Behind Xi’s strongman image, a demanding father always loyal to the party

Beijing had taken a tough stance toward Trump’s tariffs, retaliating with economic countermeasures and vowing to “never kneel down" before foreign bullies. This defiance burnished Xi’s self-styled image as a leader with absolute authority, one imbued with the fortitude and spirit of sacrifice needed to guide China’s resurgence as a great power.

These qualities, some historians say, have roots in Xi’s formative years as a son of the revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun, whose harsh parenting and unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party—throughout a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution—seem to have inspired Xi Jinping to show the toughness his father demanded.

Party lore celebrates the elder Xi as a stoic figure who fought bravely for the Communist revolution and stayed true to the cause despite being wrongfully purged under Mao.

“While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?" historian Joseph Torigian writes in the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, which offers fresh vignettes and insights into the father’s influence on the Chinese leader.

Many within the party elite misread Xi Jinping when he took power in 2012, expressing expectations that he would emulate his father’s reputation as a reformer who helped open up China’s economy and managed religious and ethnic minorities with a softer touch. Instead Xi used iron-fisted tactics to centralize power, squelch dissent and tighten party control over the economy and society.

Xi’s hard-line approach belies a deeper degree of continuity with his father, whose “absolute devotion" to the Communist Party may have inspired his son’s own commitment to it and its long-term rule, Torigian argues in “The Party’s Interests Come First."

Xi Zhongxun joined the Communist Party as a teenager in 1928 and won Mao’s trust as a revolutionary fighter. After the Communist victory in 1949, he took on roles as a regional leader, propaganda minister and vice premier, but was purged in 1962 for alleged “anti-party" activities.

Stunned by his downfall, the elder Xi told a friend that he felt like “a person who fell off an eighteen-floor building," according to the biography.

He was sent away from Beijing to work in a factory and separated from his family. During Mao’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which began as Xi Jinping entered his teens, militant Red Guards abused Xi Zhongxun at public-shaming rallies and, according to party accounts which don’t offer details, “persecuted" one of his daughters to death.

But Xi Zhongxun “never abandoned his emotional attachment to Mao," writes Torigian, who describes how the patriarch—while still in political disgrace—made Xi Jinping memorize some of Mao’s speeches. During a brief reunion in 1976, the father watched his son recite the speeches by heart while they both sat in their underwear, according to the book.

“Although the party betrayed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Zhongxun never betrayed the party," Torigian writes.

The elder Xi was rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, serving as a provincial chief, a member of the party’s elite Politburo and a senior lawmaker before being sidelined after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A father of four daughters and three sons across two marriages, the patriarch died in 2002 at the age of 88. Xi Jinping is the elder of the two sons he had with his second wife, Qi Xin.

Historians and people who knew Xi Zhongxun say he molded his son’s character by imposing brutal discipline at home—including strict rules on frugality enforced with physical beatings—and by recounting tales of his revolutionary exploits. During the Mao era, Xi Jinping often faced persecution as a child of a disgraced official—experiences he later credited for hardening his character and schooling him on the vagaries of power.

Xi Jinping “does seem to have learned quite a bit from his father about the nature and dynamics of Chinese politics, which even insiders struggle to navigate successfully—including Xi’s own father," said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a former director for China on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.

Xi Jinping showed reverence for his father, publicly and privately. Torigian recounts how the son would kowtow to his father at Lunar New Year gatherings, wait for the patriarch’s go-ahead before taking his seat, and on one occasion even finished a piece of food that his father had started eating but found too difficult to chew.

“The ways in which Xi has gone out of his way to almost perform respect and obedience to his father…is striking," said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, who has written books on Xi.

“Xi [Zhongxun] respected toughness—Jinping was his favorite son precisely because of a belief that Jinping had the most ‘mettle,’" writes Torigian.

Xi Jinping has sought to demonstrate that mettle as China’s leader. He has pursued a more assertive style of diplomacy to advance Beijing’s interests and called on the Chinese people to show grit in adversity such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current trade war with the U.S.

The younger Xi’s forcefulness in cleansing corruption and disloyalty within the party echoes his father’s approach. Notwithstanding his reputation as being relatively liberal, Xi Zhongxun was zealous in implementing Mao’s brutal purges, according to Torigian.

During the 1942-1945 Yan’an rectification drive, a purge that Mao launched to consolidate power, Xi Zhongxun directed an “aggressive hunt for spies" that led to many wrongful persecutions, according to the book. Suspects often made false confessions to avoid torture, sometimes while Xi watched. Entire classes of school children were denounced as enemy agents, Torigian writes.

In the early 1950s, as a senior official overseeing northwestern China, Xi fervently enforced a Mao campaign to hunt counterrevolutionaries, saying that “it is necessary to remember that the more bad people whom we kill, the more they will be afraid."

“Studying his father enables us to understand how Xi [Jinping] would have gained a view on how vicious elite-level politics in China was, and what would need to be done to stay in power," said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London and co-author of a book on Xi’s political ideas.

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com