Review article published in the Sydney Institute Review, September 2025, of Linda Jaivin’s Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China, Old Street Publishing [and also Black Inc.], 2025; & Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First. The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, Stanford University Press, 2025.
These two books, written about the Chinese Cultural Revolution (approximately, 1966-1976) and about the life of revolutionary leader, Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002), victim of the Cultural Revolution and father of the current master of the country, will be ‘go-to’ reference works, clearly written and nicely illustrated. Both raise questions about the mystique, credibility, and on-going dynamic of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of China. Together, they provide fresh, scholarly and authoritative perspective about the worlds within worlds of Chinese communism, particularly the impact and implications of the Cultural Revolution, both specifically, in the historical context of modern China, and in the context of the life and career and thought of one of the most important pre-revolutionary leaders who rose to the top echelons of party and government.
In condensed, lively brevity, Jaivin’s is an excellent guide to how and why China ‘went mad’. In word count, Torigian’s book is five times the length of Jaivin’s, examining the life of a party veteran, many times betrayed and traduced, during his long life serving the party. Xi was almost executed in the 1930s in an intra-party dispute, held senior roles, 1954-65, was purged, in internal ‘exile’ from 1965 to 1978, became Party Secretary of Guangdong Province, 1978 to 1980, at the beginning of economic reforms; and ended up as Vice Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, 1980-83 and again, 1988-93. Torigian buttresses his account with several pages of abbreviations. 83 of closely typed footnotes, a bibliography of 45 pages, an index, maps and photos, a door stopper of over 700 pages.
Both books zero on how elite figures were damned, how they coped, recovered, and repaired their lives during and after Mao’s ‘experiment’ in mass hysteria and blood-letting. Neither author is shy about featuring human consequences, the tens-of-millions dead, slaughtered, starved, and enslaved, the many more whose lives were forever blighted due to Mao’s Red Terror. Torigian concludes his study noting: “Left out of this narrative is a full account of the terrible costliness in human suffering that has come along with the revolutionary project — a Faustian bargain seen so clearly in the life of the man Xi Zhongxun.”
Jaivin dedicates her book to Geremie R. Barmé, Australia’s leading scholar of contemporary Chinese Communism including the period she covers. Together with Kevin Rudd, this trio are the outstanding products of Pierre Ryckmans’ time as Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University.
Jaivin usefully includes ‘A Cultural Revolution Timeline’ at the beginning of her monograph, referencing the Great Leap Forward, and other calamitous events in modern Chinese history as precursor events she focuses on. Mao’s words are cited: “A revolution is not a dinner party… A revolution is an act of insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Jaivin comments: “…seventeen years after the birth of the People’s Republic, it seemed to [Mao] that the revolution had lost its dynamism and the Party was stagnating. Keeping the revolutionary spirit alive meant incessant class struggle and the purging of footdraggers, insubordinates, opportunists and saboteurs.” The title of her book is derived from the Mao-authored Big Character poster plastered everywhere in the first months of the unfolding turmoil, “Bombard the Headquarters!” Ironically, Mao was the headquarters, in the key, meaningful sense of the leader of the nation.
When the CCP achieved complete mainland control in 1949, China was poor, war-ravaged, from both the Japanese and the Communist-versus Kuomintang/Nationalists civil war, with 80% illiteracy. The country’s new leaders had limited experience, learning anew the arts of government and administration. Stalin’s example and the regional ‘soviets’ established in China in the civil war period was all they had to go on. Mao was addicted to crisis. Jaivin convincingly highlights his history of threatening to blow up the Party. Forced collectivisation of agriculture, extirpating factory and workplace management into the hands of fevered ideologues, mass famine, the Great Leap Forward experiment, the ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ moment of liberalisation in 1956-7 before ferocious crackdown against ‘rightists’, were instances of rule by crisis and dogmatic fiat, for which at least 60 million lives perished. The Sino-Soviet split between the two Communist Parties in the early 1960s, meant that numerous projects stood incomplete as the CCP despatched Soviet technicians and advisers back home. Mao was upset by Khrushchev’s critique of the Stalin era.
In trying to explain reactions of party loyalists three themes emerge from both authors: first, the fear of the CCP losing control of the country; the quasi-religious zeal to renew the revolution; and the cultish care to stay loyal to the Party despite the calumnies visited on leading cadres. Comparisons with Stalin’s time are discussed below.
Precarious was the life of party members. At Beijing University in 1966 splashed on the walls was this: “Resolutely, thoroughly, totally and completely wipe out all ghosts and monsters and all Khrushchevian Counter-Revolutionary Revisionists and carry the socialist revolution through to the end. Defend the Party’s Central Committee! Defend Mao Zedong Thought! Defend the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!” School teachers were renounced as “reactionary academics”. Exams for university entrance were abolished, and universities as functioning operations ceased to exist.
Awkward divisions arose: “Personal grudges and loyalties, interpretations of the ideological scripture and arguments over who was most loyal to Mao also caused ructions,” Jaivin points out. There was theatre in the crazy spectacle. On 16 July 1966, Mao plunged into the Yangtze River, both to demonstrate his physical fitness and to urge the nation’s youth to be unafraid to swim against the tide. Within three months thereafter, 15 to 20 million Red Guards were deployed across the country to beat the hell out of supposed reactionary elements. “Long live the Red Terror!” was a popular Red Guard slogan. Terror it was. One vigorous enthusiast is cited by Jaivin, as explaining away Red Guard mistakes: “If good people beat good people, it is a misunderstanding. Without beatings, you do not get acquainted…”
Everyone came under suspicion, everyone was considered a potential Khrushchev puppet. Previously revered boosters of communist rule, the chairman of the Beijing Writers Association, the author of the Chinese national anthem, March of the Volunteers, included, either suicided or died in prison
Besides the millions of killings, brutality, life-lasting injuries, and chaos, Red Guards destroyed millions of rare volumes of classical texts, cultural artefacts, carved stone stelae; they dynamited Confucius’s tomb, digging up surrounding ancestral graves in a frantic effort to ‘renounce’ the past. One chapter heading of Jaivin’s perfectly captures the madness: ‘1967-69: Violence, Confusion and Contradiction’. Early in 1967, factory workers were threatening to strike for higher pay and better conditions, “a prospect from which even the most radical Communist Party leaders recoiled,” Jaivin says.
She explains: “The politics of the Cultural Revolution are devilishly confusing. They are full of convoluted and improbable conspiracy theories, imagined enemies and absurd proclamations about how brilliantly things were going when they were an absolute mess.” Similarly, Torigian: “Old grudges and loyalties shaped political contestation, and no figure fit perfectly into either the ‘leftist’ or ‘rightist’ label.” Jaivin refers to the terrifying line of Beria’s, Stalin’s chief of secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”, as if anyone could be made to confess to anything, given the pressure that might be applied to get the result desired. Torigian again: “When differences did appear, it was often extremely difficult to parse their meaning.”
Five Black Categories of counter-revolutionaries were defined as Landlords and Rich Farmers (and their cursed descendants). They had already suffered greatly, but now the Cultural Revolution unleashed further pillorying violence on that duo. The third was the all-purpose Counter-revolutionaries category (former Kuomintang officials, ex-government officials, and political opponents, real or imagined). The fourth, Bad Influences category mopped up many of those not yet included, common criminals and social misfits; and finally, the fifth category, Rightists (critics of Mao and/or the CCP, or of the current path pursued by the party.) The potential for arbitrary persecutions is not hard to fathom.
Suddenly, in January 1970, a new campaign was launched against the three antis – anti-graft, anti-profiteering, and anti-waste. It was “a time of mob justice” and no one was safe or could be sure what constituted guidelines on justice.
The Vice Premier (and future paramount CCP leader from 1978 to 1997), Deng Xiaopeng was exiled, assigned factory work at the Xinjian County Tractor Factory in rural Jiangxi province, his fifth purge or exile. Deng’s half-sister suicided, his son while under interrogation was left a cripple. The country’s President since 1959, Liu Shaoqi, was expelled from the party and removed from office in 1968; he died a year later. Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, with his son attempted to flee the country in September 1971 and their plane crashed in Chinese Mongolia. Xi Zhongxun had already lost political office in 1965. The elder Xi was paraded as an enemy of the Cultural Revolution; the family home ransacked by student militants. A daughter committed suicide because of the pressure, Xi’s wife was forced to renounce her husband. Both the elder Xi and his son were sent to work in rural settlements. (Zhongxun was only rehabilitated in 1978, brought back to harness by Deng, himself rehabilitated by Premier Zhou Enlai and Mao in 1974 as First Vice-Premier, tasked with running the economy.)
On Mao’s 80th birthday, he told Zhou that the Cultural Revolution would end soon, but something similar would be needed every seven to eight years. The turmoil, however, persisted another few years. Jaivin touches on Zhou’s legacy, citing Pierre Ryckmans’ summation: “…the staunchest pillar of a regime that managed to kill more innocent Chinese citizens in twenty-five years of peace than had the combined forces of all foreign imperialists in one hundred years of endemic aggression.” Zhou was a survivor. Torigian reveals that in August 1983, Xi Zhongxun and other party leaders ordered the burning of the most damning documents implicating Zhou in executions and persecutions during this time.
Jaivin drolly observes that in January 1975, the Party enshrined in the constitution the ‘Four Great Freedoms’ — to ‘speak freely’, to ‘openly air views’, to carry out ‘big debates’ and to post big-character posters. She suggests “It was not a good idea to take this too literally.”
Death in September 1976 at age 82, precluded further laps by the Great Helmsman, Mao, across the Yangtze River. Apart from the Gang of Four, a core group fomenting trouble: “Most Cultural Revolution radicals paid little or no price for their actions,” Jaivin concludes. The fifth member of the Gang, Mao, escaped post facto censure. State propaganda organs particularly scapegoated Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, the leader of the Gang for the main excesses of those years. Within months of Mao’s death, the CCP embarked upon the “Four Modernisations” – policy aimed at strengthening China’s competence in agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. Deng, in a 1978 interview said Mao had been 70% good, 30% bad in his policies. The party leadership feared the consequences of Khruschev-like renunciation of Mao rule. To this day, the carefully curated Mao cult flourishes.
Telling truthfully China’s history in ways that deviate from the latest official version, is career defining in communist China, usually in the terminating sense. In a major speech in 2013, CCP General-Secretary Xi Jinping condemned “historical nihilism”. Which is to say, too much negative concentration on the excesses and mistakes during China’s blood-soaked modern history of CCP rule. Jaivin says genuine research is forbidden, although some scholars have raised thorny questions. But there is nothing comparable, say, to Barmé’s exhaustive oral history and other documentary research. As the story of those times is expunged in part and glossed over, Jaivin notes that “unreinforced memories gr[o]w dim.” This is of course just what the party prefers. It is a pity that Torigian’s work was in the presses before Rudd’s definitive assessment was published, On Xi Jinping. How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World, Oxford University Press, 2024. Rudd, in looking for the source stream found Lenin, not Confucius.
In the aftermath, a critical question, alluded to earlier here, arises: ‘why did the previously diehard Communist Party victims not renounce the vehicle that enabled their macabre experiences? A clue is given early in Torigian’s book. On a white cloth Mao once wrote the words “The party’s interests come first” and handed this to the elder Xi, as if this summed him up. Hence, too, the title of Torigian’s book.
Torigian carefully considers the legend of the senior Xi, as that of the righteous, practical, open-minded and merciful cadre, the apparently pro-reform leader who privately and publicly expressed support for greater democracy in the party. The author addresses the teasing question as to whether Xi Jinping is the unfilial son, given his authoritarian instincts. Such characterisations mask both father’s and son’s absolute devotion to the revolution and to the CCP.
During the Great Purges in the Soviet Union during 1936-38, Old Bolsheviks confessed to absurd ‘crimes’, agreeing to the prosecutors’ demands to admit collusion with both Nazi and Trotskyist spies, infiltrators, and saboteurs. Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940) through the character Rubashov, loosely based on Bukharin, ‘agrees’ to what is demanded out of loyalty to the Party and the Revolution. Yes, Stalin was a primitive, blood-thirsty lunatic. The charges against them were beyond absurd. But the Soviet Union was progressing, developing to a ‘higher stage’. Surely, an understanding would emerge in time about the travesty. To spitefully seek personal justice, to resist the charade, would be individualist selfishness. In time, they might be vindicated by the party and the people. But resistance now might imperil the credibility of the revolution. If, ultimately, all this was for the betterment of mankind, in the end, protecting the gains made and to come, required self-sacrifice. Those Old Bolsheviks in Koestler’s novel feared that the Party might be overthrown or discredited and that this was a fragile moment in the Party’s and the country’s development.
Something similar must have exercised the minds of Chinese Communist Party revolutionaries as they were harassed, beaten, driven to despair, sometimes killed, sometimes taking their own lives. Xi Zhongxun for the better part of 12-years was in internal exile. He must have wondered what fidelity to the revolution meant. The merit of Torigian’s assessment is that he does not over-psychologise or guess too much what might have been on his mind.
Noting that explicating party history is a landmine, Torigian sees Zhongxun as in the “very center of discussions about how the party should think about — and explain — what it was trying to achieve.” He says: “While Xi felt undeniable anguish and sadness throughout his life, it would be a mistake to assume that these difficulties diminished his devotion to the party and the revolution. Understanding why requires a sensitivity to the political culture in which Xi lived. In the party, suffering meant “forging”, or strengthening one’s willpower and dedication.” That is a telling word, “forging”, revealing the perspective of rehabilitated party elders. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, is not how Torigian expresses the point, but those words are not far off the mark. He sums up the man, “Xi [Zhongxun] was an earthy, humorous individual who often impressed people with his sincerity…” His friendships with “ethnic-minority figures had genuine features…” But he was complicated and contradictory.
The elder Xi’s most significant work for the party focused on United Front work with other communist parties around the world, and his forging of alliances, and friendlier relations with the Tibetan, Muslim, Mongol, Buddhist, and Christian communities. At the international level, he witnessed the Sino-Soviet split, and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc completely. Domestically, everything he did, in finding common ground with ethnic leaders, such as in Chinese Mongolia, and his friendship with the Panchen Lama was to thwart “splittists” and to promote the leading role of the party. He never seriously entertained any such minorities’ right to outright, independent existence.
The elder Xi’s performance and history, as sage and practical leader, skills he struggled to cope with, emerged within the system of which he was a part. Torigian notes: “…the same dilemmas that appeared in the earliest days of the revolution persisted. What was the right balance between stability and transformation, co-optation and repression, zeal and pragmatism, openness and control?”
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Deng’s frustration with “leftist’ elements, so called-extremists resistant to modernisation led to confusion as to how best to retain communist control. He zig-zagged along with the rest of the party leadership. At one point Deng stated that “practice is the sole criterion of truth.” And that treating Mao’s words as “lifeless dogmatism” was a “violation of Mao Zedong thought”. Getting the economy right had its own rewards for the party. Their rule would seem to be working. But Deng was no technocrat. He was democratic centralist. Deng’s believed that the party needed a “core”, both in personnel and ideology. He was prepared to lead. In March 1979, in a major speech, Deng “…demanded that party members uphold the four Cardinal Principles: the socialist path, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the principle of Mao Zedong thought and Marxism-Leninism.” Torigian says Xi was delighted. Like other comrades, Torigian says Xi was unsure how the party might manage the transition to a market economy with Chinese socialist characteristics. But Deng seemed to ‘know’ what to do. Post-Mao, Deng had a decisive hand in the selection and discarding of CCP Leaders Hua Guofeng (1976-81), Hu Yaobang (1981-1987), Zhao Ziyang (1987-89), and in picking Jiang Zemin as party leader (who served, 1989-2002).
In 1983 Xi, by then a sprightly 70-year-old, remarked; “Affairs in the party center are difficult to manage… Our party engaged in leftist activities for twenty years. Plus, China’s autocratic traditions have a distant source and a long stream! Every step forward is difficult.” In the same year, in an address to the National People’s Congress, Xi stated: “There is no socialism without democracy. There is no socialist modernization without democracy. Chaos and arbitrariness were the rule during the Cultural Revolution.” This sounded like a tocsin to fundamental reform. But it is more likely that Xi was merely proposing an extra dose of party democracy, rather than sweeping, country-wide political reform, with contestation between the CCP and other parties. Torigian, however, asks whether something more searching was being entertained. In an ambivalent passage, Torigian surmises: “Xi was afraid that the party, which was full of former peasants, still suffered from too much feudal thinking. The understanding of Communism held by most cadres remained at the level of ‘beating up the landlords and dividing their land’. Most cadres believed that whoever conquered the nation had the right to rule it. The party, Xi worried, lacked democratic traditions.” The evidence suggests that the elder Xi realised that some uncomfortable changes to communist rule needed canvassing. But he was ambivalent on the point.
He could sometimes sound radical. At a party meeting in 1986, Torigian quotes Xi: “Henceforth, we should persist in the transition from the rule of man to rule of law, persist in universal equality before the law, and persist in ruling the nation with law.” Mixed with such robust expressions of legal and constitutional governance, was sentimental thinking about the cultural and spiritual significance of the party. Xi said: “Material civilization is not enough. It is also necessary to have spiritual civilization.” He believed that was where the Chinese Communist Party mattered.
Under Xu Yaobao’s leadership of the party, from 1979-1987, the elder Xi was an enthusiastic supporter. That is, until he wasn’t. Xi encouraged Hu to see Deng frequently, lest the old man misconstrue Hu’s intentions. But they fell out. Hu complained: “I’m not the head I’m the bottom of the foot.” In another telling admission quoted by Torigian, Hu said that he was like “a mouse who stepped on the scales to weigh himself.” There was only one paramount leader and that was Deng. Hu was eventually removed as party leader. Xi, some of the evidence suggests, felt the subsequent humiliation of Hu and party-organ published criticisms in and after 1987 were excessive and disrespectful of this old comrade who, after all, led the modernisation of China. Yet Xi ‘agreed’ that Hu had become an umbrella for the liberalisers. Tellingly, Torigian explains, “Despite Xi’s frustrations about what had occurred, within weeks, he was praising Deng and lambasting Hu.”
As Xu fell, as the party wrestled with reform and modernisation, and keeping the party ‘pure’ and united, “Xi, just as in the 1950s, was once again one of the closest witnesses to the inherent pathologies of succession politics and leader-deputy relations in the Leninist system.” This time Xi was a survivor. “He existed in an inherently opaque system in which even people at the top often had a very poor idea of what was transpiring,” Torigian says.
Above all, the author says: “Xi was a brawler who did not shrink from using ‘leftist’ methods against people whom he thought were ‘leftist’. He was more than aware that: “Leading party figures continued to pick ‘ideological’ fights because they felt personally threatened or because they wanted to damage someone else politically.” Torigian notes that “Everyone had to at least pretend to respect one another,” in the new era. There was reason, however, for messy contestation: “Although party discipline kept a lid on political infighting, institutions were too weak to systematically resolve problems. Political contestation instead took the form of spying, the use of compromising material, lying, and plotting,” at least sometime. The whole history of Chinese communist practice was conducted in varying types of “pestilential atmosphere”.
In his own remarks on ideology and reform, Xi emphasized the need for balance. He recognized it was hard to tell when critical views were “anti-party”. Indeed. Gradually, Xi senior faded from leading roles in the party. His physical and mental health were fragile.
With the June 4th 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square and other parts of the country, the party and Xi worried about “spiritual pollution”, about anti-party western influences. There were intense, tedious debates about the difference between Marxist and bourgeois humanism. Both Xis had shifting and contradictory attitudes. Xi senior was savvy enough to see that many young Chinese were losing faith in Communism. For both, the party came first. Both worried about the country’s ‘stability’, that refuge-phrase of all justifications for suppressing dissent. Torigian explains Xi senior’s position: “Given…circumstances, the question for Xi was how costly the crackdown would be for him and the party if it had to come. In that sense, Xi’s behavior is less a case of cowardice than a demonstration of political judgement.”
Naturally, Torigian’s study conjectures on the famous son’s thinking. By 2000, Xi Jinping was Governor of Fujian province, seven years after his father’s retirement, and on his way to the top. Interestingly, Torigian notes that “Xi Jinping’s career continued to progress even as his father’s was collapsing… like his father, he did not trust Catholics.” Torigian notes: “Jinping argued that to avoid the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party, his generation must study theoretical matters, act as servants of the people, feel a sense of long-term historic responsibility, and inherit the traditions of the revolutionary generation.” This is an echo of Deng’s Four Cardinal Principals. Torigian poses this question: “How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?” It is not a matter of like father, like son. For, as He Fang, party elder and veteran official in foreign policy once said: “Political genes cannot be inherited.” True. But the party came first for both men.
On the son, Torigian concludes: “It is also difficult to guess whether Jinping sees himself as more ‘left’ or ‘right’ than his father because those terms have always been arbitrary.” Furthermore: “For any leader of a Leninist regime, getting the level of ‘struggle’ right is like catching lightning in a bottle. Who is a friend, who is an enemy, and who can be won over has always been shifting for Chinese leaders.” As for the ‘ideology/security’ and the ‘development’ debate, sometimes discussed as if they were rival postures, Torigian explains that the party cares about both, notwithstanding that their management creates tensions.
In a masterly conclusion, Torigian writes: “Xi [Zhongxun’s] life is a powerful statement about the misleading nature of grand narratives. It shows that power is tricky, slippery, and contingent even for a organisational weapon like the party.” Both Jaivin and Torigian explain how this is so, both explicate the meaning and history of snakes and ladders politics with CCP characteristics. These works are required reading for understanding the world that became modern China.
