*The Party’s Interests Come First*

By Joseph Torigian, this could easily end up as one of the twenty or thirty best biographies of all time.  It is about Chinese history, and is a biography’s of Xi’s father.  The subtitle is The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.  The dense (and fascinating) exposition is difficult to excerpt, but here is one bit of overview:

An inescapable irony sits at the heart of The Party’s Interests Come First.  It is a book about party history, and the life of its subject, Xi Zhongxun, is itself a story about the politically explosive nature of competing versions of the past.  The men and women who gave their lives to the party were enormously sensitive to how this all-encompassing political organization would characterize their contributions.  Such a sentiment was powerful not only because revolutionary legacies were reflected through hierarchy and authority within the party but also because their lives as chronicled in party lore had a fundamental significance for their own sense of self-worth.

If there is an overriding lesson to this book, it is that China has not yet left its own brutal past behind.

Hat tip and nudge here goes to Jordan Schneider.