinping showed that video toKim Jong Un when he visited Beijing a few
(38:23):
years ago.
It's a family business in some ways.
>> Bill Whalen (38:26):
Let's close out Joseph with a few thoughts on generational
leadership in China.
Here in America, we have beengoverned by baby boomer presidents.
My gosh, going back to Bill Clinton.
The entire post Cold War era in Americahas had Presidents born between 1946
and 19.
Let's see, Obama's born in 61,I believe so Cold War presidents.
China, though in theory, like America,
(38:48):
will at one point turnto younger leadership.
And here's my question for you.
Going back to Joseph Kennedy.
Joe Kennedy groomed his son forpolitical office.
He going back to running forthe House, the Senate, the presidency.
The father was always thereproviding money, pulling strings,
making things happen.
Is political grooming possible in China?
Is political grooming done in China?
(39:08):
Let's say that you were wealthy,you had political aspirations.
Could you send your son toan American college and
put that son on a political path oris it done in a different way?
>> Joseph Torigian (39:16):
Point well, Xi Jinping and the his relationship with other so
called princelings.
My understanding is that it'ssomewhat fraught, right?
So I think that it's now harder forsenior figures
to promote their childrenthan it was in the past.
(39:37):
And even in the past when they did it,it was still very deeply unpopular and
costly for the party's reputation.
In this kind of system,you need to be clever right?
And Xi Jinping is a good example of this,
because nobody really knew what hethought until he became the top leader.
And so he was ambitious, butit was a careful ambition.
(39:59):
So again, to refer to.
To Li Ray, he met with xi Jinping in 2002after a big promotion that Xi Jinping won
and said, you know, you should speakout more, your position is different.
And Xi Jinping said, no,I don't know how to do it like you,
you know how to hit the ping pong, just soit hits the edge without going over.
So in that sense, you.
(40:19):
The way to rise in this kind of systemis to get a good sense of what the top
leader wants anddoing it better than anyone else,
while also not completely screwing upwhatever it is that you are tasked with.
So, so in that sense, the rise topower is a little bit different
in China than it is in other places,I think, at least now and then.
>> Bill Whalen (40:41):
Finally you mentioned that Xi Jinping, I don't want to call
it cautious leadership, butyou suggest it's a measured leadership,
especially in terms of dealing withthe Catholic Church, for example.
This generation andthe next generation, I assume,
may avoid big sweeping thingslike the Cultural Revolution.
Do you think that's the case?
>> Joseph Torigian (40:58):
You know, it's interesting.
Xi Jinping is someone whose lifewas two lessons in one way.
One is what happens when youcare about ideology too much and
what happens when you don'tcare about ideology enough.
And it gets to a philosophical question,
which is what kind of suffering inspiresyou, toughens you, dedicates you, and
what kind of suffering is a turn off andpushes you away?
(41:21):
And Xi Jinping, his ambitions are quitebreathless when you really look at what he
says he's trying to do, which is to breakthe cycle of one dynasty collapsing after
another by taking 5,000 years ofChinese traditional culture and
baptizing it in the legacy of therevolution, what he calls self revolution,
which means inspiring people withthe story of the Party as moral education.
(41:44):
But the story of the Partyis one of suffering, right?
It's one of putting the nation's interestsfirst, the Party's interests first.
And I can see how formany young Chinese people,
that is something that is meaningful,right?
But for other Chinese, maybe they don'twant to go on the merry go round again.
And I think this is somethingXi Jinping really worries about, right,
because the revolution toughened the firstgeneration, the Cultural Revolution
(42:07):
toughened the second generation, orat least the toughened Xi Jinping.
But how do you toughen the thirdgeneration in a way that's effective and
that's something they'retrying to figure out.
And one way they do that is bytalking about Party history.
And if you read my book, you actuallySee that they did a lot of things wrong.
And so that's also something that'seffective but also problematic.
>> Bill Whalen (42:29):
And it really is a great book.
Final question for you, Joseph.
If I could get you 10 minutes of FaceTimewith Xi Jinping, what would you ask him?
>> Joseph Torigian (42:36):
I'd ask him if he read my book, maybe I've reflected on this so
much that I don't evenreally know where to start.
Right, I think that probably Iwould ask him about June 4, 1989,
whether he was communicating withhis father during those days and
what his father was saying.
>> Bill Whalen (42:59):
It's a question to ponder because you get only a few minutes of
the leader, and you see this happenin American politics all the time.
If they don't like the question,what do they do?
They don't answer it.
They run out the clock,>> Joseph Torigian: you know?
Yeah, I interviewed the Dalai Lamafrom my book, and it wasn't.
Yeah.And it was very challenging, right,
Because I felt this burden of being oneof the few people who had looked at
(43:19):
the material, both in Chinese, but I alsohad a lot of Tibetan materials translated.
And I had interviewed Tibetan people whohad interacted with Xi Zhongshen and
his secretaries counseled me.
They told me how to go about it, andthey gave me all of these suggestions.
But, you know, how you phrasethe questions to get a good answer and
(43:41):
how you.
Not to get away a state secret here but
how do you reach the Dalai Lama?
I assume he's not@lamail.com,how do you find him?
>> Joseph Torigian (43:49):
When I once I did get in touch with one of his secretaries,
it took me years to actually schedulea meeting because he's so busy.
But on the other hand, I think the DalaiLama and the people around him recognize
that outreach to people is essential forthem to get their message out.
Now, at the same time,it's interesting, like,
(44:09):
I didn't get the sense thatthey were trying to curate for
me my interactions with him fora political purpose.
I was actually quiteimpressed by his secretaries,
by the sense that I did get the sense thatthey wanted me to get what was useful for
me to tell the historical story.
Right.
Which I found quite meaningful,actually, to be honest with you.
>> Bill Whalen (44:25):
And I apologize.
I cut off the rest of what you're gonnasay about your time at Xi Jinping.
>> Joseph Torigian (44:29):
I'd have to go back and reflect,
because you're right, which is youhave what you really want to ask, but
then you have to figure out how to ask it.
And to be honest, to be Frank with you.
I would love to speak with the,I didn't write this book to.
With any particularpolitical purpose in mind.
I wrote it, for one, because I think thatthere is an inherent value to doing good
history andthat it doesn't need an instrumentality.
(44:52):
I wrote it because I thought thatthe people's lives deserved to be told.
Right.
And also because I thoughtthat people needed to know how
the Chinese Communist Party works.
And so I have my own views.
But the purpose of the book wasto facilitate a conversation.
And to the extent that he or anyone elsein the party would want to be a part of,
that is something that, of course,I would always be open to.
>> Bill Whalen (45:14):
Are you going to write a bio on him at some point?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:16):
I'm not planning on it right now.
I won't say I will never do it, but that'snot in the cards in the immediate future.
>> Bill Whalen (45:22):
Okay.
By the way, I think the worst questionever asked to the Dalai Lama was,
has he ever seen Caddyshack?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:27):
Did somebody really ask him that?
>> Bill Whalen (45:29):
Someone actually asked at one point,
has he seen the movie Caddyshack?
>> Joseph Torigian (45:32):
Wow.
We'll have to look that up.
>> Bill Whalen (45:35):
Yeah, >> Joseph Torigian
I didn't ask him that.
Hopefully my questions were.
Maybe it would have loosened them up,
maybe it would have facilitated a more,a better conversation, but you never know.
Exactly Joseph, great conversation.
I neglected to mention the introductionthat you're actually back in Michigan.
Why you have left Palo Altoin the summertime.
It's 70 degrees here today, my friend, so.
>> Joseph Torigian (45:56):
Well, you know, this is one of the last things I'll be doing as
a research fellow atthe Hoover Institution.
And so this is a great coda tothe two years that I spent out there.
And I do love California,but Detroit is still home.
So I'll be spending the lastmonth of the summer back here.
>> Bill Whalen (46:15):
Okay, well, thanks for all the great work, and
I hope you enjoy your timeat the history Working lab.
And it really is a great thingthat Kotkin and Neil Ferguson and
Victor Davis Hansen have cooked up.
>> Joseph Torigian (46:25):
It's a wonderful program.
And the book would not have been the bookif I hadn't had that time and space and
access to the archives.
And so I'm very grateful to Steve forhaving me at the lab.
>> Bill Whalen (46:37):
Okay, Joseph, great conversation.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Joseph Torigian (46:40):
Thank you.
>> Bill Whalen (46:40):
You've been listening to matters of policy and politics.
Hoover Institution podcast devotedto governance and balance and
power here in America andaround the globe.
If you've been enjoying this podcast,please don't forget to rate, review and
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If you wouldn't mind,please spread the word.
Tell your friends about us.
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(47:01):
Joseph Tyrigian is on X as well.
His X handle is @Josephtorighian,let me spell that for you.
J-O-S-E-P-H-T-O-R-I-G-I-A-N atJoseph Turingian,
his book, by the Way,the Party's Interests Come first,
the Life of Xi Zhongshen thank you,Father Xi Jinping.
I mentioned our website atthe beginning of the show,
(47:21):
which is hoover.org while you're there,sign up for the Hoover Daily Report,
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And that comes your inbox weekdays forthe Hoover Institution,
this is Bill Whalen, we'll be backsoon with another installment
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Till then, take care.
Thanks for listening.
>> Speaker 3 (47:36):
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