By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Miseducation of Xi Jinping

Given the flood of books on China that has poured forth in recent years, one might think the rest of the world would have figured out that provocative country by now. But much of China’s historical evolution continues to defy Western understanding, and many of its leaders remain tantalizing conundrums—few more so than Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China. Having watched him up close on official trips, once in 2015 with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and once during U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 trip to China, I’ve encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little about what’s going on inside their heads. With a Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile permanently etched on his face, Xi’s mien is hard to read.

Opacity may have been a skill Xi learned as a child, according to Joseph Torigian’s prodigiously researched epic The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. Torigian quotes the Chinese historian Gao Wenqian, who suggests that after watching his father’s fall from grace within the CCP, Xi learned the art of “forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.” Xi Zhongxun, a close colleague of Mao Zedong’s, had been intensely loyal to both the party and its revolution, only to be repaid with political persecution, abuse, imprisonment, and domestic exile. This was the world in which Xi Jinping came of age.

As Torigian observes, the history of internal CCP dynamics confronts scholars, especially those not from China, with “one of the most difficult research targets in the world.” Not only do they have to contend with the formidable language barrier, but the CCP is so sensitive about having its dirty laundry aired in public that it goes to great lengths to distort its historical record with propaganda and to keep embarrassing documents off-limits. The result is an official history that is immaculately well scrubbed and ordered lest it reveal any fallibility.

But peek behind the veil, and a different reality reveals itself: a dog-eat-dog world of power struggles, artifice, hubris, treachery, and duplicity—yet also an enormous amount of sacrifice. By limning the life of Xi Zhongxun in such extraordinary detail, Torigian helps readers see behind the veil and understand the political crucibles in which father and son were “forged,” the term both use to describe how they were shaped by revolutionary hardship and struggle.

“The fall of Xi Zhongxun was a turning point in Chinese history,” Torigian writes. It was also a turning point for the Xi family, which spiraled into tragedy thereafter. Xi Jinping was only nine years old in 1962, when his father, a senior member of Mao’s government, was purged on spurious charges, including approving the publication of a novel about his mentor. The elder Xi was plunged into 16 years of political ostracism and violence—he was beaten so badly he became deaf in one ear—that continued until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, and the end of the Cultural Revolution. 100YearsCCP1.html

As one former colleague recalled, Xi’s purge caused him “psychological damage.” Yet despite all the abuse, Xi continued to insist that all he wanted to do was to “struggle his entire life for the party.” One is left to wonder why—and how all the injustices and indignities inflicted on the Xi family affected his children.

Xi Jinping’s childhood was so traumatic that being “sent down” to the countryside in 1969 to spend seven years in grinding poverty and “learn from the peasants” during the Cultural Revolution came as a relief. Of course, the whole time he lived under the mortifying shadow of his father, a “counterrevolutionary,” which was one of the lowest categories of political damnation in the CCP playbook. As Torigian writes, Xi Jinping “suffered special mistreatment” because of his father, whom he was forced to denounce. One can only imagine his humiliation as a teenager to have his application to join the Communist Youth League—a precursor to full party membership that every child coveted—rejected eight times. And then, before the Cultural Revolution finally ended, his sister, who had suffered her own torments, hanged herself in despair.

Lest any whiff of pop psychology tarnish his rigorous scholarship, Torigian insists his book “is not intended to be a Freudian analysis” of this father-son drama. Instead, he writes that his intention was to use “the life of one rather unique individual to tell the story of the Chinese Communist Party in the twentieth century.” By tapping into new Chinese, English, French, and Russian sources based largely outside China, Torigian has done that and more. Few sons ever escape the influence of their fathers, and by just laying out this father-son narrative, Torigian helps readers gain a deeper sense of how Xi Jinping’s passage to adulthood made him who he now is.

 

Struggle Session

Xi Zhongxun, Torigian says, was drawn to the promise of Marxism-Leninism in a manner that was “more emotional than ideological.” Born to a peasant family in 1913, just after the abdication of the last Qing emperor, he received only a rudimentary education in China’s hardscrabble northwest Shaanxi Province. “A tough man with chauvinistic tendencies,” writes Torigian, Xi Zhongxun “found motivation in the self-sacrifice and dedication of the professional revolutionary.” His idealization of the Communist revolution, which began in the early 1920s, remained a leitmotif throughout his life, even when the party turned on him in the most irrational and brutal ways.

He first became caught up in the party’s internecine power struggles in the early 1930s, when as a young man working with two of Shaanxi Province’s most celebrated Communist leaders, Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, he fell victim to a byzantine purge that saw hundreds executed. Xi was accused of “rightism”—insufficient ardor in executing “class enemies” such as landlords and rural gentry—and consequently beaten and imprisoned. Throughout his ignominy, however, he remained steadfastly loyal to the party and revolution. “I believe that the Central Committee will definitely clarify this matter,” he optimistically declared. “I absolutely am not a counterrevolutionary.”

His fate did change in 1935, when Mao, in need of refuge from his beleaguered Long March, stumbled into the Shaanxi area and ended the purge. Xi was rehabilitated and assigned to do “United Front work” with the Nationalists, who had temporarily joined forces with the Communists to fight the Japanese. Next, he moved to the Communists’ capital, Yanan, where he headed the Northwest Bureau Party School.

Mao’s paranoia about enemies and desire for ideological uniformity reached hysteria in 1942, when he launched his “rectification campaign.” At the time, many top leaders, including Premier Zhou Enlai, were forced to engage in days of humiliating self-criticism and confession. Xi had been sent to the commercially successful Suide subregion, where he helped organize mass rallies to expose putative spies, enemy agents, and other imagined political malefactors. Torigian describes the rallies as generating “a persecutorial mania that combined elements both farcical and terrifying” and wonders how to definitively account for such extreme actions by Xi, whom he views as a relative moderate.

“Xi was a party member,” Torigian surmises, “so when he was told to find spies, he did.” His goal was to “do everything possible to demonstrate his loyalty to Mao.” As a result, Mao ended up gifting him a white cloth inscribed with the phrase “The party’s interests come first,” a token he cherished. Despite all the political extremism that Xi was forced to endure, however, Torigian describes him as a person who preferred “balance,” a state that was difficult to find under Mao.

As his career took off, Xi gained new posts with increasing responsibilities and visibility until he became known as “the king of the Northwest.” In 1944, however, his eight-year marriage to Hao Mingzhu, with whom he had three children, fell apart. The same year, he married the 17-year-old Qi Xin, with whom he went on to have four more children, including Xi Jinping.

As the Communists gained ground on the Nationalists in the late 1940s, Xi joined Mao’s land reform movement, which saw millions of landlords “struggled against” and executed. He expressed doubts about such tactics and tried to make the case for a more moderate “middle path.” But this was a time of extremes, and Xi went on obediently supporting Mao in his next campaign against “counterrevolutionaries.” Xi even exhorted his minions to “kill enough to create awe and terror”—a logic, explains Torigian, that presupposed “the party could somehow achieve a ‘right’ number of executions.”

Postage stamps of Xi Zhongxun, Yantai, China, October 2013

After Mao’s People’s Liberation Army finally triumphed over the Nationalist forces in the Chinese Civil War, in 1949, Xi worked in a variety of central government positions in the newly established People’s Republic of China. His posts included minister of propaganda and managing relations with the Soviet Union, then China’s socialist “big brother.” In 1956, he joined the CCP’s Central Committee and then three years later became a vice premier under Zhou on the State Council, the chief administrative branch and national cabinet. It was there, Torigian reports, that Xi learned that Mao’s impetuous communization of agriculture, the so-called Great Leap Forward, had created one of the worst famines in human history and that “Zhou’s priority was not good policy” but “political survival.”

By 1962, a strange brew of convoluted accusations laid Xi low once more. Because of Moscow’s détente with Washington and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s emphasis on de-Stalinization, the Soviet Union had become China’s enemy; Mao began to fear Xi might have become infected by Khrushchev’s “revisionist” virus. Then there was a novel that Xi had reluctantly approved for publication about Liu Zhidan, his old mentor from Shaanxi Province, whom some rivals were now criticizing. Xi was accused of having “illicit relations with Moscow,” approving an incorrect work of fiction, and being an “antiparty” element. Even after numerous confessions, self-criticisms, and apologies, he found himself excommunicated again by the very party to which he’d dedicated his life.

“Thirty-six years of affection were ruined all at once,” he wrote as the next round of humiliations began. He felt like “a person who fell off an eighteen-floor building,” he told a friend.

All this happened before the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966. As Mao launched his Red Guard army against the party headquarters and state apparat that he believed were becoming too bureaucratic and bourgeois, Xi was exiled to a metal-working shop in Henan Province. There, insult followed injury. Kidnapped by a group of Red Guards, he was transported to a prison and then paraded before a stadium filled with detractors, arms bound behind his back, and beaten as the crowd screamed, “Topple! Set on fire! Deep-fry!” He was later imprisoned, plunged into repeated struggle sessions, and subjected to more beatings.

In desperation, Xi wrote pleas to his old comrades Mao and Zhou. Although neither replied, Torigian notes that Xi “never abandoned his emotional attachment to Mao” or his devotion to the party. Despite his willingness to repeatedly yield, even pander, to Mao and the party, Xi still comes across as well intentioned: someone trapped between submitting and surviving or opposing and being crushed. The party left no middle ground.

 

“Down With Xi Jinping!”

In Xi Zhongxun’s absence, his young second wife mothered their children as well as she could. But because of her husband’s fallen state, she was put on a “black name list” at the Central Party School where she worked and soon suffered numerous physical attacks. This left her children in the painful position of needing parents who had been rendered unlovable.

“I both could not stand to look at the black-and-blue scars on her face and was also worried that my classmates would surround her and look down on her, and I would feel ashamed,” Xi Jinping’s brother wrote of the embarrassment he experienced when his mother walked him to school. “I often cried silently out of humiliation for my mother and family.”

One of Xi Jinping’s teachers remembered him suffering “extremely unfair treatment” because of his parents. At his mother’s work unit, for instance, the young Xi was the only one dragged out with a group of adults to be publicly criticized. The teenager endured his own mother chanting, “Down with Xi Jinping!” out of fear of more persecution herself. When Xi later sneaked out of his school one night to run home and beg his mother for food, she rebuked him and turned him in to the authorities. At 15, he was brought in for questioning and detention at a facility where, he later claimed, he “collapsed from sickness” and “even thought of death.” When, in 1969, he was shipped off as a “sent down youth” to a penurious village in Shaanxi to do seven difficult years of manual labor, he felt it as a deliverance.

When Mao died, in 1976, Deng Xiaoping returned to power, and Xi Zhongxun was finally allowed to return to Beijing. He described his mood as both “joyful and terrified.” Despite all the official abuse, he still looked on the chance to contribute to China’s development again as a “glorious mission.” He was assigned as a deputy provincial party secretary to Guangdong Province and charged with cleaning up the mess left by the Cultural Revolution. He was also tapped to help initiate the new special economic zone in Shenzhen, one of four such zones that Deng had approved to bring in foreign investment and invigorate China’s lagging socialist economy with market forces. By 1980, Xi was leading China’s first delegation of governors to the United States.

Xi proved a deft reform leader and gained a reputation for being open-minded. But even though Xi Zhongxun and his family were ultimately reinstated, Torigian says that the “problems at the heart of the Leninist system”—which had allowed their political persecutions in the first place—remained unresolved. As the CCP amply demonstrated when it ordered troops to fire on protesters in 1989, the party had not lost its habit of responding to both real and imagined political challenges in harshly punitive, often murderous, ways. And so, when Xi Zhongxun died, in 2002, his children’s generation was left to wrestle with the same contradictions in China’s political system that he’d found so intractable.

Ten years later, when Xi Jinping was enthroned as China’s supreme leader, he came freighted with all the hopes to which his father’s last years in office had given rise. Many mistakenly thought Xi would follow in his father’s reformist footsteps and that China might slowly evolve into a more collective form of leadership, adopt a rule-of-law-based system, and welcome a more liberal economy. Torigian’s book offers a wealth of clues as to why these hallmarks have not ended up distinguishing Xi Jinping’s tenure. The Forbidden History.

The Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of 1991, has weighed heavily on the minds of China’s leaders over the past three decades as they seek to avoid a similar fate.

The Germans accomplished such a reckoning, but only after the complete defeat of the Nazis. And it was not until 1970 that Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees in apology before the memorial at the Warsaw ghetto. “Faced with the abyss of German history and the burden of the millions who had been murdered, I did what we humans do when words fail us,” he later wrote in his memoir.

Because the CCP is still in power, China’s challenge is far more difficult than Germany’s. For Xi Jinping or other party successors to similarly reckon with their country’s past, they would, in effect, have to take down the portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square. Such an act would betray the legacy of all those who, like Xi’s father, devoted their lives to the sacred cause of Mao’s revolution. Xi Jinping continues to venerate the party and views criticism of its record as “historical nihilism.” Indeed, it’s unlikely he will ever admit to the magnitude of crimes it committed against him or his country, much less abandon the rationalizations he inherited from his father that the revolution’s travails may have involved excesses but are excusable because they helped forge a better future for China.

Torigian seems vexed by this predicament for China. He ends with this line: “Left out of this narrative is a full account of the terrible costliness in human suffering that has come along with the revolutionary project—a Faustian bargain seen so clearly in the life of the man Xi Zhongxun.”

It is not clear whether Xi Zhongxun understood that to remain a loyal player in Mao’s China, he had to sell at least part of his soul. But it is clear that his son, despite all of China’s manifold accomplishments, confronts the same wager. Standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Xi recently declared at a military parade in Beijing that “the great rejuvenation of China is unstoppable.” Then, sounding almost American, he proclaimed that “the Chinese people firmly stand on the right side of history and on the side of human civilization and progress.”

Yet Xi’s declarations were bereft of any suggestion he’d ever be ready to honestly reckon with the CCP’s ruinous past. Therein lies the main obstacle to China ever becoming a truly respectable great power. If Xi were to confront history, he would have to demolish the party’s pretense that the Chinese Communist Revolution was largely a benign, productive force. So far, nothing suggests he has sufficient dedication to historical accuracy to do that. But future generations in China, those not bound by the same baggage as the Xi family, may someday find their voice and want to overturn Mao’s old mendacious order. If they do, they may ironically find it helpful to consider one of Mao’s most iconic slogans: “Without destruction, there can be no construction.”

 

Redder than Red

Torigian recognizes that “the emotional pressure on a child who was denied participation in the grand adventure of revolution because of family ties must have been intense.” But he is wary of addressing the question of what Xi Jinping learned from his father’s manic odyssey head-on. Although he’d rather let readers come to their own conclusions, he leaves a breadcrumb trail that is easy to follow.

In what Torigian describes as “a rare moment of candor,” Xi Jinping once confided, “My father entrusted me with two things: don’t persecute people and tell the truth. The first is possible, while the second is not.”

Readers may wonder, of course, if the first “thing” is not also impossible in modern China. But one finishes this family saga more fully understanding why, for Xi Jinping, opacity and mendacity became the best guarantors of survival. “Ironically,” Torigian writes, “guessing what [Xi] Jinping ‘really thinks’ of his father is difficult in part because he grew up in the Xi household—a place where a person would have learned the need for caution and reticence at a young age.”

While the young Xi was rusticating as a teenager in Shaanxi, he seems to have absorbed one other lesson: the best protection against being viewed as an apostate was to become more orthodox than anyone else. As one U.S. Embassy official wrote in a report quoted by Torigian, Xi concluded that “by becoming redder than red,” he could both assuage his own embarrassment regarding his father and armor himself against further criticism.

The more challenging question than how the father influenced his son, however, is one that lingers everywhere in this book: What does a one-party state such as China do with a revolution in which its own leaders—not outside colonialists, imperial overlords, or exploitative capitalists—became society’s main oppressors, all in the name of “liberation”? Can such leaders ever be expected to embrace their government’s past with enough honesty to acknowledge the damage done, much less make amends?

 

 

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