Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics

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2:00Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wazenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, sometimes I read 20th century Chinese history and... Sometimes? Just a little? No, here's something I don't understand. I read about the Mao era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and all the various cadres, they're all like, oh, we're guilty of committed a left deviationism or right deviationism or all this stuff. And they're all really worried about whether they're going to get expelled or something like that. And I never know what any of these words mean. I actually feel like I have no intuitive understanding of how elite level Chinese Communist Party politics works.

2:42And I think I probably should, given the sort of growing stakes and the growing awareness with which we as Americans all have to be aware about how China works. Wait, if you're reading lots of China history books, you must know what self-criticism is, right? I know it's of criticism. Okay. But I don't know why. They're like, oh, you engaged in revisionism. Right. Or you engaged in ultra leftism. Or you engaged in ultra rightism. And I don't know what any of these terms mean. Well, my experience of China is that sometimes the rules are a little sketchy on purpose, right? Yeah. So that there isn't a clear definition so that you can kind of go after whoever you want.

3:19You know what I do to learn about Chinese history? Tell me. Chinese historical dramas. I kind of love them. Do you mean like plays or books? No, no, no. I mean TV shows. Oh, TV shows. Probably the equivalent of soap operas in the States. Do you have a favorite? Oh, I have one I'm watching right now. I'll tell you afterwards. Okay. It's so good. But the reason I bring it up is because relatively recently there was a historical drama that was all about Xi Jinping's father. Oh, I saw some screenshots from that. I think someone like uploaded it all to you. Have you watched it? I haven't. I've been looking for it and I haven't been able to find it.

3:54So if you find it on YouTube, let me know. But the reason I bring it up is because we're going to be speaking about his life today to the author of one of his biographies, the first English speaking biography. And the series itself got panned when it came out. It was really funny. And there are some quotes that said, oh, I think Chinese youth today would rather watch Stranger Things than learn about the history of the CCP. So we're going to try to make CCP history as interesting as Stranger Things on this podcast. And we're also, I guess, going to make the case maybe to American listeners and maybe some Chinese youth, if they're listening, that it's worth learning about.

4:33Absolutely. Right? Like whether it's interesting or not, it's like, OK, it's the year 2025. Do we need to like revisit the history in Yan 'an or the Northwest provinces or whatever? All this stuff. Is this really important? Anyway, we obviously have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Joseph Terrigian. He is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and an associate professor at American University. And he is the author of a new book, The Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Xi Jinping. Joseph, thank you so much for coming on Outlaws. Thanks so much for having me. Why are we interested?

5:08Or I guess you. Why were you? Why is anyone interested and worth spending time to learn about the life of Xi Jinping? Sean? You know, I was listening to your conversation. I was thinking about how one of the things that Xi Jinping is trying to achieve is make the regime immortal by having people study party history. He believes that one of the ways to keep the party vigilant and dedicated and at one with the people is to learn from the legacy of the revolutionaries. So what that history is, teaching that history is moral education is at the very heart of Xi Jinping's project. So that begs the question, what was that history?

5:50And I tried to tell it through the prism of his own father with my book. So one question I always wanted to ask a sort of CCP expert is, why would anyone want to join the party in the sort of 1940s, 1950s, 1970s? I understand that hindsight is 20-20. But looking back, first of all, no one knew how this was all going to turn out. And secondly, it seems like your life as a sort of minor party official could be very, very tricky and very dangerous in some ways, to Joe's point about things like self-criticism and getting in trouble for leftist deviations or rightist deviations or whatever. It doesn't seem like a fun time.

6:35So I think that breaking down your question a little bit would be meaningful. What decade you joined the party can tell you a lot about that person. And also why you stay in the party can be very different from why you joined in the first place, because often you don't know what kind of organization it is and you don't know what's going to be coming. But I think that at the heart of what you're getting at is why would you join an organization that is so dangerous to be a member of, either because you're fighting a revolution against a vastly superior force or because there are so many power struggles within that party?

7:11One of the answers is that for these people, communism wasn't just a way of understanding economics. It wasn't just about Marxist dialectics. It was really a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. It was joining an organization that for them was a manifestation of a world historical inevitability. And it was exciting. It gave them agency. It gave them a sense that their lives mattered. And of course, they were often joining the party at moments when they felt that the entire nation was at risk of falling apart because of warlords and bandits and Western and Japanese encroachments. I forget what decade it is, but there's another reason that even people today get excited about radical politics, and that is sex and dating.

7:53And they think it'll make them attractive to members of the opposite sex. You mentioned that in your book, that that was one of the appeals for the very early communists. So it's interesting how politics and the personal mix often for members of the Chinese Communist Party. So there was a political background, there was a social background. He was born two years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty. He saw all of these battles between nationalists and bandits, nationalists and communists. And it would have been even just visibly striking for him to grow up in this area because he grew up near Xi 'an, which many of your listeners must know as where the terracotta soldiers are from.

8:36And that's because the first unified Chinese state was forged near where he was born. And so he would have seen just how far his country had fallen from these amazing heights during the Tang dynasty. And so for him, he didn't really understand the intricacies of the ideology. He wasn't really attracted to Marxism from an intellectual perspective. But as he and other people had written about or talked about later, it was just kind of cool to be more radical and more leftist because there was a sense that the country really needed something drastic to be able to find its feet. Can you talk a little bit about how he rose up through the party ranks in the sort of early days?

9:20Because this is always a question. So first of all, the goal of the Communist Party, as you mentioned, is sort of always changing in one way or another, or certainly the way they execute on it seems to be quite flexible. And so I'm very curious how a sort of junior level politician or party member gathers influence within the party and basically what qualifies as a good job to get them ahead? Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the dilemmas that my book tries to explore is what does it mean to be a deputy in a system that puts so much focus on a strong leader and discipline? So people might wonder, why would I read a book about someone who wasn't the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party?

10:08Isn't this just an organization where people do what they're told? But actually, it's so much more complicated than that. And it's complicated for lots of interesting reasons. One is that the top leader often will give a general sense of what they want to achieve, but they won't say what matters more and how to achieve it. And then so the deputy has to figure it out. They have to be loyal to what the top leader wants, but also not screw everything up entirely. There's other competitors that might not like you. You also have to be aware of the fact that often the top leader will change their mind.

10:42So all of these things are what members of the party have to manage. And Xi Zhongshun stands out for his ability to keep winning over famous senior men within the party. So he was not one of the oldest of the founding generation, but he really impresses you with his ability to find these big brothers over and over again who saw something in him that they admired. One thing I really got from reading your book, and you mentioned Xi Jinping himself as part of his own goal is to have the younger generations learn more about party history, hence the drama that Tracy mentioned. And one thing I really sort of deeply internalized reading your book is how young the country is, how young the party is.

11:29And I mean, there is a sense in which Mao is like Xi Jinping's uncle. I mean, you say the word big brother in terms of like Xi Jinping's ability to find these sort of brother figures. It's still a very close. It's a very close family. These people were like right there at the very beginning that Xi Jinping knew and was growing up with. Yeah. So one of the things in the book that I think is really quite significant is how long these people knew each other. So the book begins in the 1920s and Xi Zhongshun's a major figure through the early 1990s. And these names keep coming back over and over and over again.

12:10And they knew each other for so long. And the intricacies of these relationships are really something. So in the West, we've often seen this habit of dividing the party between good guys and bad guys, reformers and conservatives, leftists and rightists. And one of the things that emerges from my research is that they were so subtle the way they interacted with each other. So they were kind of frenemies in a way, right? So they all had loyalty to the party. But the way that the antagonism shifted, the way that the loyalty shifted, it was something that was very protean over these years. Talk a little bit more about that, because I think when people certainly in the West hear about the Chinese Communist Party, they often think of factionalism and all these cadres that are sort of in secret rooms, forming different groups with different goals.

13:01Did that actually happen? So I'm a skeptic about how useful the idea of factions can be for understanding the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I don't want to go too far. It definitely matters who you worked with, whether you work in the same organization, that kind of thing. But the reason Leninist parties are known as organizational weapons is because they are so leader friendly and because there is such a taboo about any concerted political action by certain groups. Now, sometimes they approach that level of coordination, but they have to be so careful because as soon as the top leader identifies that, then they're going to be in big trouble.

13:41But also people are people. So you can have more liberal views on some issues, more conservative views on other issues. Just because you worked with someone doesn't mean that you're going to like them. So often the people who are, As I mentioned, these relationships are shaped by what happened decades previously. They have long memories. And if you worked with someone and you didn't get along, that can be meaningful many, many, many years into the future too.

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16:20Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosure. I mentioned this at the beginning, but I remember when I read the recent biography from a few years ago of Deng Xiaoping and then also a recent Zhou Enlai biography, they're always like trying to read Mao's mind, right? Like they're on there like, oh, and are we guilty of leftism or rightism or whatever? And I can never really figure out, do we take the correct line? We take the people's line, whatever. What does leftism mean? They're always getting accused of leftism. I thought they're all leftists. They're communists. But what is actual, what did they mean when they said that someone was taking the leftist line and the CCP and that that was bad in some way?

16:54Good question. So when you look at Chinese texts, when they talk about leftism and rightism, leftism is always in quotation marks, right? So what is leftism? In theory, leftism basically means that you're too ambitious. You're moving forward too quickly. You don't recognize the objective conditions, and therefore you're making a hash of things because you're trying to achieve what is not possible at that particular time. Now, at the same time, leftism is part of what makes the Chinese Communist Party because of this phenomenon known as campaigns, right? So what's a campaign? A campaign means you get people to go too far deliberately because you need to get them to go too far because the whole point is to gin people up, to get them excited, to inspire zeal.

17:39So you expect that things are going to go too far. Now, for these people who are the deputies, typically when they go too far and then there's a rectification, they're not punished for it because there was an always expectation that there was going to be some mistakes, that you're going to break a few eggs, right? Right. Nevertheless, because this was a system that took ideology so seriously, when there were differences of opinion, often they weren't understood as such. They were seen as manifestations of a deeper political problem. And as you were alluding to in your introduction, one of the reasons Mao and Deng were so powerful is because they got to decide what was leftist.

18:19They got to decide what was a line error. And so often the reason we think that there are factions is because the top leader decides after the fact to label a bunch of people as a group and say that they represented some kind of political view. But almost always what really happened is that these people just simply weren't in line with the chairman and they weren't guessing correctly what he wanted and they were punished for it and then they were given this label. Why didn't Mao just issue clearer instructions? Yeah, good question. Part of it was about the succession, right? So Chinese top leaders always are thinking about what's going to happen after they die, and they don't want their model to disappear with them.

19:05And so they're testing their deputies. They're trying to figure out whether their deputies can do the right thing on their own. And so they don't always want to be clear because they want to see what you do. But also the top leaders change their mind all the time. They're mercurial. They can watch a situation and decide that things aren't going the well that they wanted. And then they don't say that immediately to see whether other people are going to realize that on their own. But also I think that by leaving some ambiguity, they can see whether or not you are going to use that space to do everything you can to remain loyal to the top leader or whether you're going to show some of your own inclinations, which you may or may not like as the senior leader.

19:47Let's talk about the trajectory of Xi Jinping's life a little bit more. A big part of your book is these fights over history. And they're obsessed about getting the exact history of riot of Chinese and the Northwest Territories and who is where, when, etc. And who is influential, etc. Why was this so important, these sort of fights over specific details of history? And then how did that culminate ultimately in 16 years in which he was sort of extremely punished and banished and basically cast out of the party and humiliated and all the horrible things that happened during the revolution? Two reasons primarily.

20:26One is for a top leader, your legitimation narrative is to say, I was always on the right side of the debate. And so when you make the case for why everyone should listen to you, whether or not your version of history is affirmed has a lot to do with whether or not you are seen as someone who deserves to be the chairman. And the second reason is that the party is a totalizing organization, right? So your entire sense of self-worth, your prestige, your status, your sense of meaning is how the party characterizes your contributions to the revolution and to the regime after it's established. So history in that sense is absolutely existential for them.

21:08And I think that also when it comes to, as I said, this preoccupation with whether the regime will survive, you need to win the hearts and minds of young people by talking about the party as an organization that went from one victory to another, because it was the only way of organizing society that can guarantee China's return to its rightful place on the world stage. So for all of these reasons, history is so important. And so when you're purged from the leadership and you're doing self-criticisms, what are these self-criticisms about? Well, it's a reflection of your own personal history. So when Xi Zhongshun spent 16 years in the political wilderness after he was purged, what he was writing about was his past over and over and over again and negotiating with the top leadership just exactly how what he had done previously was going to be officially evaluated.

22:05You mentioned the word frenemy earlier, and as a former teenage girl, frenemies is something that is of perennial interest to me. And when I think about famous frenemies in the past, do you like the segue? Yeah, I do. All right. When I think about famous frenemies in the past, I kind of think about the Soviet Union and China in the 50s and 60s. And one of the interesting things about the elder Xi is that he was for a while in charge of basically managing China's relationship with Soviet experts at the time. What was that experience like for him? How tricky was that to actually do? And was it useful to him in later years, having had that experience?

22:49So in 1953, the most prominent slogan in the People's Republic of China was the Soviet Union of today is China's tomorrow. And in fact, that also was the year that Xi Jinping was born and his father, Xi Zhongxun, was minister of propaganda. In subsequent years, when Xi Zhongshun was working for Zhou Wenlai at the State Council, as you said, one of his tasks was to manage the Soviet expert program. And for a period of time, the number one priority was to learn wholesale from the Soviet Union. And it was rooted in this idea that there was only one way of doing communism. But Mao Zedong increasingly came to the view that something had gone deeply wrong with the October Revolution, that the Soviet leaders were engaging in revisionism.

23:42And I know you were chuckling about this word earlier. Because they're always getting accused of revisionism. What is this communist jargon? And revisionism basically means you're not really a true communist anymore, that you are not as actually leftist as you need to be, right? You're not pushing forward. You're too scared to try to win new victories for the revolutionary agenda. And so Xi Zhongshun would have witnessed this story. He would have witnessed how Mao Zedong gradually came to the conclusion that the Chinese project was going to be different. And he also would have seen something else, which was how dangerous it was to talk to people outside the Chinese Communist Party, especially foreigners, because one of the accusations against him in 1962, other than as you said, that he was trying to revise history, was that he was a spy for the Soviet Union.

24:31So it would have been very frightening for Xi Zhongshun to manage relations with the Soviets, right? So the first great purge of the People's Republic of China was a man named Gao Gong. And he was another Northwesterner. He had known Xi Zhongshun for years. Oh, this is the Gaogong affair, right?

25:18commander on the Northwest battlefield, and Xi Zhongshun was his right-hand man. So Xi Zhongshun was basically a Forrest Gump for the two first great purges of the People's Republic of China. And they both were seen by Mao as having had illicit relations with the Soviet Union, and then he is purged in 1962 as well. I'll say one other thing about this, which is quite remarkable. So So the first split that was really something that the Chinese and Soviets had trouble managing happened while Xi Zhongshun was visiting the Soviet Union. And what had happened was there was an altercation on the border between China and India.

26:00The first one and several Indian soldiers were killed. And while Xi Zhongshun was traveling, the Soviets put out a statement that essentially took a neutral position, even though the Soviet Union and China were in a formal alliance and the Chinese were absolutely furious. And Xi Zhongshun left Moscow early. And when Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited China just a few weeks later, Mao said to him, your statement made the imperialists happy. And Mao's conclusion was, why aren't the Soviets, why don't they have our back? Why aren't they more supportive? And his answer was that it wasn't that the Soviets were pursuing their interests.

26:42We have our interests. It was that they're not really communists anymore. They've gone revisionist. And actually, to tie it again back to Xi Zhongshun, it contributed to Mao's preoccupation with this idea of class struggle. And he wanted to figure out a way to make sure class struggle never went away. and his crackdown on Xi Zhongshun in 1962 was related to his marinating in this obsession with the importance of class struggle that was partly inspired by what he saw as the degradation of the revolutionary project in the Soviet Union.

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