OxTalks is Changing
During Michaelmas Term, OxTalks will be moving to a new platform (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
For now, continue using the current page and event submission process (freeze period dates to be advised).
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
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.
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.
Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover History Lab, a Visiting Fellow at the China in the World Program at Australian National University, a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a Postdoctoral (and Predoctoral) Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a Predoctoral Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. His first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was released with Yale University Press, and The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was published by Stanford University Press in 2025.
Date:
26 September 2025, 12:00
Venue:
Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details:
Lucina Ho Seminar Room (first floor)
Speaker:
Professor Joseph Torigian (American University)
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser:
Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Part of:
China Centre talks
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
