Father of Xi Jinping and a major figure in China's Communist Party history. Born in 1913 into a peasant family. His parents died when he was a teenager, a consequence, he believed, of the stress caused by his imprisonment. Two of his sisters died of hunger.
Xi Zhongxun was an ardent believer in communism from a young age, radicalised by witnessing what he called "the tragic mistreatment of the labouring people". He took part in violent student protests in 1928 and was imprisoned by the anti-communist authorities. After the civil war he rose rapidly through the party's ranks and entered the very top echelon of the government.
In 1962 Mao Zedong purged Xi Zhongxun for supporting the publication of a novel Mao considered subversive. During the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, he was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Around 20,000 people were targeted for having supported him, and at least 200 were beaten to death, driven mad or seriously injured. One of his daughters committed suicide.
Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and put in charge of Guangdong province, where he began to liberalise the local economy. Towards the end of his career he was put in charge of unification with Taiwan, but died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled.
Joseph Torigian, an American scholar, published "The Party's Interests Come First", a biography of Xi Zhongxun based on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources (Stanford University Press).
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