Book Launch: Joseph Torigian, The Party's Interests Come First

Selected as a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, BBC History Magazine, New Indian Express, and Marginal Revolution

"[A] masterly biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's present-day president, Xi Jinping.... [A] scrupulously researched and keenly perceptive account of an important but, in the West, little-known historical figure."—Robert B. Zoellick, The Wall Street Journal

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world—and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese. And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the Party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters.

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. Through the eyes of Xi Jinping's father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP—and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.

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Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a senior fellow at the Council on Foriegn Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He studies the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. He uses primary sources, rare books, and interviews to provide new accounts of historical milestones in two nations of crucial geopolitical importance: China and Russia. In particular, he investigates how leaders in those nations secure themselves against threats at home and abroad. His research agenda contributes to several fields and disciplines: international relations, comparative politics, security studies, history, and Chinese and Russian studies.
Torigian's first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published with Yale University Press in 2022. His second book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was released with Stanford University Press in June 2025. It was a Financial Times Book of the Summer and an Economist Best Book of the Year So far. His current research agenda looks at nuclear weapons and the military-industrial complex in China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Previously, Torigian was a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab, Stanton Nuclear Security 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, a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research has also been supported by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, MIT’s Center for International Studies, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, the Critical Language Scholarship program, and FLAS.
Torigian's views on Chinese and Russian politics and history have appeared in media outlets such as the BBC, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and others. He has also published in general interest journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

Moderator:

Michael Froman, President of the Council on Foreign Relations

Panelists:

Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Professor and Chair, Department of Global Inquiry at American University's School of International Service

Katie Stallard, Senior Editor, China and Global Affairs, at the New Statesman

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

American University, School of International Service, Founders Room, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, United States

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