The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

Full title: LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

Joseph Torigian, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

Recorded on Tuesday, December 2, 2025

The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party's demands.

Dr. Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was a Visiting Fellow at the China in the World Program at Australian National University, a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a Postdoctoral (and Predoctoral) Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a Predoctoral Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. His first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was released with Yale University Press, and The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was published by Stanford University Press in 2025.