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.

Recommended on 1 episode:

What Xi Jinping Wants

You can’t understand China today without understanding its president, Xi Jinping. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has doubled down on communist ideology and significantly consolidated his own power while transforming China into an industrial juggernaut unrivaled in the world. And Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that. So what does Xi want for China in the coming years? And how should the United States respond? Kevin Rudd has a unique perspective on these questions. He first met Xi in the 1980s, when Rudd was a China analyst in Australia’s foreign service and Xi was a local party official. Decades later, when Rudd was the prime minister of Australia and Xi was China’s vice president, the two men got to know each other better. And after leaving office, Rudd decided to really try to understand Xi; his latest book, “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World,” is built off the doctorate he pursued at Oxford after his time as prime minister. Rudd recently finished a stint as Australia’s ambassador to the United States and is now the global president and chief executive of the Asia Society. In this conversation, Rudd explains Xi’s ideology and the forces that shaped it, his ambitions for China and strategy for achieving them, and what Xi thinks of the United States and Trump.

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford–Hoover Series on Authoritarianism) by Joseph Torigian
• 📘  The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson
• 📗  Magnifica Humanitas - Magnificient Humanity : On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Annotated) by Pope Leo XIV, Richard Brooks

Kevin Rudd July 14, 2026 3 books recommended

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