news

Mr Xi was used to leftovers. As a boy, he would wash in his father’s bathwater. (The next morning the water would be used for a third time, to launder the family’s clothes.) He also understood the importance of deference, for Xi Zhongxun had taught him that children who did not respect their parents were doomed to fail as adults. Every lunar new year, Mr Xi would perform the traditional kowtow ritual, prostrating himself before his parent in a display of reverence. If his technique was off, his father would beat him.

These stories are recounted in “The Party’s Interests Come First”, a biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, an American scholar. Mr Torigian draws on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources, including official documents, newspapers, diaries and interviews. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject—who was a major figure in the party’s history in his own right—but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader.

As China’s unquestioned ruler, possibly for life, Mr Xi is arguably the most important person in the world. He will be wielding power long after Donald Trump has retired to Mar-a-Lago. Yet information about him is paltry. His every movement is choreographed by a fawning propaganda machine; in the accounts of his life, interesting details are expunged by overbearing censors. There are only a handful of ways to understand Mr Xi, which involve poring over party records or leaked speeches, learning about key moments in Chinese history that he lived through and studying the people who most influenced him. Few people have shaped Mr Xi more than his father. Xi Zhongxun’s relationship to the party and his thwarted ambitions offer clues as to what his son wants for China.

Like many of his generation, Xi Zhongxun’s life was marked by tragedy. Born in 1913 into a family of peasants, he was an ardent believer in communism from a young age. His belief strengthened in his adolescent years, he said, as he witnessed “the tragic mistreatment of the labouring people”. He took part in violent student protests in 1928 and was imprisoned by the then anti-communist authorities. Xi Zhongxun’s parents died when he was a teenager: the result, he thought, of the stress caused by his jailing. Two of his sisters died of hunger.

After the civil war, Xi Zhongxun rose fast through the party’s ranks and “entered the very top echelon of the government”, Mr Torigian writes. Then, in 1962, he was purged by Mao Zedong for supporting the publication of a novel Mao considered subversive. Four years later, China’s paranoid dictator launched the Cultural Revolution, unleashing frenzied gangs who killed between 500,000 and 2m people and displaced many more. Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Around 20,000 people were targeted for having supported Xi Zhongxun, the author estimates, and at least 200 “were beaten to death, driven mad or seriously injured”.

His family suffered, too. They were forced to denounce Xi Zhongxun; one of his daughters committed suicide. A teenager at the time, Mr Xi was branded a “capitalist roader” (ie, a traitor) because of his father’s disgrace. On one occasion the young Mr Xi was forced to wear a heavy steel cap and subjected to public humiliation. A crowd ridiculed him, shouting slogans including “Down with Xi Jinping.” His mother joined in the jeering.

Mr Xi was thrown in prison, where he slept on an icy floor during the winter. “My entire body was covered in lice,” he wrote. One time, Mr Xi managed to escape and make his way home. He begged his mother for some food. Not only did she refuse, she also reported him to the authorities, fearful that she would be arrested otherwise. Crying, Mr Xi ran out into the rain.

What doesn’t kill you

The anguish did not stop there. In 1969, aged 15, Mr Xi was “sent down” to the countryside with millions of other young people exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave in a desolate part of the country, where girls were sold into marriage for a dowry calculated by their weight. “Even if you do not understand, you are forced to understand,” he later recalled of that time. “It forces you to mature earlier.”

Why did both men stay committed to a party that had caused them so much pain? Mr Torigian suggests the answer may lie in “What Is to Be Done?”, a novel of 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian journalist. In the story a young man named Rakhme sleeps on a bed of nails to strengthen his will. Mr Xi imagined that he was Rakhme as he endured those cold floors, lice, rainstorms and blizzards. Both father and son may have been influenced by a Bolshevik political culture that glamorised “forging”—the idea that suffering strengthens your willpower and dedication to the cause.

Throughout his life, Mr Xi has been loyal to two groups that demand absolute obedience: the family and the party. Both were often “unfairly” strict, Mr Xi has said, yet this did not dent his loyalty. Mr Torigian shows how Mr Xi balances dedication and realism. “If I were born in the United States, I would not join the Communist Party of the United States. I would join the Democratic Party or Republican Party,” Mr Xi once told Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister at the time. Abe concluded that Mr Xi joined the party not because of ideology, but as a way to gain power.

After Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, he was put in charge of Guangdong province and began to liberalise the local economy. When Mr Xi became general secretary of the party in 2012—the top job in China—many expected him to be an economic reformer like his father. But the assumption that Mr Xi was any kind of liberal was wrong: he is not interested in creating an open and free country. He believes in restoring China’s greatness and thinks that, to this end, the party should use any means necessary. His experience of injustice has not taught him that arbitrary power is undesirable; only that it should be wielded less chaotically than it was under Mao, by someone wise like himself.

In a little over a decade, Mr Xi has become the most autocratic Chinese leader since Mao. His regime ruthlessly represses dissidents at home and activists abroad; it enforces a stifling political conformity, forcing many to study “Xi Jinping Thought”. Such methods are justified, he thinks, because he sees himself as a man of destiny, with a duty to generations past and future. He often speaks of himself as a protector of Chinese civilisation. “Whoever throws away those things left behind by our ancestors is a traitor,” he told Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of Taiwan.

That attitude is apparent in Mr Xi’s Taiwan policy, which bears his father’s influence. Towards the end of his career, Xi Zhongxun was put in charge of unification with Taiwan. The party had ambitious dreams of reclaiming the island, which has been self-governing since China’s civil war ended in 1949 and the losing side, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), retreated there. But Xi Zhongxun died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled.

His son yearns to fulfil it. Mr Xi has made it plain he wants to take back Taiwan. Those who rule China must remember that “The territory left by the ancestors must not shrink,” he said in 2012. When or how he may try to seize Taiwan—through war, a blockade or other means—is unclear.

What is clear, though, is that his family’s suffering has shaped Mr Xi’s dark view of politics. “For people who rarely encounter power and who are distant from it, they always see these things as very mysterious and fresh,” Mr Xi once said. “But what I saw was more than the surface of things. I didn’t just see the power, flowers, glory and applause. I also saw the cowsheds [where people were confined during the Cultural Revolution] and the fickleness of the world.” Mr Xi’s formative years made him clear-eyed and cynical, hardened and imperious. The worldview he learned from his father will affect not only 1.4bn Chinese people, but the whole of humanity. ■