In December 2002, less than one month after he became the top party leader in Zhejiang Province, Xi Jinping treated his father’s old friend Li Rui to breakfast at an extremely expensive restaurant intended to host ministerial officials. They discussed Zhongxun’s behavior when Hu Yaobang was removed from power in 1987, as well as how, after he died two years later, Li had left Hu’s wake to visit Zhongxun at the Great Hall of the People.

“Now your position is different,” Li told Xi Jinping at the end of their meeting. “You can raise a few ideas with the higher-ups.” Xi responded cautiously. “How can I compare to you?” Xi said. “You know how to walk a fine line. I don’t dare.” This was to be the last meeting between Li Rui and Xi Jinping. Li would later say, “Of course, at the time, I did not look down on him because he was the son of Zhongxun.”

In 2009, Hu Dehua, the youngest of Hu Yaobang’s sons, met with Jinping for an hour when Jinping went to visit Hu’s widow for the Lunar New Year.

Hu Dehua later described his conversation with Xi, who was the heir apparent by then: “I spoke a lot. I said that now the issue is not whether to reform or not. It is that without reform everything will be over. I said that reform does not need to wait until you are in charge…. When my father and your father embarked on reform, your father was in Guangdong, and my father was vice president of the party school. The party school had no status at all in the past, and he was only third vice president, but he was still able to cause big waves.”

Xi said little in response. When pressed, he responded noncommittally, “I am listening to you sing.” 

That was not the last meeting between a member of the Hu family and Xi. In 2012, Hu Yaobang’s older son Deping, a man whom Xi had once referred to as “big brother,” also met with Jinping to encourage a reformist path. Jinping listened patiently, and Hu Deping left the meeting feeling confident that Jinping would steer the party in a better direction. Xi told Hu that the problems China had accumulated were unprecedented, and it was necessary to achieve progress while remaining steady. Although Xi promised to deliver on political reform, he expressed opposition to radical change.

After Xi succeeded Hu Jintao as the country’s top leader, pro-reform party elders and intellectuals were not sure what to make of him at first. In November 2012, Zhao Ziyang’s former secretary Bao Tong told the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily that he expected Jinping could “surpass his father” as a leader. “If he does poorly, he will disappoint and not do justice to his father,” Bao said, “but I believe he will do better than his father.”

On February 6, 2013, the proreform journal Yanhuang chunqiu held a meeting during which Feng Jian, a former high-ranking official at the New China News Agency, expressed optimism about Jinping because of who his father was: “He cannot completely give up his father’s legacy.” But He Fang, a party elder who for decades had worked on foreign policy, interrupted. “Political genes cannot be inherited,” he warned.

The pro-reform elites returned to the question of Xi Jinping on February 27 at a Lunar New Year’s celebration, again held by Yanhuang chunqiu. Du Daozheng, the director of the journal, pointed out that Jinping had already made a trip to Shenzhen to signify support for the reforms, and, on the anniversary of the 1982 constitution, he had given a major speech praising rule of law.

Du was worried, however, by comments Jinping had made for internal consumption that emphasized the loss of control over ideology and the military that had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “My meaning is not to be pessimistic,” Du said, “but currently one also cannot feel optimistic.”

Another attendee was Ma Xiaoli, daughter of Ma Wenrui — a northwesterner who, because of his ties to Zhongxun, had also been persecuted during the Mao era. Ma drew upon her understanding of the princelings to warn the participants about what might be coming. She said that “80 or 90 percent of the second Red generation” was leftist. “They all have genes they inherited from their parents, beginning from Old Mao; it is all the same…. I say Chairman Mao inherently spoiled us as a group: we’re aggressive; what he taught is to be bellicose roosters all the time.”

Ma believed that the Hu family, given its historic relationship to the Xi family, had a special obligation to push matters in the right direction. In his own speech, Hu Dehua made a cutting remark about Xi Jinping’s recent comments that neither the thirty years before or the thirty years after the beginning of Reform and Opening should be rejected. Hu wondered aloud whether such a position also meant that “what Chairman Mao said about General Secretary Xi’s father, Zhongxun, ‘Using a novel to oppose the party is a great invention,’ also cannot be rejected.”

When Xi met with potential challengers to party rule, he often charmed them. Was he acting sincerely or instrumentally or a bit of both? While this is an academic question for historians, it was an existential puzzle for United Front targets.

Li Rui did not quickly change his mind about Xi Jinping. Despite more and more evidence that Xi would pursue an authoritarian line, Li repeatedly told his daughter that “Xi Jinping is still the son of Xi Zhongxun.”

In October 2014, Li claimed that nefarious individuals had cut important segments of a speech Xi had given on the constitution the previous year when it was published by the New China News Agency and People’s Daily: “Some people say this is a serious political incident. I also believe this.”

When asked explicitly if he was optimistic about Jinping’s leadership, Li said he had “big hopes,” referring specifically to Jinping’s war on corruption, the dismantling of the “reform-by-labor” camps, and the new policies against perks for party members.

Li’s feelings toward Xi Jinping were based on his attitude toward Xi Zhongxun: “Xi Zhongxun and I were intimate friends. We got along very well. Xi Jinping recently said, ‘In the struggle against corruption, the life and reputation of one individual do not matter.’ That is enough to see in him his father’s courage, strength of character, and sense of responsibility.”

In 2016, Yanhuang chunqiu, which had been praised by Xi Zhongxun himself, was finally shut down by the authorities under Xi Jinping’s watch. Furious because of this turn of events, Li Rui shared a clever play on words with the journal’s director, Du Daozheng: “Maobing bugai, ji’e chengxi.”

The expression can be interpreted both as “If a fault is not corrected, it will become a bad habit” or as “If the disease of Mao is not changed, the evil will accumulate and turn into Xi.” Li was asserting that because the legacy of the Maoist era had never truly been overturned, it was now manifesting itself in Xi’s behavior. In October 2017, when Xi was reappointed general secretary, Li noted in his diary that the front pages of party newspapers were covered with big headshots of Xi Jinping. “Not even in the Mao era did it ever reach this level,” he wrote.

In April 2018, as he lay on his death bed, Li Rui asked his daughter Nanyang how the outside world was reacting to the recent decision to amend the constitution to allow Xi Jinping to stay in power potentially for life. Two days later, Hu Dehua came to visit him. Li was devastated by the turn Chinese politics had taken: “The appearance of Xi Jinping is your responsibility. You need to figure out who he is. Is it a lack of education? Mao’s problem was precisely that he was uneducated; he scored an F in math. Xi’s education is also very low. I am very sad. His father was so good. It is so painful that he had such a son.”

THE MYSTERY OF XI JINPING

So what, then, were the lessons of Xi Zhongxun’s life for his son Jinping? That, of course, raises another question: What are the lessons contained in this biography?

The evidence presented here touches upon perhaps the most perennial question of scholarly research into Communist regimes: the question of “possibility-hood.” Did the life of Xi Zhongxun, especially his actions during the 1980s, suggest that, under different circumstances, the party might have taken a more “humane,” liberal path? Or did the characteristics inherent in the party, as well as Xi’s own personal limitations, demonstrate that, as the Russian rock ’n’ roll musician Boris Grebenshchikov once put it in a song, “there is no road, and there never was one”?

The question of possibility-hood is inherently dramatic regardless of the answer. Storytelling certainly has its place in history. It can vivify past voices and convey the emotional atmosphere experienced by the participants. Yet, with no disrespect to Li Jiantong’s purposes in writing Liu Zhidan, “lives are not novels,” as Arlette Farge writes.

Biographies should not ignore “the disjunctures and anomalies of human experiences, of radically different contexts… in service to a literary imperative to give meaning and recognizable shape to the life as a whole,” in the words of Ronald Suny.

Poetics, partisanship, and presentism are not a free pass to deny the concrete methodological challenges inherent in historical counterfactuals. A serious investigation into historical moments can give us a sense of how politics works and teach us how to structure questions. But the past cannot give us a precise constellation of the variables that deterministically explain an outcome, nor can it help us predict the future.

While books that overemphasize contingency or continuity might make for a good read, Xi’s life is a powerful statement about the misleading nature of grand narratives. It shows that power is tricky, slippery, and contingent even for an organizational weapon like the party.

Each of the chapters in this book is about a different topic, but they are interconnected in a way that makes counterfactuals about the regime’s broader trajectory challenging. All the “characters” in this book, not only Xi but also the people whom he despised, were full of contradictions. They were both victims and perpetrators.

While Western historians and official party histories have both long seen the party’s past as a constant struggle between “good people” and “bad people,” such approaches simply do not do justice to the extraordinary subtleties of personal interactions in an organization like the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite organizational discipline, people remained complicated. They could seem “rightist” in one situation and “leftist” in another. They could also change their minds. And even if Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, or Xi Zhongxun had become the top leader, they too, if they survived, might have changed. Xi himself whispered privately that power corrupted.

Moreover, despite the findings provided in this book, many aspects of Xi’s life remain a mystery. This point is not an attempt to shy away from drawing conclusions but a reflection of the peculiarities of party life in China.

When Xi met with potential challengers to party rule, he often charmed them. Was he acting sincerely or instrumentally or a bit of both? While this is an academic question for historians, it was an existential puzzle for United Front targets.

Xi Jinping was only nine years old when his father fell [four years before the Cultural Revolution], so the tough environment directly influenced his personality. He is therefore good at forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.

Gao Wenqian, a Chinese historian

Even within the party, discipline often made it impossible to discern what Xi, who spent years doing underground work, really thought. He existed in an inherently opaque system in which even people at the top often had a very poor idea of what was transpiring, and he himself often had extremely mixed feelings about events.

Because competing versions of the past hold a special charge for party members, writing party history faces special challenges. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes, the “play of power in the production of alternative narratives” extends even to the evidence upon which histories are written. In many cases, the vagaries of evidence and intention simply cannot bear the weight of the big questions we would most like to ask.

It is precisely these ambiguities that make the question of what lessons Jinping learned from his father so meaningful. Ironically, guessing what 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.

As the Chinese historian Gao Wenqian notes, “Xi Jinping was only nine years old when his father fell [four years before the Cultural Revolution], so the tough environment directly influenced his personality. He is therefore good at forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.”

In a rare moment of candor, Jinping once even said, “My father entrusted me with two things: don’t persecute people and tell the truth. The first is possible, while the second is not.” Certainly, the Zhongxun-Jinping relationship is a powerful context for understanding the son, yet, at the same time, Jinping, like his father, is the product of a multiplicity of different motives, influences, and contexts.

The possibility of multiple meanings that could be derived from Zhongxun’s life is also evidenced by the very different paths taken by his children.

Xi Heping committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Before his death in 1998, Xi Zhengning, as minister of justice in Hainan Province, fought to strengthen rule of law there — the same task that his father pursued on a national level during his final years in Beijing.

In two speeches Zhengning gave on the subject, in 1994 and 1995, the word “party” appeared only once. Instead, he emphasized the importance of learning from Western legal systems. Lawyers should never be punished, he said, for exercising their right to independently practice the law.

Xi Qianping became a journalist at International Business Daily, where one journalist who knew both her and her father later wrote that she “dressed simply, was low-key, and had the style of the Xi family. She could not be more different from the show-off style and arrogance of some children of high-ranking officials.”

In October 2011, she attended an event marking the thirtieth anniversary of the defeat of the Gang of Four that had been organized by Yanhuang chunqiu, the history journal. When she attended another Yanhuang chunqiu event in March 2014 celebrating the Lunar New Year, those who saw her thought she looked like “a rustic old revolutionary from a base area.”

Except for Jinping, Xi Zhongxun’s other children, who were born to Qi Xin and grew up after the revolution, have all received extensive attention because of their wealth.

In 1990, Xi’s daughter Qiaoqiao quit her job in Beijing as vice–division commander in the People’s Armed Police to help take care of Xi. As early as 1991, one year after she moved to Shenzhen with her father, she purchased an apartment in Hong Kong that cost $387,000. In 1996, she married the Yunnan businessman Deng Jiagui. Just a few years later, in 1997, she and her husband Deng had an investment of 15.3 million yuan in a company.

In an interview, Qiaoqiao claimed that after her father’s death in 2002, Qi Xin wanted to write a letter to the leadership requesting that Qiaoqiao, by then already fifty-four years old, be allowed to return to her old job in Beijing. Qiaoqiao rejected that option, she claimed, and instead decided to start all over again by entering the world of business.

She completed Tsinghua University’s executive master’s program in business administration in 2006. That same year, in an interview with Successful Marketing, Qiaoqiao described her approach to real estate as “looking at things from the perspective of a housewife.” She asserted that “the most important thing is that you must be trustworthy! Tricking other people means tricking yourself.” Unlike other real estate companies, she would not purchase advertisements.

While Mao had described her father as “putting the party’s interests first,” in this interview, Qiaoqiao stated that it was necessary to “always proceed from the interests of the customer.” In 2008, Deng Jiagui spent $71 million to buy a stake in Jiangxi Rare Earth. In 2009, for unclear reasons, Qiaoqiao and Deng were given an early opportunity to buy a $28.6 million stake in Wanda, the giant shopping-center conglomerate owned by oligarch Wang Jianlin, before the company went public.

Mao’s problem was precisely that he was uneducated; he scored an F in math. Xi’s education is also very low. I am very sad. His father was so good. It is so painful that he had such a son.

Li Rui, former secretary to Mao Zedong

In 1977, Yuanping entered the Luoyang Foreign Language Academy of the People’s Liberation Army. After he graduated, he worked in the military and the government, including in the area of foreign trade, although the details remain unclear.

An American embassy contact claimed that, by the 1980s, Yuanping “had become both obese and very wealthy.” He sported “expensive jewelry and designer clothing,” moving to Hong Kong when it was still under British rule.

In October 2000, a man who had previously served as a bodyguard for Ye Jianying, Zhu De, and Hu Yaobang but then later became a businessman told Li Rui that he had run into Yuanping at a hotel and not only paid the 8,000-yuan check but also gave Yuanping all the 10,000-yuan bills he had on hand. This remarkable display of generosity did not impress Qi Xin, who allegedly made a sneering remark: “Get rid of the beggar.” He decided to give up on the Xi family.

Excerpted from The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Joseph Torigian, published by Stanford University Press, © 2025 by Joseph Torigian. All Rights Reserved.

Join China Books Review for author and academic Joseph Torigian’s book talk on The Party’s Interests Come First at Asia Society in New York, June 11, 2025.

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