Inside the CCP: how Xi Jinping's father illuminates party loyalty, corruption as a weapon, and succession risk

Summary

Joseph Torigian, author of The Party's Interests Come First, offers a granular read of Chinese Communist Party dynamics through the life of Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping — a figure whose repeated persecution by his own party, and continued devotion to it, encapsulates the Leninist political culture that still governs Beijing today.

Party Loyalty as Identity, Not Compliance

The central paradox Torigian surfaces is why senior CCP figures, after being jailed or humiliated by the party, redoubled their commitment rather than defecting. His answer is structural. In Bolshevik-Leninist political culture, the party is not an institution members join — it is a source of personal meaning. Rejecting it would mean rejecting one's own identity. When Xi Zhongxun was persecuted, the instinct was to prove loyalty, not question the system.

This is by design. Lenin's explicit goal was to build what he called a "party of a new type" — an organizational weapon capable of forcing compliance so that a top leader could make a decision and the entire apparatus would execute it, regardless of whether that decision was right. The top leader is, by architecture, firewalled from political consequence.

Corruption as Political Weapon

Corruption is not simply a governance failure inside the CCP — it is an instrument of power. The party has never been able to define stable red lines around what constitutes corrupt behavior, which means the top leader retains discretion over who is vulnerable at any given moment. Officials who accumulate wealth or influence may be tolerated during one period and prosecuted in the next, not because their behavior changed but because the political calculus did.

Xi Jinping frames his anti-corruption campaign in existential terms: corruption signals that officials are putting themselves before the party, and it creates a vector for Western influence. The CCP reads the Soviet collapse as a "war without gunpowder" — the West winning by co-opting Soviet elites through materialism rather than military force. That framing makes ideological purity and anti-corruption enforcement inseparable in Xi's worldview.

Xi Zhongxun, the United Front, and Ethnic Minorities

Xi Zhongxun was the CCP's leading United Front practitioner — the political influence strategy Mao described as one of the party's "magic weapons." The approach maps constituencies into allies, persuadables, and irreconcilable opponents, then applies pressure accordingly. As head of the Northwest Bureau in the final years of the civil war and the early People's Republic, Xi Zhongxun applied this framework across a vast territory that included Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Gansu, managing Tibetan and Muslim minorities through a mix of coercion and co-optation via local power brokers.

By the 1950s, the party concluded that gradualism was failing — minorities were not voluntarily embracing socialism — and shifted to military suppression. The Cultural Revolution treated ethnic difference as class struggle. In the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun ran ethnic policy through the party secretariat, reverting to economic development and controlled religious expression. When protests followed, the party again concluded that opening space had been a mistake, a cycle that maps directly onto Xinjiang policy under Xi Jinping today.

Hong Kong as Economic Mirror

After 16 years of persecution, Xi Zhongxun's first assignment on rehabilitation was as party boss of Guangdong, the province bordering Hong Kong. He witnessed firsthand thousands of mainland Chinese risking their lives to cross into the territory — a visceral demonstration of how far the socialist economy had fallen behind. That experience directly informed his role in establishing Special Economic Zones, a pragmatic concession to market logic that sat awkwardly alongside party ideology.

During the Hong Kong handover negotiations, Xi Zhongxun was tasked with winning over Hong Kong's business and legal elite. A Hong Kong lawyer at one of those meetings captured the asymmetry: mainlanders felt they were emerging from a tunnel after the Cultural Revolution; Hong Kongers felt they were entering one.

Xi Jinping's Ideological Balancing Act

Xi Jinping's current posture reflects the same unresolved tension his father navigated. After a severe crackdown on the tech sector under the banner of common prosperity, Xi has more recently empowered his premier to prioritize economic development — without acknowledging the policy reversal. The latest party congress report encodes this flexibility deliberately: it affirms socialist ideology, then states that communism succeeded in China because the party "sinicized" it — meaning ideology says what the leadership needs it to say. Markets remain "decisive," and China is described as still in the stage of primary accumulation, a formulation that defers redistribution indefinitely.

Xi's worldview holds that China possesses a "spiritual civilization" the West lacks, because Western capitalism produces only consumption and inequality. He sees Western social decay as an accelerating trend, while believing the party can organize interests in a way no single class dominates. The reality of significant wealth inequality and periodic crackdowns on billionaires does not resolve that contradiction — it is managed, not solved.

Succession Risk is the Defining Variable

Xi Jinping faces a third term in 2028 with no term limits, but Torigian identifies succession as the sharpest risk in the system. In a leader-centric Leninist structure, naming a successor immediately raises the question of who actually holds authority. A designated heir must calibrate constantly — appearing capable enough to eventually lead, but never threatening enough to unsettle the incumbent. If Xi names no successor, he risks leaving the party without a managed transition after his death.

Torigian frames this as a genuine trap with no clean exit. Xi is likely testing candidates informally, watching how they read him and handle pressure, with personal chemistry driving decisions that will shape the world's second-largest economy.

Princelings: Entitlement and Vulnerability

In the 1980s, founding-generation leaders began placing princelings — children of senior officials — in their offices, valuing family loyalty after being betrayed by their own secretaries during the Cultural Revolution. But princelings were broadly resented as arrogant and entitled, which is partly why Xi Jinping chose grassroots postings over a Beijing career track — a deliberate effort to preempt that characterization.

Xi's relationship with today's princelings is reportedly distant. He expects all officials to subordinate family identity to party identity, and other princelings are said to feel they have little influence over China's direction despite their lineage. The irony is that Xi Jinping is himself a princeling — one whose career was both hurt and helped by his father's legacy.