2026年4月16日
下午12:30 - 下午 2:00 EDT
2026年4月16日
The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun
Book Talk with Joseph Torigian
活动系列: 中国政治与经济研究讲座系列
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. The Party’s Interests Come First (2025) 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, as well as 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 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.
This is event is co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and Department of Government.
Featuring
Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He has previously held positions at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab and Center for International Security and Cooperation, the China in the World Program at Australian National University, the Council on Foreign Relations, Princeton-Harvard's China and the World Program, George Washington University's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and Fudan University in Shanghai. His books include Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao (Yale University Press, 2022) and The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025).