Knowingo
The cover of The Party’s Interests Come First

The Party’s Interests Come First

Joseph Torigian, 2025

Understand how Xi Zhongxun could champion humane reform while repeatedly subordinating it to Communist Party survival, and how that contradiction shaped Xi Jinping's inheritance.

Get the app Read on the web

8 parts, about 33 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Follows a revolutionary who could pity the victims of campaigns yet kept putting the party first, and asks what that choice cost
  • Helps you see how Chinese Communist politics works, from purges and rewritten history to reform by controlled local experiment
  • Weighs official biographies, family memories and hostile records against each other and says plainly what cannot be known

Who it is for

  • Readers trying to understand the family roots of China's leadership
  • Students of Chinese Communist history and elite politics
  • Journalists and analysts who follow Beijing's decisions

What the summary covers

  1. A Humane Cadre and a Party Man3 min
  2. Revolutionary Formation and the Politics of Survival4 min
  3. The Implementer in Power5 min
  4. When History Became a Weapon3 min
  5. Reform Through Controlled Experiment4 min
  6. Opening Without Political Pluralism6 min
  7. Succession, Hu Yaobang, and 19894 min
  8. Inheritance and Verdict4 min

Recommended by

  • Robert B. ZoellickFormer president of the World Bank Group
    [A] masterly biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's present-day president, Xi Jinping.

About the author

  • Joseph TorigianAssociate professor at the School of International Service, American University
    • Earned a PhD in international relations theory and comparative politics from MIT, defending his dissertation in August 2016
    • Associate professor at the School of International Service at American University and, as of the book's release, a Hoover Institution visiting fellow
    • Senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
    • Previously published Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion (Yale University Press, 2022)

More books like this