Let us directly go to the verdict: Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun is an impressive achievement. It is not only grounded in an extraordinary array of sources, but unlike many political biographies, it keeps the subject firmly in view without losing sight of historical context. The author reconstructs even the minor details of Xi’s life with remarkable precision and where documentation falters during Xi’s purged years, Torigian redirects attention to the family, especially to his son Xi Jinping, thus sustaining narrative continuity.
This continuity is supported by Torigian’s decision to structure the book broadly chronologically in six parts but with each section divided into various themes, a choice that lends the book analytical depth and allows readers to approach discrete facets of Xi Zhongxun’s life (his family relations, his role in the United Front, or his management of ethnic and religious affairs, among others) as thirty almost self-contained mini-studies. Yet this same organization also produces unevenness: certain themes are treated with great density, while others appear only briefly. The result is a work of considerable richness but variable narrative balance.
Torigian’s narrative abounds with vivid anecdotes, which take turns being disturbing, curious, or even comic. One recalls Xi standing by brutal interrogations in Yan’an (p. 57); another depicts father and son, Xi Zhongxun and Xi Jinping, smoking in their underwear as the younger recited Mao’s “On Contradiction” and “On Practice” (p. 247). Elsewhere, Xi’s contradictory stance toward reform is captured in his support for special economic zones while threatening to dismiss cadres experimenting with household contracting (p. 283), and in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster he calls bureaucratism “much more terrible than radiation” (p. 423). The book also includes lighter moments, such as Liu Shaoqi joking that Xi’s belly resembled that of a capitalist (p. 177), or Xi Jinping urinating on his father, who didn’t say anything because he believed intervention would cause illness in his son (p. 180). Countless vignettes like this illuminate not only Xi Zhongxun’s personality and his relationship with his family, but also the Party’s internal culture and the intimate, often contradictory moral world its leaders inhabited.
Anecdotes serve as the empirical foundation for a number of broader arguments about Party governance. Often, Torigian leaves such connections implicit or without much elaboration, as they are scattered throughout the book. Given his stated ambition to use the “life of one rather unique individual to tell the story of the Chinese Communist Party in the twentieth century” (p. 7), a fuller engagement with such systemic implications would have strengthened the analysis. That said, in themselves, these points are thought-provoking and invite further theoretical and empirical scrutiny. Below, I will highlight some of them.
One of Torigian’s central insights concerns several contradictions inherent in Party governance. For example, Torigian draws attention to the tension between liberalizing impulses and ideological orthodoxy, epitomized by the “reformist” 1978 Third Plenum and the subsequent “conservative” Four Cardinal Principles (p. 442). Officials were required simultaneously to preserve Party leadership and pursue economic reform, a balance that demanded constant recalibration. This points to an institutional design of the Chinese Communist Party that “inevitably creates tensions” (p. 543). As Torigian concludes, getting the level of “struggle” right in a Leninist system is “like catching lightning in a bottle” (p. 543) – rather impossible. Xi Zhongxun, Torigian suggests, sought a cautious middle path: neither “practical individual” nor “radical ideologue” (p. 95). Yet his failure to navigate these extremes exposed the impossibility of perfect alignment. This dynamic is familiar to scholars of local governance, where officials are exposed to contrasting and sometimes even contradictory demands even in the 21st century. Another contradiction is between Xi’s insistence that “China could not afford another Mao” (p. 469) that Torigian juxtaposes with Deng Xiaoping’s belief in the need for a strong unifying leader (p. 469). This oscillation between excessive and insufficient centralization in the individual points to another of the Party’s enduring pathologies, with continuing relevance for succession politics. Together, these examples illustrate how tensions between institutional preservation and political adaptation recur across levels of the system. Such moments invite, but do not receive, fuller theoretical interpretation.
A second domain where the book’s insights invite reflection concerns Torigian’s portrayal of elite politics as a web of interpersonal conflict, and his conscious rejection of crude factional categories such as “conservative” or “liberal.” Ideological divisions, he shows, were shaped as much by history, personality, contingency and very human emotions like fear or confusion, as by doctrine (p. 434). During the 1980s, debates could hinge on tone or the frequency of a particular expression (p. 437). These episodes reveal China’s elite politics as a politics of personal slights rather than coherent ideological camps or factions, a point that might have been articulated even more explicitly.
A further area lies in the treatment of agency. The book touches on historical contingency but stops short of addressing to what extent Xi Zhongxun was a product of his environment or an autonomous actor within it, and how such agency could operate within the constraints of a Leninist system. Torigian’s description of Xi as the “chief implementer for the chief implementer” (p. 8), invites ambivalence in this regard. Although Xi often executed directives dutifully (“when told to find spies, he did” [p. 63]), he also demonstrated initiative, for example when he addressed the Catholic succession crisis, stabilized Xinjiang, and oversaw the return of religious properties in the 1980s (p. 395). Xi operated within the system until he, a “cautious man” (p. 208), made a mistake that led to his purge. Implicitly, one recalls Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s account of officials during the Cultural Revolution “working toward” the leader, where subordinates try to anticipate the leader’s will (and often fail). One questions whether the pressures that Xi Zhongxun felt in navigating the above-mentioned contradictions also fall under this framework or if there is more to the story. Regardless, Xi Zhongxun emerges as a somewhat tragic figure: an active reformer whose initiatives were ultimately undone by the inherent contradictions and tensions in the system and the unpredictable politics of small slights.
Ultimately, the book’s greatest contribution lies in its extraordinary empirical depth. Notably, Torigian concedes that his study is “only the latest draft” (p. 547) awaiting revision as new sources emerge, a modest description for a work of such scope and accomplishment. By focusing on a remarkable individual, the book opens a range of questions on which future scholars can fruitfully build. The wealth of anecdotes and relationships it documents provides a foundation for precisely the kind of broader theorization it leaves to others, a task that I hope will be taken up.
