Foreign Affairs - Xi Jinping’s Costly Inheritance - How His Father’s Travails Defined China’s Leader—and the Country He Rules - Joseph Torigian June 23, 2025

 Foreign Affairs 

Xi Jinping’s Costly Inheritance

How His Father’s Travails Defined China’s Leader—and the Country He Rules

Joseph Torigian

June 23, 2025

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his father, Xi Zhongxun

Illustration by Foreign Affairs. Photo Source: Reuters

JOSEPH TORIGIAN is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University and the author of The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.

In 1980, Xi Zhongxun, a major Chinese Communist Party heavyweight and the father of the current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, visited one of the premier tourist attractions of central eastern Iowa: the Amana Colonies, a German heritage site founded on communitarian principles, now known for beer and crafts. The experience shook him. At 67 years old, Xi was leading a delegation of provincial governors to the United States. It was a historic moment in China’s opening to Western business and investment. Xi, as leader of the southern province of Guangdong, was at the forefront of that process. Guangzhou, the provincial capital, had just seen the inauguration of the first U.S. consulate outside Beijing. Xi was also launching the Special Economic Zones—areas designed to attract foreign businesses—that would symbolize China’s new relationship with the outside world.

The Americans at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations who staffed the trip remembered Xi as a friendly and charismatic man, the kind of person who would make sure his translators had a glass of water. Yet he would sometimes go quiet as if he were preoccupied and could come across as reserved and distant.

That changed at the Amana Colonies. According to one person who was present, Xi was enthralled as he listened to the tour guide. His reaction was so strong that it seemed as if he “became a different guy,” according to a U.S. foreign service officer.

That change probably occurred because Xi saw in the heritage site a frightening possibility. Here was a community built on collectivist and utopian principles that had decided 88 years after its founding to disband. In other words, it was a story about how a communist society had reduced itself to a tourist destination.

At the time, a few years after the death of Mao Zedong, Xi and his comrades were worried that what they had built with all their sacrifices would not endure. From Xi’s position as governor of Guangdong, it did not look good. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing the poverty of the communist mainland for capitalist Hong Kong. New economic ties with the outside world could help stem the tide and create prosperity, but fears of Western ideological infiltration were especially palpable in Guangdong because of its proximity to the British colony. Young people in Guangzhou were taking to the streets to demand that the party move faster in the new direction of “reform and opening.” And even though Mao’s chaotic tenure had warned the party about the dangers of strongman rule and the explosiveness of succession politics, a new autocrat in Beijing, Deng Xiaoping, was using Machiavellian means to defeat Mao’s initial successor, the more consensus-oriented Hua Guofeng.

Soon after his trip to the United States, Xi moved to work in Beijing to assume a weighty position in the Secretariat, the party’s “brain.” It placed him at the very center of debates about how to save the revolution.

His son Xi Jinping has now inherited that mission. Inspired by his father, the son dreams of no less than breaking the cycles of dynastic collapse that have marked Chinese history for millennia. And he wants to achieve that through continuous “self-revolution,” a campaign that aims to keep the revolutionary spirit alive by calling on the Chinese people to continually study the lives of the founding generation.

In charting the party and the country’s way forward, he is no doubt informed by his father’s struggles through the convulsions that shook China in the twentieth century. A close examination of the life of Xi Zhongxun reveals the profound challenges that have marked party politics from the beginning, in particular in terms of the dilemmas posed by the role of ideology in Chinese political life and the party’s plans for succession. They are dilemmas that can be managed, not problems to be solved. And they provide essential context for understanding what Xi Jinping is trying to achieve today and whether he will succeed in the future.

THE STRUGGLE IS REAL

The elder Xi endured extraordinary suffering for the sake of the cause, at the hands of both Nationalist foes and the Communists themselves. His travails simultaneously reveal the dangers of taking ideology too seriously and not seriously enough. After his release from a Nationalist prison when he was 15 years old, Xi did not rekindle his enthusiasm for revolution by reading Karl Marx. As he later told his son, it was a novel, The Young Wanderer, by Jiang Guangci, that he found most inspiring. Its protagonist experiences one disaster after another and concludes that “the more pain that evil society brought me, the more powerfully did my resistance develop.”

Xi, then, was sensitive to the importance of cultural products for the communist cause. In 1952, he became minister of propaganda. He was tasked with educating a country of hundreds of millions of people about communism and why they should sacrifice to build it.

But ideology not only motivated Xi and helped him explain why the party deserved devotion. It also nearly got him killed. When the party persecuted him, which it did on numerous occasions, it was because differences of opinion were understood as manifestations of ideological heresy. That is why even though it was a novel that inspired Xi to stay with the revolution in 1928, it was yet another novel, Liu Zhidan, that got him purged in 1962. Mao concluded that Xi’s decision to allow a woman cadre to write the book—a fictionalized narrative of a leading revolutionary from the Northwest—was a manifestation of “class struggle.” Xi was dispatched into the political wilderness for 16 years.

His fall foreshadowed one of the great tragedies of Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution. During those frenzied years in the 1960s and 1970s, authorities banished Xi from the capital and subjected him to solitary confinement and physical abuse. After Mao’s death in 1976, leaders recognized that the Cultural Revolution was such a failure that the party would have to change in its aftermath. When Xi returned to work in Beijing in 1981, he faced a new question: how to maintain a sense of idealism and conviction when no one could explain what communism really was anymore, a reality that even Xi acknowledged.

The elder Xi endured extraordinary suffering for the sake of the cause.

Xi knew that achieving greater economic development would give the party the legitimacy it desperately needed. Yet he was also afraid of what might happen if that new economic model caused people to lose faith in the party’s ideological commitments. He worried about how China would change with the arrival of Western investment, the introduction of market mechanisms, and the use of material inducements to encourage hard work. Xi wanted to give space to new voices that could justify the party’s new economic direction, or even provide new ideas about how to achieve limited political reforms, but he was afraid of chaos and wanted the loudest critics to stop creating problems for him. There was always the risk that he could be associated with more strident calls for change and earn the ire of his superiors. It was a recipe for confusion and dysfunction. Throughout the 1980s, the party regularly launched crackdowns that raised fears of another Cultural Revolution and then rapidly pulled back when the campaigns threatened economic growth.

Finally, there were consequences for the party elite itself. In 1987, after student protests, Deng purged General Secretary Hu Yaobang from the leadership. The party accused Hu of “bourgeois liberalization.” Xi, his close associate, was said to have “gone even further” than Hu, according to Yang Shangkun, a Politburo member. Xi hated the charges. He knew that Hu never opposed Deng. The real problem was that balancing reform and opening with conservative principles had proved to be a near-impossible task. And Hu and Xi were blamed when the contradiction became too obvious to ignore.

Xi Jinping faces the same problem of balancing growth with ideology that his father did, but he has his own approach to solving it. The son clearly cares about economic development. Yet he is also preoccupied with instilling a sense of idealism and conviction in both the party and the rest of the Chinese population. He believes that the party should avoid the extremism of the Mao era but also needs to reinvigorate its members with a call to struggle and vigilance. He has tried to avoid the dramatic zigzags that marked the Deng period even as he has attempted to be flexible with limited course corrections.

The problem for him is that the “struggle” he demands of his people is an inherently ambiguous notion. Too much and too little are both dangerous. As the economy slows down, the challenge of meeting the material needs of China’s population while pursuing strategic and ideological goals is likely to get worse. Xi Jinping’s “middle path” approach could achieve the best of both worlds by using growth to facilitate greater security and stability (and vice versa), or it could simply be a recipe for muddling through.

THE HARDER THEY FALL

Party leaders might have done a better job with thorny ideological debates if they had evaluated different approaches dispassionately. But the problem was that ideology mixed with another issue, the most explosive one in the history of the party: succession politics.

And no one witnessed the pathologies and dangers of succession politics more closely than Xi Zhongxun. Xi served premier Zhou Enlai in the 1950s and early 1960s and then General Secretary Hu Yaobang during the 1980s. In other words, he witnessed firsthand the relationships between the Chinese paramount leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and their most significant deputies.

Xi would have seen how party politics at the very top was about much more than executing the senior leader’s wishes. The implementers were told to pursue multiple goals at the same time without clear guidance about which mattered more or how to achieve them. Commands would often include two contradictory orders separated by a “but”: make sure the campaign is thorough, they were told, but avoid going too far too fast. If they went too far in one direction, either to the “left” (too radical) or to the “right” (too cautious), they could face charges of ideological heresy. Setbacks might mean losing authority to someone else.

As paramount leaders, Mao and then Deng were often distant, vague, mercurial, and suspicious. If a deputy reported too much to them, they could feel overwhelmed and bogged down by details. But not enough communication could lead them to suspect that underlings were trying to run the country themselves. Private, frank meetings between leaders and their lieutenants were extremely rare, and even then there was no guarantee that they would reach a durable understanding. When deputies got it wrong, their bosses stripped them of power—or worse.

No one witnessed the dangers of succession politics more closely than Xi Zhongxun.

This was an almost impossible situation for deputies to navigate. Xi watched as Mao regularly humiliated Zhou Enlai. On one occasion in 1958, Zhou, after an excruciating self-criticism that lasted several hours, plaintively admitted to Xi that Mao had criticized him once again. Xi promised to share the blame with Zhou. He was shaken by how the experienced Zhou, who understood Mao better than most, could nevertheless face devastating setbacks.

Xi thought Mao’s personality cult during the Cultural Revolution was disastrous. He was thus disappointed as Deng became another despot over the course of the 1980s. Xi suggested to Hu that he should speak to Deng more to make sure they understood each other. But Hu thought he had Deng’s complete trust. He was wrong. When Deng said that he was planning to retire in 1986, Hu made a fatal mistake. He agreed that Deng should go, which in turn led Deng to conclude that Hu was eager to push him out. And so Hu was booted out. In the aftermath, it became clear to Xi that the party was less inclined to resolve the problems inherent in its leadership system than it was to repeat them.

Like Mao and Deng before him, Xi Jinping has arrogated to himself great power. His model of rule makes some sense given his father’s experiences. If the jealousies and insecurities that come with succession politics are dangerous, then it is no surprise that Xi has not picked a successor. A named successor might create more than one center of authority in the party, and Xi does not want to risk the instability that might result if he has to purge such a figure. If too much daylight between a leader and his deputies is a problem, then we can understand Xi’s decision to concentrate control in his own hands, as he did when he undermined Li Keqiang, the premier at the time, by restricting Li’s latitude to make decisions about the economy.

Yet those are only temporary solutions. Sooner or later, Xi will be tempted to pick and test a successor. As he ages, he may lose energy and want to focus on bigger issues, which will mean delegating more authority to others. The same problems that tormented his father could reappear.

FATHER AND SON

At the twilight of his career, in 1990, just a few months after the People’s Liberation Army massacred many of the young protesters who had called for change in Tiananmen Square, Xi Zhongxun assumed one of his last titles: co-chairman of the Care for the Next Generation Committee. It was a fitting coda to a life that had been marked by constant worry about an existential question: Would younger and future generations accept the continuing legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party?

For Xi, of course, it was not just a professional concern but a personal one, too. He wanted his children to be just as dedicated to the cause as he was. He regaled them with stories of the revolution to inspire them and imposed brutal discipline to familiarize them with collective values.

Yet his children saw something else, as well. They saw how the party that Xi served executed policies that brought tragedy to the Chinese people. They saw the humiliation, persecution, exile, and incarceration to which the party subjected Xi. And they saw the guilt and shame he experienced as both a victim and a victimizer. They witnessed the same tragedy but lived very different lives. One of Xi’s children, Heping, committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Another came to associate with veteran pro-reform officials and intellectuals. Others made a lot of money in business ventures.

Xi’s children saw how the party that he served brought tragedy to the Chinese people.

Even Xi Jinping has admitted that the torment he endured as a young person led to doubts about the state and the party. Indeed, he was convinced that his ordeal was worse than what many others suffered during the Cultural Revolution, since he was the son of a leader who had been purged earlier than most senior revolutionaries. Nevertheless, he has spoken with great pride of the toughness these horrific experiences inculcated in him. And he has asserted that his ideals and convictions are unshakable precisely because he went through a period of confusion before recognizing that only the party’s path was the right one.

Instead of turning him away from the party, these experiences seem to have led Xi to subscribe to a cause for which his father suffered so much and to seek to regain pride and legacy for a family that had been humiliated so many times. With that in mind, he followed his father into politics. But will future generations feel the same way as their parents? Xi believes that China’s Western adversaries want to instigate young people today to demand radical political change. To combat this danger, Xi hopes to inspire China’s youth with a mission of national rejuvenation, of sacrifice, of “eating bitterness” for the greater good.

Some will inevitably be proud to accept that task. But others may hear Xi Jinping’s call not as a rallying cry but as a weary echo of the past. Many young Chinese people might be more interested in living less ardent lives than what Xi demands of them. The Xi family story raises questions about just how these young people can be won over. A message of suffering and struggle can indeed be meaningful for some—but for others, it may only lead to alienation.

Topics & Regions: China Politics & Society Political Development Xi Jinping Mao Zedong