Chapter One for The Party's Interests Come First

1

THE PARTY’S INTERESTS COME FIRST

Fourteen months after the crackdown on protesters in June 1989, Chen Jianzhong, one of the late Chiang Kai-shek’s top spymasters, departed from Taiwan to meet Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, in Beijing. Nearing the end of his political career, Xi Zhongxun had hoped to establish a secret back channel that would facilitate unification between Taiwan and mainland China. Sixty-two years before Chen’s trip, when they were fourteen-year-old best friends growing up in Shaanxi Province, Chen and Xi had committed their first revolutionary act together. They tried to poison an academic administrator but failed and instead sickened many of their teachers. The two young boys were swiftly arrested and spent months in prison. Five years later, Chen betrayed the top Shaanxi Chinese Communist Party leadership, joined the Nationalists, and spent the remainder of his life working against his former comrades—including Xi.

The meeting of the two old friends and comrades in arms was bittersweet. Chen later vividly described the experience:

Xi Zhongxun had suffered from brutal factional struggles inside the party, causing psychological damage; in his later years, he would have a hallucination that a figure was following him from behind; later, the pressure became so great that he developed a mental illness. Xi Zhongxun spoke with me on two occasions; it was probably because when he saw me that his emotional state became calmer, his illness took a turn for the better. . . . One time when we were chatting at his home, he took me outdoors to the courtyard where no one could hear what we were saying. He looked left and right and then said to me, “Regarding our situation on the inside, you, elder brother, know everything. I have to be careful. Nobody will hear us talking in this place today.” His wife even patrolled from a distance so that no one would approach us. Xi Zhongxun and Deng Xiaoping both had been Zhou Enlai’s subordinates, and they both had been sent to the countryside for labor reform. In such a situation, Xi was extremely careful. He dared not utter one careless word; at the time, I thought the Chinese Communist Party system was truly terrifying.¹

Chen Jianzhong had arrived in Beijing at a troubled time in Xi’s life. Over four months in 1988 and 1989, three of Xi’s closest friends had died: the prominent Mongol cadre Ulanhu; the tenth Panchen Lama, Choekyi Gyaltsen; and the former party general secretary Hu Yaobang. Two months before Chen’s appearance in the Chinese capital, Liu Jingfan, the younger brother of Xi’s first great mentor, Liu Zhidan, had passed away as well.

Yet Xi was not only witnessing the loss of his companions—the party was rapidly moving away from the new policies he had helped implement during the 1980s to overcome the tragic legacy of the Cultural Revolution. The special economic zones, first established while Xi was party boss in the southern province Guangdong and in which he took great pride, were under threat as the party debated whether the liberal economic policies might have led to the mass protests in 1989. As the politburo member whose bailiwick had included ethnic and religious policies for much of the decade, Xi championed a model of ethnic relations in Xinjiang and Tibet that prioritized addressing grievances, allying with local minority leaders, and promoting economic growth. But after a series of protests in those regions, by 1989, the party leadership had decided priority should instead be placed on cracking down on “splittists.” Xi had helped rebuild relations with foreign Communist parties after such ties were destroyed under Mao Zedong, but now global Communism was at a moment of crisis. Even though Xi hoped the party could overcome the strongman rule of the Mao era, the autocratic Deng Xiaoping had brazenly removed Xi’s direct superior, Hu Yaobang, from power in 1987 and forced a violent solution to the student protests in 1989.

From the outside, no one could have guessed Xi’s frustrations. Publicly and within the party, Xi always faithfully toed the official line and defended even those decisions with which he most vociferously disagreed. Yet people who truly understood Xi—for instance, Mao Zedong—would not have been surprised by this behavior. During the revolution, Mao often gave short, pithy formulations to characterize his favorite cadres. For Xi, Mao wrote the words “The party’s interests come first” on a white cloth and gave it to him as a gift. It became one of Xi’s most treasured possessions.

Although the party’s interests came first, Xi was still human. He struggled to balance the multiple centers of emotional gravity that shaped his life. In August 1990, Xi momentarily lost his ability to contain his frustrations. According to the diaries of Li Rui, one of Mao’s former secretaries, at a meeting of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, Xi screamed at Premier Li Peng, leading Li Rui to write, “This demonstrates that his mental situation has, at the very least, completely lost control.” Li Rui concludes that “this was the result of several years of pent-up resentment.” Xi refused to see a doctor and spent the night after his outburst on the couch in his office.² It was soon after that incident that Xi met with Chen Jianzhong. Xi then departed for Guangdong, only to return to Beijing in 1999.

Xi, according to one of his closest associates, once claimed, “With regard to me at least, in my whole life, I never persecuted anyone; in my whole life, I never made a leftist [radical] mistake.”³ One of Xi’s daughters claimed that after his retirement, he told her, “Your father, in his whole life, did not leave you all with anything. I only left you all with a sense of uprightness.”⁴ In a letter to his father, Xi Jinping once wrote, “You instructed me that in your entire life, you never persecuted people and you always maintained the truth.”⁵ Some analysts even conclude that one of the reasons for Xi Jinping’s ascendancy to top leader is the reputation of his father as a reformist titan who had not used brutality to rise to power.⁶

Xi Jinping’s aggressive attacks on potential challengers and reluctance to introduce political and economic reforms disappointed people who thought he would be more like their understanding of his father.⁷ Even after Xi Jinping started demonstrating these tendencies, Wu Jiaxiang, who previously had worked in the secretariat, argued that Xi would never betray his father’s legacy as a reformer: “He is his father’s son; he was born into the family of the most proreform faction, and according to the legacy of the party and Chinese history, he will not betray the faction that includes his father. . . . He is an egg laid by his father, an egg of reform. . . . [Xi Zhongxun] was not a typical reformer—he was the greatest reformer.”⁸ After Xi Jinping’s political direction became clear, Xi Zhongxun’s life turned into a weapon against him. Hu Ping, a prominent Chinese liberal intellectual living in the United States, called Xi Jinping an “unfilial son.”⁹

Xi Jinping’s supporters, on the other hand, emphasized another one of Xi Zhongxun’s legacies—his absolute devotion to the revolution and the party. Despite the misfortunes Xi Zhongxun encountered throughout his life, including the suffering he experienced at the hands of the party itself, he never lost faith. In that same letter to his father, Xi Jinping wrote, “No matter whether it was the era of the White Terror [i.e., the Nationalists] or the period of extreme leftism; no matter whether you were libeled against or you were in a difficult situation, in your heart, there was a bright lantern that always kept you on the correct path forward. When people yelled at us for being bastards, I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero, that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud.”¹⁰

Xi Jinping repeatedly refers to his father when he meets with foreigners. In August 2011, when Xi met with then vice president Joe Biden, he spoke of Zhongxun and his family’s traumatic experiences.¹⁶ Unprompted, Xi also brought up his father during a cozy fireside chat at the Lodge, the official residence of Australian prime minister—at the time, Kevin Rudd.¹⁷ In March 2013, Xi told a group of Russian sinologists that his father was the “supreme life example” and was “humane to the highest measure of wisdom.” “We took the historic baton and will carry it with honor,” Xi said.¹⁸

For Xi Zhongxun, party history was a landmine that, throughout his career, threatened to explode and sometimes did. Even before he began working in the Communist-controlled rural base areas in 1932, the party in Shaanxi Province was riven by mutual antagonisms and violence, which resulted in hatreds that would last for decades. The year of 1935 was a watershed—Xi and more prominent leaders, such as Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, were incarcerated by fellow Communists. For the rest of his life, Xi would claim that the party’s plan had been to bury him alive. Mao and the rest of the central leadership, nearing total exhaustion after months of fleeing Nationalist forces on the Long March, stumbled upon the Shaanxi Communists. Soon after, Xi and the others were released and the Central Committee under Mao proceeded to settle in the region. That moment would tie Mao and Xi together but in a dangerous way. As one of the last corners of Communist-controlled territory, its discovery was a great boon for Mao at a critical moment, but its existence also suggested that Mao was not the only one who had devised a way to make revolution work.

In 1942, Mao used his own interpretation of party history to “adopt” the men who had survived the 1935 purge. According to this narrative, Xi and others from the Northwest had suffered leftist dogmatic persecution in ways that mirrored Mao’s own experiences in Jiangxi before the Long March. Yet Mao would abandon Xi twenty years later. When the sister-in-law of Xi’s comrade Liu Zhidan began drafting a book about Liu, Xi initially discouraged her, but others persuaded him to relent. After segments were published, the book was characterized as an attempt by Xi to rewrite party history for his own nefarious goals. Under intense emotional pressure, he spent the next sixteen years of his life rewriting self-criticisms about his history in the party. Even after Mao’s death, the issue of the party’s past in the Northwest was a sensitive topic—Liu Zhidan would be banned twice more, once in the 1980s and again in 2009.

The weaponization of Xi Zhongxun’s life by both his son’s detractors and his son’s boosters, as well as by the inherently political nature of party history described above, raises serious challenges for any potential biographers. Jia Juchuan, the author of Zhongxun’s official biography, admits, “So many officials and people want to make up and change things. Lots of political factors have been introduced. Everyone, no matter whether they have jobs or are retired, wants to leave something behind for their own status. . . . People who don’t know about history are writing history, and people who don’t know how to write biography are writing biography.”¹⁹ Xi Jinping himself has characterized the negative portrayals of the past as “historical nihilism” and therefore an existential threat to regime stability. Thus, any book on party history, especially on Xi Jinping’s own father, is necessarily only the latest draft.

Xi Zhongxun was a man whose life was marked by personal tragedy. Shortly after he was released from jail at the age of fourteen, his father, whose health had collapsed out of worry over his son, died. His mother and two sisters, weakened by famine, passed shortly thereafter. In the following years, he was almost killed on numerous occasions by enemy forces, causing him to experience nightmares for the rest of his life. During the Cultural Revolution, he was kidnapped by Red Guards and forcibly brought to another province, held in solitary confinement, sent to struggle sessions, and sometimes beaten. Many of his former colleagues, as well as his own family, suffered terribly because of their connections with him—some were even persecuted to death, including a daughter.

While Xi felt undeniable anguish and sadness throughout his life, it would be a mistake to assume that these difficulties diminished his devotion to the party and the revolution. Understanding why requires a sensitivity to the political culture in which Xi lived. In the party, suffering meant “forging,” or strengthening one’s willpower and dedication. Undergoing such trials would signify true faith in the cause, and caring too much about oneself was a symptom of a bourgeois, individualistic privilege. Xi’s favorite novel, The Young Wanderer, tells the story of a series of personal disasters that befall a young man on his course to joining the revolution.²⁰ When Xi was incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution, as he paced back and forth every day to maintain his health, he memorized Mao’s writings. When people complained about party policies, Xi often bragged about his hardships to delegitimize their grumblings. In the early 1990s, Xi even boasted to a Western historian that although Deng Xiaoping had suffered at the hands of the party on three occasions, he had been persecuted five times.²¹

Yet Xi still had an impressive career that saw him carry heavy responsibilities at tender ages. When he was sixteen, he infiltrated a warlord army as an undercover agent, and only two years later, he led a failed mutiny of a battalion. At twenty, he was chairman of a local soviet base area. On arriving in that region, Mao saw posters about a “Chairman Xi,” and when he finally met him, Mao was shocked by his youth. After the revolution, Xi was by far the youngest leader of a major regional bureau. In 1959, he was the youngest vice-premier. Over and over again, Xi served as the trusted right-hand person to others who were much older, including such legendary figures as Peng Dehuai, He Long, and Zhou Enlai. In the 1980s, he served as the trusted assistant to the slightly younger Hu Yaobang on the secretariat.

Under Zhou and then Hu, Xi twice served as the “chief implementer for the chief implementer.” He also executed the party’s policies as the head of regional powerhouses in the Northwest and the South. On first glance, such a figure might not seem worthy of a biography. Why would someone whose job was to follow orders be interesting? The answer is that party life is much more complicated than simply doing what one is told. As Xi’s life shows in dramatic fashion, the “implementers” often faced an impossible situation. They were told to pursue multiple goals at the same time without clear guidance on what mattered more or how to achieve them. Commands would often include two parts separated by a “but”: make sure the campaign is thorough, they were told, but avoid going too far too fast. If they went too far in one direction, either to the “left” (too radical)” or “right” (too capitulationist), they could face charges of ideological heresy. Setbacks might mean losing authority to someone else. As paramount leaders, Mao and then Deng were often distant, vague, mercurial, and suspicious. If a deputy reported too much, they might feel overwhelmed and distracted from big issues. But not enough communication could lead to suspicions that underlings were trying to run the country themselves. Private frank meetings between a leader and his lieutenants were extremely rare, and even then there was no guarantee that an understanding had been achieved or would prove resilient. Working for both Zhou and Hu, Xi saw how all these challenges were further exacerbated by the explosive politics of course correction—a common problem given the constant swinging from left to right—and worries about succession.

For people outside the party, Xi was most famously a high-ranking figure in the so-called United Front: an influence campaign to co-opt other parties, prominent unaffiliated individuals, powerful ethnic-minority leaders, and the Chinese diaspora. His deep faith in the revolution made him an especially capable person to make the party’s case to these outsiders. Displaying the party in a positive light was much easier when Xi actually held office. Before 1949, the party was an attractive alternative to the corrupt Nationalists. In the 1950s, many had hopes that the party would finally build a strong China. Then, in the 1980s, as the party moved away from the disastrous policies of the Mao era, people once again had reason to believe that it was moving in the right direction.

Xi was an earthy, humorous individual who often impressed people with his sincerity. He was memorably courteous and friendly toward much younger people. His friendships with former Nationalist leaders and ethnic-minority figures had genuine elements. Yet although he could be a charmer, he was no pushover. He often reminded these individuals that friendship with the party could only be based on “principles.” Toward other party members, he could display an explosive rage, although never toward top leaders, such as Mao or Deng. At times, he overreacted to perceived slights or jumped to conclusions, often apologizing after wrathful encounters. His tenure on the secretariat was memorable for its open atmosphere, but he could also be longwinded and monopolize conversations. When necessary, he served effectively as the party’s enforcer. Xi respected toughness—Jinping was his favorite son precisely because of a belief that Jinping had the most “mettle.”²² In part because of his fixation on hardship as a character-building enterprise, at home, Xi Zhongxun was a brutal disciplinarian.

Although Western scholars often use “left” or “right,” or even "good" or “bad,” to characterize Chinese leaders, a closer look at the supposed inveterate “reformer” Xi Zhongxun reveals the problems with such terminology. Although he helped establish the special economic zones, at first, he strongly opposed the household-responsibility system in the countryside that allowed peasants to farm their own plots—perhaps the most important policy change that led to China’s economic takeoff. He thought the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, and he believed Mao’s style of strongman rule should never be repeated, but throughout his life, he remained deeply devoted to the chairman’s memory. Xi was comfortable with policy flexibility, but he was sensitive to the importance of justifying such innovations with ideological explanations, and he found consumerism and materialism deeply distasteful. He thought dialogue and listening to grievances could help resolve contradictions within society, but he had a phobia of chaos. He used co-optation and a lighter touch to win the loyalty of ethnic minorities, but such policies were still forms of control for Beijing to maintain its power along its borders. He cared deeply about the principle of protecting differing opinions, but he also fetishized party unity. Although he often shared policy views with his protégés, he simultaneously felt a responsibility to regularly rein them in and to push them to pursue unity with competitors.

As Russian historian Roi Medvedev writes, no one in a Leninist system could occupy a top post and not “from time to time betray one’s own friends, associates, or completely innocent people. Everyone made their own choice, and everyone sought justifications for their transgressions.”²³ In this book, the traditional “heroes” of Chinese history come out a bit worse, and the “villains” a bit better. Personalities matter, but no one’s behavior can be understood out of the context of a particular system: the Chinese Communist Party.

A tough man with chauvinistic tendencies, Xi Zhongxun was still someone who struggled to find meaning in the face of desperation. As a young person, he went through a period of doubt and depression, but ultimately, he found motivation in the self-sacrifice and dedication of the professional revolutionary. Life as a member of the party presented new challenges: how to balance his own “humanity” (renxing)—in the form of ambition, friendship, family, mercy, and personal political views—with the values of “partyness” (dangxing)—organizational discipline, unity, societal transformation, and protecting the “core” leader.

Sometimes these elements aligned, but at other times, they did not. And although the party betrayed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Zhongxun never betrayed the party. Xi’s choice was always inevitable, but it was never easy. Terror, guilt, regret, sadness, and fury mixed with dedication and a coolly rational conclusion that opposing the party would make any situation worse. For many observers, such a life might seem tragic, but Xi Zhongxun made his choice, and it was deeply meaningful for him. It was a life lived according to party morality, a life that afforded him the excitement of participating in the grand adventure of revolution in an organization that he believed was a manifestation of the iron laws of history. And now his son, who intimately watched his father balance these competing tendencies for decades, is the leader of the People’s Republic of China.

Notes

1. Chen Jianzhong xiansheng koushu lishi fangwen dagang (self-pub., n.d.).

2. Li Rui, diary (vol. 22, 1990), p. 67, HIA.

3. Wu Jiang, “Qin Chuan tan Xi Zhongxun er san shi,” Yanhuang chunqiu, no. 11 (2003): 56–57.

4. Hao Ping, “Yi sheng xinshou ‘shemi wuguo, qinjian xingbang,’” in Xi Zhongxun jinian wenji, ed. Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi, 2013), 762.

5. Xi Jinping, “Gei baba bashiba zhousui shengri de hexin,” in Xi Zhongxun jinian wenji, ed. Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi, 2013), 806.

6. Gao Wenqian, “Mao de wenge yichan yu Xi Jinping zhiguo moshi,” in Wenge wushinian: Mao Zedong yichan he dangdai Zhongguo, ed. Song Yongyi, vol. 2 (Deer Park, NY: Mingjing, 2016), 406–24.

7. Ibid., 417.

8. Jiang Xun, “Xi Jinping xiang zuo zhuanshi zuojia dongzuo,” Yazhou zhoukan, Sept. 22, 2013, 34–35.

9. Hu Ping, “Buxiaozi Xi Jinping,” RFA, May 4, 2015.

10. Xi Jinping, “Gei baba,” 806–7.

11. Yang Ping, “Mudu ganren de Xi jia fuzi qing,” Yanhuang shijie 132, no. 2 (2013): 9.

12. Evan Osnos, “Born Red,” New Yorker, Apr. 6, 2015.

13. Yang Ping, “Xi jia,” 11; He Yao, Xi Zhongxun jiafeng (n.p.: Hunan renmin, n.d.), 415.

14. Long Fei and Jing Jing, “Zuihou yi ren mishu yanzhong de Xi Zhongxun,” Dang’an chunqiu, no. 1 (2008): 8.

15. Zhang Guoying shenqie huainian Xi Zhongxun: Xi Zhongxun danchen yibai zhounian jinian, 1913–2013 (Guangzhou: self-pub., 2013), 250.

16. Andrew Higgins, “For China’s Next Leader, the Past Is Sensitive,” WP, Feb. 13, 2012.

17. Kevin Rudd, The PM Years (Sydney: Macmillan, 2018), 301; Kevin Rudd (former prime minister of Australia), in discussion with the author, Feb. 2020.

18. Iu. V. Tavrovskii, Si Tszin´pin: Po stupeniam kitaiskoi mechty (Moscow: Eksmo, 2015), 246; “Vstrecha Predsedatelia KNR Si Tszin´pina s rossiiskimi kitaevedami,” Problemy Dal´nego Vostoka, no. 4 (2013): 7.

19. Higgins, “For China’s Next Leader.”

20. Titles in running text are generally given in English for ease of reading. The original language is presented in citations where applicable.

21. Interview with Western historian. All interviews without identifying information were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees and dates and locations of interviews are withheld by mutual agreement to protect the identity of the interviewees.

22. Joseph Torigian, “Historical Legacies and Leaders’ Worldviews: Communist Party History and Xi’s Learned (and Unlearned) Lessons,” China Perspectives, no. 1–2 (2018): 8.

23. Roi Medvedev, Iurii Andropov: Neizvestnoe ob izvestnom (Moscow: Vremia, 2004), 29.