For Love of Party

All aspects of China's President Xi Jinping's young home life were dictated by his father's expectations

- by JOSEPH TORIGIAN

Chinese President Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongxun, was a Communist Party official for more than seven decades—from the Communist Revolution through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests and beyond. In the first English biography of Xi Zhongxun, THE PARTY'S INTERESTS COME FIRST, Professor Joseph Torigian uncovers the story of his life and of the modern Communist Party—and sheds light on the formative influences on Xi Jinping. This excerpt from Torigian's deeply researched book talks about the family's home life.

AT WORK, XI ZHONGXUN FACED a dizzying array of policy challenges and the vicissitudes of his own shifting fortunes. But in party culture, home life was no escape from the political. Everything from schooling and leisure to clothes and food in the Xi household were shaped by broader preoccupations within the elite. Aaron Solts, the Soviet Union's most famous theorist of Bolshevik ethics, had asserted that “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell” and “must, in all their work and life, represent a unit of assistance to the Party.” Domesticity presented an existential challenge to the Communist war on bourgeois weakness and materialism. Having fought decades of war to establish a transformational regime, party leaders in China were proud of what they had achieved yet concerned about their families losing the revolutionary élan that had proven so instrumental. The leadership, including Xi, worried that the next generation would grow up spoiled and separated from the so-called masses.

Before he arrived in Beijing in 1953—well before the one-child policy—Xi was already a father to three surviving children with his first wife (a son, Zhengning, and two daughters, Heping and Qianping), as well as two daughters with Qi Xin (Qiaoqiao and An'an). Two more sons, Jinping and Yuanping, were born in the capital in 1953 and 1955, respectively.