The Will to Power in China

Anne Stevenson-Yang reviews Robert L. Suettinger’s “The Conscience of the Party” and Joseph Torigian’s “The Party’s Interests Come First.”

By Anne Stevenson-YangSeptember 10, 2025

• Politics

• History

• Biography & Autobiography

WHAT DOES THE survival and current ideological shape of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mean for China and the world? Is the CCP a political clique in which a few ruthless men have managed to seize and wield power at the expense of the great majority of Chinese? Or is it a capacious movement in which factions contend to bring a measure of justice to a sprawling and poor society? Can the Party be reformed from within?

The answers a reader will extract from two recent biographies of formative figures in the CCP’s development are ultimately similar as well as depressing. The books suggest that a governing party’s will to power is destructive of both its own ideals and of the society that birthed it. The lives of these two men, one who tried to reform the CCP and another who believed the CCP would ultimately reform itself, show that a raw desire for power, and not the ideals that drew adherents to the Party, has been the motor of social change in China.

Robert L. Suettinger’s The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer (2024) paints a sad, elegiac picture of his subject, who was for a time the heir apparent to Deng Xiaoping and whose death in April 1989 provided the instigation (or excuse) for the Tiananmen protests. Through meticulous historical work, Suettinger shows Hu to be a tragic hero, a poor peasant boy from Hunan (whence also hailed Mao Zedong, an important fact in that the two could understand each other’s dialects) who believed with all his heart in the benefits the CCP was bringing to China but who saw, by the middle of his life, that the struggle for justice had become a mere struggle for power. It took Hu years to find his voice and then to find a means for pushing the CCP in the direction of humanity, and he ultimately lost that battle. Hu came to understand the Party’s cruelty. He then tried, and failed, to change it. He did, however, provide a new moral compass for a succeeding generation. Suettinger leaves no doubt that Hu experienced the brutality and understood the sharp-elbowed politics of the Mao Zedong era (1949–76). Hu also confronted the flaws of the reformers, whose efforts began in 1979. Suettinger brings the reader to understand that Hu’s idealism was plausible, even if ultimately frustrated.

The second biography is Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (2025). Xi Zhongxun rose high in the Party and was famous within China during his lifetime but is now associated there—and for the first time globally—with one thing: his son, Xi Jinping, whose star rose even further. In the first English-language biography of Xi the elder, Torigian offers a clouded and troubling picture of a man and his party. The book uses current paramount leader Xi Jinping’s father’s life to provide a sketch of a political organization that was deeply violent and duplicitous from the very start. Torigian attempts to show that Xi Zhongxun welcomed a new direction late in his career. For example, after China’s brief but costly 1979 invasion of Vietnam—a response to that country’s toppling of the China-backed Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and to its close alignment with the Soviet Union—Xi supported a major shift in foreign policy, backing efforts to improve ties with countries like Australia and the United States. But while Xi Zhongxun, a comrade in arms to both Mao and Deng, supported these overtures, he did not instigate them.

Xi and Hu were part of the same generation, though Xi was born two years earlier, in 1913, and lived much longer, dying in 2002. Xi and Hu both became communist warriors in their teens. They were members of the Party well before 1949, the year that the communists took power and established the People’s Republic of China on the mainland as a successor state to the Republic of China that an earlier generation of revolutionaries had founded in 1912. After losing the civil war, the Kuomintang forces took over the then-unclaimed island of Taiwan, which Japanese occupiers had left months before, and Taipei became the capital of the new Republic of China government. Now a democratic country, in which competing parties vie for electoral power, it was for decades after 1949 a one-party authoritarian state controlled by Mao’s rival Chiang Kai-shek, and then Chiang’s son. Both those men led the Nationalist Party—once dominant on the mainland and still one of the two main parties in Taiwan. Back on the mainland, Xi and Hu both assumed positions of power and labored long and hard to serve the Communist Party. Hu was principally a theoretician who dedicated himself to elucidating or creating theoretical struts for communist practice of the day.

Xi was, to put it crudely, a hatchet man. Having participated in an attempt to murder an instructor when he was just 15, Xi went on to help kill landlords, brutally repress dissent by Muslims and Tibetans, and insist that when the Party engaged in murder and physical violence, it was because individuals made mistakes and not because policies were wrong.

Hu was clearly the more thoughtful and intelligent of the two leaders and made more of a mark on China’s direction. He is probably best remembered among Chinese people today for his tireless efforts to restore rank to and bring home many thousands who had been abused, stripped of power, sent away from their families, and forced to do hard labor during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). He later tried publicly to persuade the aging Deng Xiaoping to relinquish power, and he promoted and implemented economic reforms to make it easier for the average person to get by. In the end, these efforts earned him the wrath of Deng, and he was forced out of office two years before he died.

Xi is best known as a progenitor of the Shenzhen model, under which freer and to some extent “capitalist” policies were allowed on the mainland to promote economic development. Torigian’s work, however, casts doubt on the importance of Xi’s role. When he first encountered Shenzhen, Xi was baffled and depressed by its run-down character compared to Hong Kong, just over the border, which was much more prosperous. “The starkness of the divide seemed to strike Xi deeply,” Torigian writes. But Xi’s reaction was to organize a campaign to stop people trying to flee. Torigian tells us that 100,000 migrants were incarcerated in Shenzhen in just six months in 1979 in extremely poor conditions and that Xi opposed pleas to free them. Only much later, and under intense pressure from other leaders, did Xi accede to policies others had proposed to promote a freer economy in Guangdong.

We are reminded by these two biographies that the Communist Party eats its own. Both Xi and Hu were repudiated and purged, and they suffered greatly as a result. Hu was purged several times, sent to a labor camp, and his family made to suffer. Xi was purged in 1962, and later, one of his daughters hanged herself, probably as a result of the persecution the family faced during the Cultural Revolution.

The subjects of these two books reacted differently to the torment. Hu embarked on tentative but persistent criticism of the CCP that focused on working within the system. Suettinger writes: “Based upon what he did in the rest of his life, the Cultural Revolution was a watershed for Hu, the point in time at which he stopped trying his best to do what Mao wanted and began trying to find ways to undo Mao’s worst excesses.” Xi, by contrast, seems to have become more hesitant and afraid of making mistakes. According to Torigian, “In 1978, Xi was sent to work in a distant province, and the accusations against him were still not officially reversed. Xi told an old friend that Hua Guofeng’s plan was to have him ‘first start working and then, at the same time, solve the [historical] problems.’ Xi, however, did not mind.” Xi did not criticize the abuses of the Cultural Revolution. In 1997, despite the suicide of his daughter, Xi said: “The Cultural Revolution honed my children.”

The careers of these two men, neither a household name in the West, represent turning points that might have caused the People’s Republic of China to mature as a political and economic system, perhaps even following the path that Taiwan ultimately did. Instead, Xi and Hu represent the road not taken, one that might have kept China from becoming the gray Stalinist place it is now under Xi the son.

Suettinger is a lifetime China historian who has served at the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council (NSC), and wrote what might be viewed as the predecessor to this book, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations 1989–2000 (2004) two decades ago while a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution. In the end, Suettinger, now old and retired and unlikely to care about visiting China, tells a masterful and engaging history of the CCP, with Hu Yaobang, the reformer, as the organizing principle. Like Hu, Suettinger seems to rue the lost ideals of the communists, who at the time of China’s civil war (1945–49) appeared genuinely to care about feeding the hungry and lifting up the downtrodden. Of the later Party under Mao Zedong, Suettinger writes:

Combining the credulousness of ordinary party members, for whom Marxism was a foreign dogma full of difficult-to-pronounce names and peculiar concepts, with the cynical manipulation of high priests in a theocracy, along with the ruthless discipline of a criminal gang, the CCP had become the dominant force in Chinese society by 1965, when Mao set out to destroy and remake it.

There is much less written about Xi the elder than about Hu, and, perhaps as a result, Torigian’s book has less thematic sweep. It must be said, however, that the book might have been better conceived as an article or series of shorter studies than as a biography of 700 pages. While Torigian’s book is far from hagiographic, containing many pointed criticisms of Xi and the Party, there are moments when the tone feels restrained. It’s worth considering whether this caution might reflect the sorts of dilemmas faced by foreign scholars working on sensitive topics—especially those who hope to continue conducting research in China—rather than any lack of analytic rigor or content. For example, he says that the communists in the remote “base area” of Shaanxi in the 1940s tacitly acceded to peasant demands to grow opium. In fact, we know that the early CCP actively organized opium cultivation and earned significant income from exporting it.

The brutality that colored both Xi’s political work and his management of his family also seems underplayed. Xi the elder was known as a heavy drinker and an abusive father. This matters, because the contemporary reader’s principal interest in him is reading through his behavior for clues to the policies and attitudes of his son. Familial abuse, heavy drinking, and parental aloofness affect children and may indicate character traits that matter.

The tragedy of the CCP is the same as that besetting revolutionary movements around the world: such movements present an eschatological vision of a future, redeemed society. They inspire self-abnegating devotion by idealistic foot soldiers. But when the movement seizes control of a country, it chews up its early idealists, because any alternative power base threatens leaders who seek absolute power. The roots of the destruction wrought during the CCP’s long period in control can be traced back to Mao Zedong’s proclivity for destroying governing structures and his unwillingness to relinquish power. The histories of the CCP embedded in these two biographies demonstrate that when you tear things down, dangerous dictators tend to arise—an important message for our own times.