Gaza's largest functioning hospital facing disaster, medics warn, as Israel widens offensive
The UK economy shrank unexpectedly in May, according to latest official figures.
The economy shrank by 0.1%, the Office for National Statistics said, the second month in a row it has contracted.
Economists had expected GDP to grow by 0.1%.
The fall in economic output was mainly driven by a drop in production, the ONS said.
Unite says it has suspended Angela Rayner from her membership of the union, amid a deepening row over the long-running bin strikes in Birmingham.
The deputy prime minister has been urging striking bin workers to accept a deal to end the dispute, which has seen mountains of rubbish pile up in the city.
The union said it would also re-examine its relationship with Labour after an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton.
Bin collection workers walked out in January, with an all-out strike going on since March. Unite is a major donor to the Labour Party, and has previously donated to Rayner herself.
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Two care home residents have died after a car crashed into the building following a police chase in Sunderland, Northumbria Police has said.
The crash happened at about 21:40 BST on Wednesday when a blue BMW hit Highcliffe Care Home in Witherwack, causing structural damage.
The vehicle had been reported stolen from the Fenham area of Newcastle earlier that evening, police said.
A woman in her 90s and another in her 80s died on Thursday, and eight other residents were taken to hospital with injuries. Two people have been arrested.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.
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Irvine Welsh is pointing up to the second floor of a grey stone building in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh.
As he gets ready to publish a sequel to his 1993 cult novel Trainspotting, the author is showing me the window of the room, with its view over a local park, where he wrote that first book, which later became a hit film starring Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller.
The son of a Leith docker and a waitress - who did a course in electrical engineering, spent time in a punk band and was addicted to heroin as a younger man - Welsh had moved back home to Leith from London and "just started typing". He tells me that before writing Trainspotting he had decided "this is my last chance to do something creative".
Trainspotting follows the lives of a group of heroin-addicted friends in Edinburgh. Violent, often shocking and darkly funny, the book is a picture of the social decay sparked by the decimation of Britain's industrial heartlands. It was Welsh's first novel and sold more than a million copies in the UK alone.
But as he sat typing away, back in the early 90s, he had no idea it would do well. "I just wanted to get it done," he explains. It certainly paid off.
The book and film tapped so successfully into the cultural zeitgeist that more than 30 years on, you can still book an official Trainspotting tour in Leith. But on a blustery Scottish summer's day, I'm getting a bespoke one from the writer himself, touring some of the key haunts that inspired him.
We head to the so-called Banana Flats, the curved building officially called Cables Wynd House that dominates the Leith skyline and where his character Sick Boy (played by Miller in the film) grows up.
We visit the Leith Dockers' Club where Renton (played by McGregor) goes with his mum and dad and where Welsh remembers hanging out "as a kid and sitting there with lemonade and crisps" and "feeling really sort of resentful" while everyone else was getting drunk.
Welsh's latest return to his characters is called Men in Love. He's previously written follow-up books and a prequel about the Trainspotting gang (he clearly can't get enough of them), but this new novel is set immediately after the first one finished, when Renton has run off with the money he and his friends have made from a big drug deal.
This time, Welsh is exploring what happens when young men start to fall in love and have relationships. He was partly motivated to write it, he says, because "we're living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison... I think that it's time we focused more on love as a kind of antidote to all that".
But don't expect saccharine stories of romance - this is Welsh, after all. The cheating, lying, manipulative - and at times, horrifying - behaviour of some of his characters is still much in evidence.
The book even has a disclaimer at the end explaining that because the novel is set in the 1980s, many of the characters "express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory".
Welsh says the publishers insisted on it. "They felt we live in such sensitive times that we need to make that point.
"We live in a much more censorious environment," he continues. While he accepts that misogynist terms in the book including "fat lassie" are hurtful and "there's a good reason why we don't say them", he worries that if the state starts to say "you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that, I think we're on a dangerous road".
The Men in Love story spans into the early 90s. It's being published at a time when Britain is indulging in a bit of 90s nostalgia, with Oasis on tour and Pulp's surprise set at Glastonbury getting rave reviews.
Welsh tells me he "never left" that era, but says younger generations also feel a nostalgia for it because "people had lives then".
He pins some of the blame for cultural change on the internet and social media which has become "a controlling rather than an enabling force".
As someone who understands addiction, Welsh hopes we'll be "more judicious" about using social media in future. He points to the way people have "their phones stuck to their face" while they are moving around.
"If we survive the next 50 years, that's going to look as strange in film as people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s."
He also thinks the internet is making us more stupid. "When you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies." He fears we're heading towards "a post-democratic, post-art, post-culture society where we've got artificial intelligence on one side and we've a kind of natural stupidity on the other side, we just become these dumbed down machines that are taking instructions".
Trainspotting's success came in part he says at a time when people were willing to read more challenging, less formulaic books. And as the money rolled in, it gave him the freedom to write.
He's also a DJ and is releasing an album with the Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra to go with his new book. The disco tracks relate to the characters, the storyline and the "emotional landscape" of the novel.
Music is "fundamental" to his writing and he's also "looking for that four-four beat all the time while I'm typing".
He builds a playlist in his head for every character and theme.
Renton's into Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Velvet Underground. Sick Boy also likes Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, New Order, he says.
The aggressive and violent Begbie likes "Rod Stewart and power ballads basically".
The singer recently told The Times that the public should give the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a chance. I wondered if Irvine Welsh thinks that his Trainspotting characters would support that party if they were growing up now.
He pushes back, telling me the Scottish working classes "still have a radical kind of spirit. They're not really there to be the stooge of some public school idiot".
Although later he adds "people are so desperate that they'll go along with anybody who has that rhetoric of change".
Welsh has always been political and, as we walk around the area where he grew up, he describes how Margaret Thatcher ended centuries of shipbuilding in Leith "at a stroke". Five thousand dockers became none, he says.
Trainspotting also resonated, he thinks, because it "heralded the adjustment to people living in a world without paid work. And now we're all in that position".
His argument is that Britain's class system is changing "because of this massive concentration of wealth towards the wealthy".
The working classes already have no money and now the middle classes are being pulled into more and more debt too and are less able to pass on their assets which makes life increasingly insecure.
"We're all members of the Precariat, basically. We don't know how long we'll have paid work if we do have it, and we just don't know how long this will last because our economy, our society is in a long-form revolutionary transformation."
In my time in Welsh's company, we haven't just toured Leith, I've had an insight into his brain, exploding with opinions on everything from our dystopian future, to why the best music was made in the analogue era and even to what would happen if he were offered a knighthood (it's a no, by the way).
When our time's up, he heads into the bar at the Dockers' Club to see a friend he first met at primary school 60 years ago. His old pal jokes to me that he's a plumber while Welsh is a millionaire author. You can see the affection between them.
Trainspotting may have changed Welsh's life entirely. But he's still plugged into the community that shaped him, and the Leith that he turned so spectacularly into fiction.
Men in Love is published on 24 July 2025
A hosepipe ban which has come into force across Yorkshire is expected to last until winter, the head of the region's water company has said.
More than five million householders have been barred from using hosepipes for activities such as watering the garden, washing the car or filling a paddling pool.
It is the first regional ban in the UK this year and comes after months of extremely hot and dry weather across England, with more high temperatures forecast over the weekend.
Nicola Shaw, chief executive of Yorkshire Water, told BBC 5 Live said: "I expect it to last until the winter as that is when the reservoirs will have recharged."
Yorkshire Water said the region had experienced its driest and warmest spring on record, with only 15cm of rainfall between February and June - less than half of what would be expected in an average year.
The company said the restrictions were needed to protect supplies in the face of more dry weather forecast in the coming weeks.
However, the decision has been criticised by some bill payers who expressed frustration at the number of leaks which appear to go unchecked.
In October, the Environment Agency (EA) reported that 21% of Yorkshire Water's supplies were lost due to leakage, higher than the national average of 19%.
The loss in Yorkshire equates to about 260 million litres every day.
When pushed on this issue, Ms Shaw, who received a bonus of £371,000 on top of her base salary of £585,000 last year, said she accepted the leakage rate was high but said it "was absolutely one of our priorities".
She added: "We have a lot of water mains across Yorkshire but because they're underground they are subject to some of the problems of the stresses and strains of movement of the soil and when it gets really dry they also break more."
"We've been working really hard on this and we've got less leakage from our pipes than we've ever had in Yorkshire.
"We are getting to fix leaks much quicker than we ever have done before."
The ban, which applies to customers across much of Yorkshire, parts of North Lincolnshire and parts of Derbyshire, comes after the Environment Agency declared a drought across the region last month.
Anyone flouting the restriction could be fined up to £1,000.
Ms Shaw, who was said to have turned down a bonus this year ahead of legislation which would have prevented her from receiving it, said businesses were able to continue using hosepipes as normal while restrictions were in place.
"We're asking people to use them for non-essential purposes. Please don't wash your car with a hosepipe, you can absolutely use a bucket.
"Washing your car with a hosepipe will use about a 1,000 litres if you did it for an hour."
Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
US singer Chris Brown has arrived at a court in London to enter a plea over two charges relating to an alleged bottle attack at a London nightclub two years ago.
The 36-year-old star is accused of causing actual bodily harm to a music producer during an incident that prosecutors have described as "unprovoked".
He is also charged with having an offensive weapon - namely a tequila bottle.
The two charges were added last month to the original charge of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm (GBH), to which Brown has already pleaded not guilty. The singer will face trial in October 2026.
The singer arrived at Southwark Crown Court for the latest plea hearing shortly before 09:00 BST on Friday.
Prosecutors have previously said the alleged victim, Abraham Diaw, was standing at the bar of Soho's Tape nightclub on 19 February 2023 when Mr Brown struck him several times with a bottle.
The singer was arrested at the five-star Lowry hotel in Salford, Greater Manchester, last month, after returning to the UK to prepare for a European tour.
He was held in custody for almost a week, before being released after agreeing to pay a £5m security fee to the court.
A security fee is a financial guarantee to ensure a defendant returns to court. Mr Brown could be asked to forfeit the money if he breaches bail conditions.
Under those conditions, Mr Brown must live at an address in the UK while awaiting trial, and was ordered to surrender his passport to police.
However, a plan was put in place allowing him to honour his Breezy Bowl XX world tour dates by surrendering his passport but getting it back when he needs to travel to the gigs.
The first date took place in Amsterdam on 8 June, before a string of stadium and arena shows across the UK and Europe.
Mr Brown is one of the biggest stars in US R&B, with two Grammy Awards, and 19 top 10 singles in the UK - including hits like Turn Up The Music, Freaky Friday, With You and Don't Wake Me Up.
His co-defendant Omololu Akinlolu, a 39-year-old American who performs under the name HoodyBaby, also entered a not guilty plea last month to the charge of attempted grievous bodily harm.
After 40 years of armed struggle against the Turkish state, the outlawed Kurdish PKK will hold a ceremony on Friday to mark a symbolic first step in laying down its arms.
The disarmament process will start under tight security in Iraqi Kurdistan and is expected to take all summer.
Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has hailed the move as "totally ripping off and throwing away the bloody shackles that were put on our country's legs".
Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, and the PKK is listed as a terror group in Turkey, the US, EU and UK. Its disarmament will be felt not just in Turkey but in Iraq, Syria and Iran.
A small group of PKK members will symbolically lay down their weapons in a ceremony near Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, before going back to their bases.
For security reasons, the exact location is not being revealed, although it's thought members of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition Dem party will be there, even if other major Turkish political parties will not.
Disarmament will then continue over the coming months at points set up with the involvement of the Turkish, Iraqi and Kurdistan regional governments, BBC Turkish has been told.
In a video, the PKK's long-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said it was "a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law". He has been in solitary confinement on the small prison island of Imrali, south-west of Istanbul, since he was captured in 1999.
This is not the first attempt at peace involving Turkey and the PKK, but this is the best hope so far that the armed struggle that began in 1984 will come to an end.
Originally a Marxist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party took up arms calling for an independent state inside Turkey.
In the 1990s, they called instead for greater autonomy for Kurds, who make up about 20% of the population.
Ocalan announced a ceasefire in 2013, and urged PKK forces to withdraw from Turkey. The 2015 Dolmabahce Agreement was supposed to bring democratic and language rights for Kurds, but the fragile truce collapsed amid devastating violence, especially in the Kurdish-dominated cities of the south-east, including Diyarbakir.
Turkey's air force targeted PKK bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. Several military campaigns have also targeted Kurdish-led forces in Syria.
The government in Ankara ruled out further talks until the PKK laid down its arms. That is now on the verge of happening.
In October 2024, a prominent nationalist leader and key Erdogan ally called Devlet Bahceli began a process described by the government as "terror-free Turkey". He urged the PKK's imprisoned leader to call for the dissolution of the outlawed group. It could pave the way for his possible release from Imrali island, he suggested.
The Turkish government launched talks with Ocalan via the pro-Kurdish Dem party, and then in February came his historic appeal for the PKK to disband, read out by two Dem MPs who had just returned from a visit to the prison island.
"All groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself," read Ocalan's letter.
The PKK had been formed primarily because "the channels of democratic politics were closed", he said, but Devlet Bahceli and Erdogan's own positive signals had created the right environment.
The PKK followed Ocalan's lead and declared a ceasefire and later declared that it had "completed its historical mission": the Kurdish issue could now "be resolved through democratic politics".
President Erdogan said it was an "opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror" and met pro-Kurdish politicians in April.
As founder of the PKK, Ocalan continues to be reviled by many Turks, even after 26 years in solitary confinement.
And yet he still plays an important role in the eyes of Kurds.
"I think he really has this authority; he is a main symbol for many Kurds, not all," says Joost Jongerden, a specialist on the 41-year conflict at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Two days before the PKK were due to begin disarmament, Ocalan appeared on video for the first time since he was put on trial more than 20 years ago.
Speaking for seven minutes, he addressed the outlawed group: "I believe in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons. And I call on you to put this principle into practice."
Ocalan was wearing a branded Lacoste polo shirt, and in an indication of his enduring relevance, the shirt quickly went viral and websites ran out of stock.
After Friday's ceremony, the scene switches to Turkey's parliament in Ankara where a commission will be set up to make decisions on the next steps for the government.
As the summer recess is around the corner, no concrete decisions are expected for several months, when MPs vote on the commission's recommendations and President Erdogan has the final say.
What happens to Abdullah Ocalan is not yet clear. The government says his conditions in jail could be reviewed as the process unfolds, but any chance of release will be left to the latter stages.
Erdogan's AK Party has begun work on changing the constitution, and there has been speculation that this would mean Erdogan would be able to run for the presidency again when his final term runs out in 2028.
The AKP and pro-Kurdish Dem party deny there is any link between the peace process and reshaping the constitution, but if Erdogan secures Dem support he would have a far greater chance of pushing through changes.
Erdogan is behind in the polls, but his main opposition rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, is in jail accused of corruption, which he denies, and more opposition mayors have been arrested as part of a crackdown in the past week.
US President Donald Trump has said he will send weapons, including Patriot air defence systems, for Ukraine via Nato.
Trump told NBC News that in a new deal, "we're going to be sending Patriots to Nato, and then Nato will distribute that", adding that Nato would pay for the weapons.
His announcement came after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of having a "positive dialogue" with Trump on ensuring that arms arrived on time, particularly air defence systems.
Zelensky said he had asked for 10 Patriot systems, after a surge in Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in the past week.
Speaking in Rome on Thursday, the Ukrainian leader said Germany was ready to pay for two of the Patriots and Norway for one, while other European partners were also prepared to help.
After a phone-call with Russia's Vladimir Putin last week, Trump said he was "not happy" that progress had not been made towards ending the war, and he has since complained that Putin's "very nice" attitude turned out to be meaningless.
During his interview with NBC News, Trump said he would make a "major statement" on Russia on Monday, but did not say what it would be about.
He said "Nato is going to reimburse the full cost" for the weapons sent on to Ukraine. Nato is funded through the contributions of its members, including the US.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Friday that he had urged countries including Germany and Spain to hand over some of their existing Patriot batteries, as they could reach Ukraine faster.
"We have continued to encourage our Nato allies to provide those weapons... since they have them in their stocks, then we can enter into financial agreements... where they can purchase the replacements."
The US defence department halted some shipments of critical weapons last week, raising concerns in Kyiv that its air defences could run low in a matter of months.
Among the armaments reported to have been placed on pause were Patriot interceptor missiles and precision artillery shells.
Then, as Ukraine was pounded by record numbers of drone attacks this week, Trump said more weapons would be sent: "We have to... They're getting hit very hard now."
Zelensky had appealed for the shipments to resume, describing the Patriot systems as "real protectors of life".
On Tuesday night, Ukraine was hit by a record 728 drones, and the Ukrainian president warned that Russia wanted to increase that to 1,000.
June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in Ukraine in three years, with 232 people killed and more than 1,300 injured, according to the UN.
Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has pushed to scale back US support for Ukraine.
The US was the biggest source of military aid to Ukraine between the start of 2022 and the end of 2024, giving $69bn (£54.6bn) in that time period, according to German think tank the Kiel Institute.
Trump has also pressed Nato allies to pledge more of their GDP to the security alliance. Last year, all European Nato members pledged to spend 2% of GDP on defence.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The US has been urging the two countries to reach an agreement to end the war.
Rubio told reporters that he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a "frank" conversation on the sidelines of a meeting in Malaysia on Thursday.
Rubio echoed Trump's "frustration at the lack of progress at peace talks", including "disappointment that there has not been more flexibility on the Russian side to bring about an end to this conflict".
He said the two had shared some new ideas about how the conflict could conclude, which he would take back to Trump.
Rubio declined to elaborate on what Trump said would be a "major" announcement about Russia on Monday.
Israel believes that Iran could potentially retrieve enriched uranium buried beneath one of the three facilities struck by US forces last month, according to a senior Israeli official.
Speaking to US reporters, the official said that reaching the enriched uranium at Isfahan would be extremely difficult and any attempt would prompt renewed Israeli strikes.
Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that US air and missile strikes on Iran in June "obliterated" the country's nuclear facilities, even as some US intelligence agencies have taken a more cautious view.
Iran denies seeking to develop nuclear weapons and says its enrichment of uranium is for peaceful purposes.
In a briefing for reporters in Washington, the senior Israeli official - who declined to be named - said that intelligence indicates that much of Iran's enriched uranium is buried at Isfahan, which was struck by submarine-launched cruise missiles during "Operation Midnight Hammer" on 22 June.
The official, however, did not express concern about the assessment, noting that any Iranian attempt to recover the material would probably be detected.
According to the official, Israel's assessment is that Iran's nuclear programme was set back two years.
Trump and members of his administration have been adamant that the Iranian nuclear facilities were completely destroyed.
"As President Trump has said many times, Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement sent to US media outlets. "The entire world is safer thanks to his decisive leadership."
The BBC has contacted the White House for further comment.
US intelligence assessments have been more cautious, with a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report concluding that while all three sites - at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan - were heavily damaged, they were not completely destroyed.
In late June, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told US lawmakers that the destruction of Iran's only facility for producing metallic uranium effectively took away Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Rafael Grossi told CBS, the BBC's US partner, that while the three targeted Iranian sites were "destroyed to an important degree", parts are "still standing".
"Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared, and there is nothing there," Mr Grossi said.
In an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson published earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Pezeshkian said that the facilities were "severely damaged".
"Therefore we don't have any access to them," he said, adding that a full assessment is impossible for now.
After 40 years of armed struggle against the Turkish state, the outlawed Kurdish PKK will hold a ceremony on Friday to mark a symbolic first step in laying down its arms.
The disarmament process will start under tight security in Iraqi Kurdistan and is expected to take all summer.
Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has hailed the move as "totally ripping off and throwing away the bloody shackles that were put on our country's legs".
Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, and the PKK is listed as a terror group in Turkey, the US, EU and UK. Its disarmament will be felt not just in Turkey but in Iraq, Syria and Iran.
A small group of PKK members will symbolically lay down their weapons in a ceremony near Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, before going back to their bases.
For security reasons, the exact location is not being revealed, although it's thought members of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition Dem party will be there, even if other major Turkish political parties will not.
Disarmament will then continue over the coming months at points set up with the involvement of the Turkish, Iraqi and Kurdistan regional governments, BBC Turkish has been told.
In a video, the PKK's long-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said it was "a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law". He has been in solitary confinement on the small prison island of Imrali, south-west of Istanbul, since he was captured in 1999.
This is not the first attempt at peace involving Turkey and the PKK, but this is the best hope so far that the armed struggle that began in 1984 will come to an end.
Originally a Marxist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party took up arms calling for an independent state inside Turkey.
In the 1990s, they called instead for greater autonomy for Kurds, who make up about 20% of the population.
Ocalan announced a ceasefire in 2013, and urged PKK forces to withdraw from Turkey. The 2015 Dolmabahce Agreement was supposed to bring democratic and language rights for Kurds, but the fragile truce collapsed amid devastating violence, especially in the Kurdish-dominated cities of the south-east, including Diyarbakir.
Turkey's air force targeted PKK bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. Several military campaigns have also targeted Kurdish-led forces in Syria.
The government in Ankara ruled out further talks until the PKK laid down its arms. That is now on the verge of happening.
In October 2024, a prominent nationalist leader and key Erdogan ally called Devlet Bahceli began a process described by the government as "terror-free Turkey". He urged the PKK's imprisoned leader to call for the dissolution of the outlawed group. It could pave the way for his possible release from Imrali island, he suggested.
The Turkish government launched talks with Ocalan via the pro-Kurdish Dem party, and then in February came his historic appeal for the PKK to disband, read out by two Dem MPs who had just returned from a visit to the prison island.
"All groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself," read Ocalan's letter.
The PKK had been formed primarily because "the channels of democratic politics were closed", he said, but Devlet Bahceli and Erdogan's own positive signals had created the right environment.
The PKK followed Ocalan's lead and declared a ceasefire and later declared that it had "completed its historical mission": the Kurdish issue could now "be resolved through democratic politics".
President Erdogan said it was an "opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror" and met pro-Kurdish politicians in April.
As founder of the PKK, Ocalan continues to be reviled by many Turks, even after 26 years in solitary confinement.
And yet he still plays an important role in the eyes of Kurds.
"I think he really has this authority; he is a main symbol for many Kurds, not all," says Joost Jongerden, a specialist on the 41-year conflict at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Two days before the PKK were due to begin disarmament, Ocalan appeared on video for the first time since he was put on trial more than 20 years ago.
Speaking for seven minutes, he addressed the outlawed group: "I believe in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons. And I call on you to put this principle into practice."
Ocalan was wearing a branded Lacoste polo shirt, and in an indication of his enduring relevance, the shirt quickly went viral and websites ran out of stock.
After Friday's ceremony, the scene switches to Turkey's parliament in Ankara where a commission will be set up to make decisions on the next steps for the government.
As the summer recess is around the corner, no concrete decisions are expected for several months, when MPs vote on the commission's recommendations and President Erdogan has the final say.
What happens to Abdullah Ocalan is not yet clear. The government says his conditions in jail could be reviewed as the process unfolds, but any chance of release will be left to the latter stages.
Erdogan's AK Party has begun work on changing the constitution, and there has been speculation that this would mean Erdogan would be able to run for the presidency again when his final term runs out in 2028.
The AKP and pro-Kurdish Dem party deny there is any link between the peace process and reshaping the constitution, but if Erdogan secures Dem support he would have a far greater chance of pushing through changes.
Erdogan is behind in the polls, but his main opposition rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, is in jail accused of corruption, which he denies, and more opposition mayors have been arrested as part of a crackdown in the past week.
© Pool photo by Mike Deal
(德国之声中文网)“我们将不得不寻找其他合作伙伴来购买我们的产品。巴美贸易占巴西国内生产总值(GDP)的1.7%,并不是说没有美国我们就活不了。”巴西总统卢拉7月10日晚间在接受巴西媒体纪录电视台(Record)采访时这样说道。卢拉还表示,巴西将努力在8月1日关税生效前完成与美国的所有谈判。但如果谈判没有进展,巴西政府将根据国会今年批准的新贸易互惠法采取报复行动。”如果他对我们征收50%的关税,我们也对他们征收50%的关税”,卢拉说。
卢拉在采访中还重申了上周末在里约热内卢金砖国家峰会上发表的言论,称“我们有意在其他国家之间建立一种贸易货币。我没有义务购买美元来与委内瑞拉、玻利维亚、智利、瑞典、欧盟或中国进行贸易。我们可以用我们自己的货币进行贸易。”
在接受Globo电视台采访时,这位左翼领导人也强调,像巴西这样的国家没有义务继续使用美元进行贸易。他还针对美国总统特朗普语气强硬地表示,特朗普必须尊重巴西的主权,不能把其他国家当成自己的国家。
美国对巴西课征50%关税的“特别理由”
特朗普7月9日公布第二波关税通知信,宣布对8个国家的新关税税率,其中对巴西的关税最高,为50%。新的关税将从8月1日起生效。特朗普在致卢拉的信中还特别提到巴西的国内政治,称巴西不该让前总统博索纳罗(Jair Bolsonaro)受审,“这是猎巫,应该立刻停止!”特朗普此举被视为直接利用进口税干涉别国内政。博索纳罗是特朗普的盟友,目前正面临审判,罪名是在2022年大选失败后试图发动政变,但他坚称自己是受到巴西最高法院的政治迫害。
这封信里还提到巴西最近针对社交媒体公司的裁决,并将此作为从8月1日起对来自巴西的商品征收更高关税的理由之一。
据美联社报道,卢拉本周四已命令外交官,如果特朗普的上述信函真的抵达巴西利亚总统府,就必须将其退回。
美国对巴西存在贸易顺差
美国是巴西第二大贸易伙伴,仅次于中国。彭博经济研究估计,50%的关税可能对巴西经济造成1%的冲击。这些关税可能导致美国从巴西的商品进口总额减少60%,尽管巴西可能会将部分出口转移到其他市场。
特朗普此次针对各国的关税措施的法律依据为1977年《国际紧急经济权力法》(IEEPA)。他在4月份表示,美国持续存在的进出口逆差是一场国家危机。不过,美国对巴西的贸易存在顺差,削弱了对巴西加征关税的部分理由。 美国贸易代表办公室数据显示,2024年美国对巴西商品出口达497亿美元,进口为423亿美元。卢拉在接受采访时表示,过去15年,美国对巴西的货物和服务贸易顺差总额约为4100亿美元。
如何谈判?
本周四(7月10日),巴西政府的部长们在公开讲话中辩称,美国对巴西加征关税背后没有任何经济理由,只有政治动机,鉴于卢拉无权介入博索纳罗在最高法院的案件,谈判余地不大。
卢拉政府的一些成员还认为,特朗普此举实际上是针对巴西加强与其他南方经济体的联系,正如周日在里约热内卢举行的金砖国家峰会上所展现的那样。此外,卢拉再次提到希望在贸易中使用一种替代美元的货币,这个话题也是特朗普不满的原因。博索纳罗的一些盟友声称,卢拉的其他决定,包括批评以色列在加沙的战争,激怒了这位美国总统。
巴西的新团结
美联社指出,特朗普对巴西事务的干涉为这个政治分裂的国家带来了此前缺失的团结感。
经常批评卢拉及其政府的《圣保罗日报》周四在一篇社论中表示,特朗普针对巴西政府的举动是“黑手党式的”,卢拉的反应是正确的。这对该报来说是一个罕见的专题报道。
分析人士还认为,特朗普试图干涉巴西内政,这可能会对正在受审的博索纳罗造成不利影响,并有利于卢拉。卢拉将在2026年参加竞选连任。6月的民调显示,三分之二巴西人不支持卢拉竞选连任。
路易斯安那州立大学历史与国际研究教授、昆西负责任治国研究所成员安德烈·帕格利亚里尼(Andre Pagliarini)“很多人的反应是,这是给卢拉的一份政治礼物。”
今年4月,誓言不会向美国屈服的马克·卡尼当选加拿大总理。特朗普的关税政策以及威胁要让加拿大成为美国第51州的举措,让卡尼领导的自由党重新焕发活力。
独立政治顾问、前巴西部长托马斯·特劳曼(Thomas Traumann)称,特朗普此举将改变巴西明年大选的“格局”。“特朗普让卢拉重回舞台,”特劳曼说道。“这给了卢拉一个说法,让博索纳罗成为任何经济问题的罪魁祸首。”
媒体报道,巴西议员和法官担心,如果这位前总统被定罪,他会试图离开巴西前往美国。博索纳罗的儿子、巴西议员爱德华多·博索纳罗今年3月移居美国。周三晚,他呼吁他的支持者在X上发布“对特朗普总统的感谢”。
在本周四的采访中,卢拉表示,博索纳罗的儿子去美国是去游说特朗普,然后特朗普就写了一封信,谈论最高法院正在审理的案件。“这不是一场政治审判。正在调查的是案件的证据”,卢拉说。
美国国际贸易法院于5月裁定,特朗普在未经国会批准的情况下通过宣布紧急状态来征收关税,超越了其权限。特朗普政府正在对该裁决提出上诉,但反对者计划利用他写给巴西的信函来支持他们的主张。
俄勒冈州民主党参议员罗恩·怀登(Ron Wyden)表示,“特朗普这是公然非法地牺牲经济来解决个人恩怨,这远远超出了他的法律权限。”
(美联社、彭博社)
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© Shwan Mohammed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
This is the last of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 55-74, from the foundation of Troy to the age of Augustus.
The foundation of Troy by Laomedon who failed to repay Apollo and Neptune for their help, so Neptune floods the city. Peleus marries the Nereid Thetis, with their wedding banquet on Mount Pelion, attended by the gods. Eris, goddess of discord, throws a golden apple into the group as a reward for the fairest, setting up the Judgement of Paris and leading to the war against Troy. Thetis gives birth to Achilles.
55 The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis
Chione boasts she is fairer than Diana, so the goddess shoots an arrow through her tongue, and she bleeds to death. Her father is turned into a hawk. Ceyx and Halcyone are turned into kingfishers. Aesacus is turned into a seabird after the death of Hesperia from a snake bite.
56 The hawk, kingfishers and a diver
After his judgement, Paris abducts Helen and triggers the war against Troy. The thousand ships of the Greeks gather at Aulis, where they’re delayed by storms. Their leader Agamemnon had offended Diana, so has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the goddess. At the last moment, Diana may have substituted a deer.
The Greek fleet sets sail against Troy, and when it arrives Protesilaus, the first to land, is killed by Hector. Achilles kills Cycnus, who is transformed into a swan. Caeneus was born a woman and raped by Neptune, for which she was turned into a male warrior. Nestor tells of the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodame.
58 A wedding ruined by centaurs
Neptune’s hatred for Achilles leads to the warrior’s death from an arrow shot by Paris.
Ajax and Ulysses contest for the armour of Achilles, but Ajax loses and falls on his sword. His blood is turned into the purple hyacinth flower. Troy falls, Priam is killed, Hector’s son Astyanax is thrown from a tower, and Troy is sacked by the Greeks.
Queen Hecuba’s youngest son is murdered, and her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed to gain fair winds for the departing Greek fleet. Hecuba blinds Polymestor and is transformed into a dog. Aurora laments the death of her son Memnon.
Aeneas flees Troy with his father Anchises and son Ascanius, but his wife Creusa dies before she can escape. They sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to Delos, then on to Crete.
Aeneas sails on to land on Sicily. Galatea tells the story of her love for Acis, and the jealousy of Polyphemus the Cyclops, who killed Acis, whose blood was turned into a stream.
Glaucus pursues Scylla, and is refused, so he visits Circe, who turns the lower part of Scylla’s body into a pack of dogs, then finally into a rock in the Straits of Messina. Together with Charybdis the whirlpool, they pose a threat to Odysseus’ ship.
Aeneas is rowed through the straits only to be blown south to Carthage, where he has an affair with Queen Dido. When he departs she falls on a sword he gave her and dies on her funeral pyre. Aeneas returns north to land at Cumae to visit its Sibyl. The pair visit the underworld, where they meet the ghost of Anchises.
A survivor left from Ulysses’ crew tells of their encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, who had held them captive. Ulysses got him drunk and blinded his single eye. The crew escaped tied under a flock of sheep. As they fled in their ship, the Cyclops threw a huge rock at them.
A second of Ulysses’ crew tells of their time on Circe’s island. She turned them into pigs, but they were transformed back after Ulysses and Circe married.
Circe transforms Picus, King of Latium, into a woodpecker. Aeneas arrives at Latium, where he has to fight Turnus for the throne. Aeneas’ ships are burned and transformed into sea nymphs. As the end of Aeneas’ life draws near, he undergoes apotheosis to become Indiges.
Pomona, a dedicated gardener who shuns men, is courted unsuccessfully by Vertumnus, god of the seasons. He assumes the guise of an old woman to try to persuade her, and tells her the tragic story of Iphis and Anaxarete, who was transformed into a statue. Vertumnus finally succeeds.
Rome is founded by Romulus. Its war with the Sabines, the death of the Sabine King Tatius, and Romulus becomes ruler of both peoples. Romulus is transformed into the god Quirinus, with his wife Hersilia as the goddess Hora.
70 Romulus and the founding of Rome
Myscelus is saved from death and goes on to found Crotona, where Pythagoras lived in exile. Pythagoras expounds change and transformation underlying everything in nature, and the central theme of Metamorphoses. The virtues of vegetarianism. King Numa returns to Rome and establishes its laws.
Plague strikes Rome. The oracle at Delphi tells the Romans to bring the god Aesculapius to the city. He is taken as a snake from Epidaurus to his temple on Tiber Island, and the Romans are saved from plague.
The assassination of Julius Caesar, who then undergoes apotheosis.
Jupiter foretells the accomplishments of Augustus, including success in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, and growth of the empire. The fate of Ovid in banishment to Tomis on the Black Sea.
© Eric Lee for The New York Times
© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
(德国之声中文网)《新苏黎世报》发表长篇文章写道,周日,西藏宗教领袖达赖喇嘛的九十岁生日庆典活动在印度达兰萨拉举行,印度少数族裔事务部长里吉朱(Kiren Rijiju)也同数千名僧侣、尼姑和信众参加了庆典仪式。《新苏黎世报》写道,达赖喇嘛以及流亡藏人在印度的存在,是导致中印关系紧张的重要因素之一。这篇题为《达赖喇嘛仍是敏感话题》的报道写道:
“1959年,时任印度总理的尼赫鲁(Jawaharlal Nehru)为当时年仅23岁的这位西藏精神领袖提供了政治庇护。尼赫鲁明确表示,做出这一决定,是基于印度人民对达赖喇嘛作为宗教领袖的尊重。尼赫鲁提供庇护的前提条件是:达赖喇嘛及其追随者在印度流亡期间不得从事任何针对北京的政治动员。1988年,尼赫鲁的继任者拉吉夫·甘地(Rajiv Gandhi )更是正式承认了西藏是中国的一部分。
尽管如此,达赖喇嘛在印度的存在,长期以来一直令中印关系呈现紧张。过去几十年来,印度接收了大约15万名藏人,他们定居于达兰萨拉及印度其他地区。如今,许多藏人已移民海外,使印度流亡藏人的人数已经减少至大约6.6万人。尽管在对藏人提供支持的问题上,印度从未有过动摇,但德里方面近年来也会更多地顾及中国对西藏议题的敏感。
这一点也体现在围绕达赖喇嘛转世问题的讨论中。在90岁生日来临前夕,达赖喇嘛表示,他的继任者将由他创立的一个基金会指定。达赖喇嘛强调,除了该基金会,任何人都无权插手寻找其转世灵童的事务。此前他也曾表示,自己死后将会‘在自由世界’转世。这一立场同中国政府在选择达赖喇嘛继任者方面拥有最终决定权的主张形成鲜明对比。
在这场关于转世问题的讨论中,印度部长里吉朱最初公开支持达赖喇嘛的立场。里吉朱表示:‘只有达赖喇嘛及其宗教机构才有权决定这一事务。’对此,中国外交部立即警告印度不要干涉中国内政。印度政府也随即做出澄清,表示印度方面在信仰和宗教问题上并不持立场。”
《新苏黎世报》的报道指出,印度方面显然不想让中印紧张关系再度升级,毕竟双边的边界冲突刚刚出现缓解迹象,而且印度也不希望中方加大对巴基斯坦的支持力度。
“在达赖喇嘛转世问题上,印度尽力避免与中国发生争执。达赖喇嘛90岁寿辰之际,尽管印度总理莫迪发函祝贺,并称达赖喇嘛是‘爱、慈悲、耐心和道德修养的永恒象征”,但他并未就转世问题发表任何意见。尽管如此,莫迪的举动仍引起了中国的不满。 中国外交部一位发言人表示,第十四世达赖喇嘛‘打着宗教幌子图谋将西藏从中国分裂出去’,并称印度必须承认西藏问题对中国的高度敏感性,应避免进一步干涉中国内政。”
“无需为尊者达赖喇嘛的健康状况担心”
《科隆城市报》以《世界上最受爱戴的僧侣》为题写道,西藏宗教领袖达赖喇嘛的九十岁寿辰不仅收到了来自世界各地的祝福,也引发了有关其转世问题的激烈讨论。
“随着达赖喇嘛九十岁生日的到来,有关其转世问题的各类猜测也纷纷登场。不过,这类猜测大多缺乏根据,毕竟这是一个极其复杂的问题:根据一项预言,现任达赖喇嘛被认为是总共十七个转世中的第十四世。不过,早在2014年,现任达赖喇嘛就曾表示,并不一定非要有人成为他的转世。如果真有继任者,那么他的转世一定会出现在‘自由世界’里,而绝不会出现在中华人民共和国境内。长期以来,中国共产党一直将非暴力抵抗运动的象征性人物达赖喇嘛视为眼中钉肉中刺。有鉴于此,专家们普遍认为,一旦现任达赖喇嘛离世,中国就会立即推出他们自己选定的第15世达赖喇嘛。可以肯定的是,现任达赖喇嘛离世之际,一场混乱将在所难免。
面对这种可能出现的‘两位达赖喇嘛相互竞争”的局面,有人提出了一个违背传统的设想:本名拉莫顿珠(Lhamo Thondup)、法号丹增嘉措(Tenzin Gyatso)的现任达赖喇嘛应在有生之年亲自指定下一任达赖喇嘛。然而,这一设想很快就被西藏流亡政府首脑奔巴次仁(Penpa Tsering)明确否定。他表示,这种所谓的‘降生’模式(Emanation)并不符合传统,信众也不会接受这种做法。奔巴次仁说:‘以90岁的高龄来看,我认为尊者目前的身体状况非常好,我们完全无需为他担心。’
达赖喇嘛本人也表示,他希望自己还能活上很多年,以便继续为众生服务。他依旧每天在黎明前起床,先是念经和冥想,随后一边吃早餐一边了解世界大事。据其身边人透露,达赖喇嘛并不会刻意回避世界上的负面消息,而是会坚持以善的力量与之对抗。例如,他会就全球性的未来议题发声,谴责当今破坏环境的粗暴行为,并呼吁加强气候保护。
然而,毕竟年事已高,现在达赖喇嘛的出访频率已经大不如前,因此各大报章有关他的报道也越来越少。上世纪90年代,每逢达赖喇嘛出席各类宗教活动,都会吸引大量的民众,并会在德国等地的各大媒体引起巨大的轰动效应。 ”
摘编自其他媒体的内容,不代表德国之声的立场或观点。
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(德国之声中文网)位于爱尔兰旨在保护数据隐私的欧盟监管机构表示,已对TikTok将欧洲用户的个人数据传输到中国服务器的行为展开调查。本周五,北京方面否认要求企业“非法”收集和存储用户个人信息。
中国外交部发言人毛宁周五在例行记者会上回应称:“我可以告诉你的是,中国政府高度重视并依法保护数据隐私和安全。从来没有、也不会要求企业或个人以违法的形式采集或存储数据。”
她表示:“我们希望欧方切实尊重市场经济和公平竞争原则,为各国企业提供公平、公正和非歧视的营商环境。”
法新社报道指出,多年来,TikTok这家社交媒体巨头一直受到西方政府的关注,原因是担心中国可能利用个人数据进行间谍活动或舆论宣传。
然而,TikTok坚称,它从未收到过中国当局索要欧洲用户数据的任何请求。
今年5月,TikTok因将个人数据传输至中国,被欧盟数据保护委员会处以5.3亿欧元罚款。当时,TikTok先是告诉监管机构,它并未将欧洲用户的数据存储在中国,而只是由中国员工远程访问这些数据。可后来TikTok改口称,确实有部分数据被存储在中国的服务器上。
监管机构那时回应称将考虑采取进一步的监管行动,而目前对TikTok展开的新调查,便是以上考虑的结果。
欧盟监管机构指出,此次调查的目的是确定TikTok是否遵守了《通用数据保护条例》(GDPR)中相关的义务,包括这些传输是否合法。
TikTok在全球拥有15亿用户,是中国科技巨头字节跳动的子公司。
(综合报道)
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(德国之声中文网)包括乌总统泽连斯基在内的政治领导人出席会议。会议之际,基辅再次遭到严重的无人机和导弹袭击。泽连斯基在会议开幕时表示,这是“彻头彻尾的恐怖主义”。
意大利总理梅洛尼以及德国总理默茨以本国在二战废墟中重建为例,表示乌克兰也可以浴火重生。
梅洛尼在开幕式上表示:“我想,我们应该为今天取得的成果感到骄傲——各国、各国际组织、金融机构、地方政府、经济界以及公民社会。”
她补充说:“今天的会议上,我们共同作出总计超过100亿欧元的承诺。”
意大利举行的这次会议是自2022年2月俄罗斯入侵邻国乌克兰以来的第四次类似会议,主旨是动员国际社会对乌克兰的支持。
罗马会议上也宣布,包括意大利、德国、法国、西班牙在内的10个欧洲国家加入了新近发起的一项出口担保机制,旨在鼓励更多欧盟企业与乌克兰开展贸易。
与此同时,欧委会拨款23亿欧元(约合27亿美元),作为更广泛框架的一部分,用于援助乌克兰。欧委会主席冯德莱恩表示,这笔款项预计将调动多达100亿欧元对乌克兰的投资。
冯德莱恩还宣布,创建一项新的股权基金,用于乌克兰重建,由欧洲投资银行以及法国、德国、意大利和波兰支持,旨在在2026年以前筹集另外5亿欧元。
冯德莱恩表示:“我们确确实实地在参与乌克兰的未来。”
默茨向特朗普发出呼吁
德国总理默茨在会议开幕之际,向华盛顿以及特朗普发出热烈的呼吁:“和我们站在一起,和欧洲人站在一起。我们志同道合,都寻求一个稳定的世界政治秩序。”
与会的美国特使凯洛格(Keith Kellogg)以德语回应说:“我们在这里。”
泽连斯基周四晚些时候表示,获得了美国恢复运送武器的时间表。他同时称赞美国派代表出席乌克兰重建会议。
与此同时,美国总统特朗普向NBC电视台表示,他将于周一发表就俄罗斯的重要声明。特朗普在接受该电视台电话采访时表示:“我对俄罗斯感到失望,不过我们会看看未来数周会发生什么。”
(路透社、美联社、德新社)
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Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping is a monumental scholarly achievement — easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade. Joseph’s goal, in his own words, was to “shine as much light into the darkness of the past as possible” to understand the nature of authoritarian politics, and he succeeds beyond my wildest expectations.
This biography gives me a feel for Chinese politics that I honestly thought I’d never have. It does an incredible job of digging deep to shed light on some of the most consequential moments in CCP history, as well as conveying what it was like to live as a senior official under Mao and Deng. Reading it was a powerful experience at both an intellectual and human level.
We get memorable vignettes, like 15-year-old Xi Zhongxun attempting to assassinate a teacher, or General Peng Dehuai using his shoe to silence Xi Zhongxun’s snoring in their shared bunk.
In this interview, we discuss:
What we can learn about authoritarianism, the CCP, and China’s future from studying Xi’s father,
Torigian’s methodology for uncovering hidden Party history,
How the Party became an existential source of meaning, and how it weaponized suffering to paradoxically deepen political loyalty,
The arc of Xi Zhongxun’s life — from a young revolutionary to key advocate of reform — and his role during Tiananmen,
The interplay of family, love, and career under the all-encompassing shadow of the Party,
The role of “Surrogate fathers” and patronage in navigating political ascent,
How literature shaped China’s early revolutionaries, and even impacted the Party as we know it today.
Co-hosting today is Jon Sine, former ChinaTalk intern.
Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
Jordan Schneider: Joseph, how do you define the purpose of this book?
Joseph Torigian: There is inherent value in going to the past and telling stories about these people’s lives, especially because they suffered so much. Second, this book helps people understand authoritarian politics and how the party works, in a way that gives us special insight into Xi Jinping. Finally, the book allows you to draw your own conclusions in many ways.
One of the themes that emerges from the book is how much suffering people in the party experienced and how they brought different meanings to it. The party imposes one interpretation on the past, but what I wanted to do with my book is facilitate multiple different interpretations for people who want to read it closely.
Jordan Schneider: Generally, when people read biographies of major political figures, there’s a bias in authors to tie bows around the narrative and make some overwhelming moral judgment about whether their decisions were right or wrong, and whether this person was morally upright or lacking in how they behaved and their impact on the world.
Remarkably, this book stops before going there. This man, whose life was incredibly gray, complex, and shaded from many different dimensions, could have been interpreted through party narratives or through the lens of liberal outside reformers projecting their ideas onto him. As you were going through his life and trying to portray what you learned and discovered to your audience, how did you think about your role as the author?
Joseph Torigian: I wanted the evidence to lead me in the direction of what was most interesting about his life. I didn’t feel there was a missing part of the literature that needed to be explored. I just wanted to do justice to his life in a way that would allow people to make their own judgments. As you see in the book, people in his own life — and Xi Zhongxun himself — sometimes found it unclear which morality was most relevant to make a particular decision.
Narrative certainly plays a role in the book. I wanted to make people feel just how dramatic, exciting, and electric it was to be a member of this organization, especially in the times and places where Xi Zhongxun found himself. I wanted people to draw broader lessons about how the party worked.
But I also didn’t want to allow the need for it all to come together or for there to be a single argument to do violence to the evidence. As I said before, I wanted people to be able to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of his life. Certainly I needed to bring an interpretive lens and my own analysis because facts don’t speak for themselves. Even choosing which evidence to include in the book required some level of reflection and thought. In many ways, a lot of the conclusions are obvious, but I don’t spell them out because they’re obvious. Allowing people to think about the most striking parts of his life on their own is a better approach.
Jordan Schneider: Before we get too meta, I think it’s important to ground folks. Generally, when you read a political biography, it’s about the number one leader, maybe the number two. Xi Zhongxun, though he was not quite at that level, lived one of the most incredible lives I’ve ever engaged with in book format. Joseph, can you give us an introduction to the arc of this man’s life?
Joseph Torigian: He grew up in Shaanxi province, which was a fascinating place because his home village was near Xi’an, where the first unified state was forged by Qin Shi Huang, and dynasties had ruled from there for millennia. But by the time he was born, two years after the Qing collapsed, it had fallen into banditry, war, famine, and poverty. It was a place of extremes.
He’s trying to figure out a way to address these wrenching problems facing society — feudalism, imperialist encroachment. He’s attracted to the party, but he doesn’t really understand it well. In fact, he’s able to read this revolutionary literature because the Nationalists and the Communists are still getting along. But of course, that all changed in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek betrayed the Communists and massacred them.
It’s in this milieu of violence that Xi Zhongxun is told to kill an academic administrator. He fails, instead getting a bunch of other teachers sick. He goes to prison and joins the party while incarcerated.
Jordan Schneider: At nineteen?
Joseph Torigian: Fifteen. He was fifteen years old. He became a founding member — although not one of the most important ones — of the base area in the northwest, which is where the Long March concludes. If it weren’t for that base area there, Mao Zedong and the other members of the Central Leadership would have needed to move even farther away from the interior Chinese areas.
He works in these fascinating places on the border of the base area, where he has to think about the United Front and manage relations with the Nationalists. They’re not at war with the Nationalists, but they’re not at peace either. It’s a very complicated liminal world he finds himself in.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was head of the Northwest Bureau, which is a giant expanse of Chinese territory that includes not just Han areas, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hui. He was brought to the capital and worked as Minister of Propaganda. There, he was a witness to several power struggles — the target of the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China is a man named Gao Gang, who was also a Northwesterner quite close to Xi Zhongxun.
Xi Zhongxun worked for Zhou Enlai, the famous premier who ran the government at the State Council. Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 because of a novel. He spent 16 years in the political wilderness facing incarceration, humiliation, and exile.
When he went back to work, it was in Guangdong province, where the failures of the revolution are perhaps most obvious. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing from the Communist mainland to capitalist Hong Kong. He sees with his own eyes just how developed things are right across the river.
Then he went back to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, managing its daily affairs. He’s the right-hand man to Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, the general secretary of the party. He has a fascinating set of tasks — he spends about 70% of his time on the United Front, returning to ethnic politics. But he also looks at Beijing’s relations with foreign leftist, revolutionary, and communist parties.
He witnessed this difficult relationship between Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping, which mirrored Zhou Enlai’s relationship with Mao Zedong. It all comes together in June 1989 when Xi Zhongxun faces the question of how he’s going to react to these student protests. Ultimately, he goes along with the crackdown, even though it seems he had very intense doubts and skepticism about using violence to resolve the crisis.
He spent much of his later years in the south, only rarely returning to Beijing. It’s quite a dramatic life — marked in particular by persecution by his own party. On many occasions, the party hurt people close to him or forced him to betray people close to him. One of the central themes that emerges is how he balances his own thoughts, emotions, and feelings with a party to which he is totally loyal, but which often does things that are deeply, deeply distressing to him.
Jordan Schneider: This book was especially engaging because you were able to find sources that really brought you into all these moments in his life. They also gave you a sense of his interior monologue and psychology at all these moments of incredible stakes, trial, and national as well as personal drama.
You take us on this arc from this 15-year-old who tries to kill his teacher all the way through to Tiananmen Square, including the family life and the experience of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening. But it’s all through this man who is incredibly faithful but also scarred in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend as a coddled person who grew up in America over the past 30 years. This book is a tremendous accomplishment.
Jon Sine: You open the book saying that Xi Zhongxun can fill one of three roles at least — his legend in the party, the role of the father to Xi Jinping, and the role that you take him as, which is a lens to party history. Could you explain how this book evolved, and why you chose to focus on Xi Zhongxun? I’m sure you’ve experienced the immediate reaction from many readers is, “How does this explain Xi Jinping?” when the thrust of the book is how Xi Zhongxun illuminates party history through the 20th century. We’d love to hear more about that.
Joseph Torigian: The book was kind of an accident, actually. I was asked to participate in an edited issue of an academic journal and was asked to write about Xi Jinping. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then I decided that the best way would be through a historical lens. I envisioned an article that was half about Xi Zhongxun and half about Xi Jinping as a young person.
I had just finished a book on elite party history, and that had been a training session on how to do it, find sources, and interpret them. As I started working on it, I realized there were many more sources than I had envisioned, even though I had just finished this other project. But also that Xi Zhongxun was an interesting person, not just because he was the father of Xi Jinping, but precisely as you said — he is someone whose life illuminates in powerful ways party history and party culture. His life is really a microcosm of the party in the 20th century.
With the book, it’s certainly the case that people are reading it because of Xi Jinping, and I’m glad people are reading it. I’m not going to be nitpicky about what reason they pick up the book. But ultimately, it says two things about Xi Jinping.
One is that it says a lot about the party and how the party works, and how every leader has tried to manage dilemmas that have been with it from the beginning. These are dilemmas that can be managed, not problems that can be solved. Xi Jinping is bringing his own approach, and we can understand how he’s bringing that approach because party history gives us the context. That’s the clearest line between the book and Xi Jinping.
But of course, there’s another line which is psychological. Here, we need to be careful because even Xi Jinping’s siblings drew very different lessons from the meaning of their father’s life. Xi Jinping, like his father, is a product of multiple influences. He’s someone who changes his mind, someone who reacts often to the peculiarities of his situation as opposed to some dogmatic worldview that always makes him do the same thing.
I hope my book is one tool in a box of tools that will be useful as we think about contemporary China. I didn’t write the book so that people will know what he’s going to do during the tariff war, although these Taiwanese talk show hosts quite loudly thought that my book might be relevant in that regard. That might be true to some extent. But the real value of the book is to take a step back and just get a general sense of the party and the milieu from which Xi Jinping emerged.
Jordan Schneider: There’s a very striking quote you have at the end of your book from Xi Jinping, where he wrote a letter to his father on his 88th birthday. I guess he couldn’t visit because everyone in the party is too busy to be at their kids’ births and parents’ birthdays —
Joseph Torigian: The party’s interest comes first, Jordan.
Jordan Schneider: Exactly. But the line that stuck out to me was him saying, despite the Cultural Revolution, “I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero and that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud of.”
The central question in Xi Zhongxun’s life, as well as Xi Jinping’s life, is, “Why are you sticking with these guys?” The party was treating them terribly while they were giving their lives to this organization. On several occasions, the lesson seemed to be that the party does not care about you and will chew you up and spit you out in ways that are illogical and detrimental both for yourself and for the country.
But you write this line explaining it:
That’s the central psychological question we explore over these 500 pages — how does this man relate to this organization, to which he has devoted his life, but is riddled with problems? What did the party mean to Xi Zhongxun?
Joseph Torigian: The party was the source of meaning in his life. It was the source of purpose. It was salvation. It was a place where a young boy growing up in a society wrecked by turmoil found an answer to solving that chaos. This was someone who didn’t really understand the intricacies of Das Kapital, but believed that only an organization as powerful as the Chinese Communist Party could respond to the challenges China was facing. It was the only way of organizing society that would allow China to return to its rightful place in the world and defeat the imperialists, the warlords, and all these other people who had brought China to the brink of collapse.
Sometimes when you join an organization like this, you don’t always fully understand what it’s going to be, but once you’re in it, it also changes you. You understand the principle of the organization, but then the organization has all these methods for changing your very soul. That’s not the language I’m using — it’s the language the Communists used. You have self-criticism, you have study sessions.
If you believe you are participating in a grand adventure, where you are a leading figure in a world historical force that is inevitable, that is a really exciting place to be. Also, think for a moment that you keep seeing the party failing over and over again, and then suddenly one particular person emerges in the form of Mao Zedong, who seems to finally have a way of getting it right. He takes this ragtag group of revolutionaries who had nearly been destroyed on many occasions and forges a new nation.
For Xi Zhongxun to reject someone like that would be rejecting his own self. When the party persecuted him, it didn’t turn him away from the party. It motivated him to ask, “How do I win back the party’s trust? How do I show that I’m better than other people? How do I show that, actually, precisely because I am going through this torment and still return to it, I am even more dedicated than other people who didn’t have to suffer?”
You see other people grumbling about the party, and Xi Zhongxun would say, “Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t go through this.” It was almost like a badge of honor that he could weaponize — this politics of suffering, of who went through the worst experiences, and that gives you political capital within the party. It’s an interesting way to think about life, but it does raise the question — what kind of suffering leads to dedication and what leads to alienation? This is really a fundamental question or puzzle.
Xi Zhongxun admitted that during the Cultural Revolution, he went through a period of doubt. But Xi Zhongxun says precisely because he wasn’t sure for a little while and nevertheless returned to the cause of the party, therefore his dedication is totally unshakable and even more powerful than someone who didn’t go through that experience.
That also raises a question for young people in China today: If you want them to eat bitterness, how do you do that without turning them away from the cause entirely? That’s a philosophical question in some ways, and it’s one that Xi Jinping thinks about all the time—something that keeps him up at night, I’m sure. It’s also at the very heart of the question of the future of the People’s Republic of China: whether or not they get that right.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, there was this very evocative moment with Xi Zhongxun towards the end of his life. In the 80s, during this spiritual pollution campaign, all these old revolutionaries were excited for the future but also worried that the youth were going soft and didn’t understand. One of his answers was that they just needed the old comrades to go into the high schools and tell their stories — like the astronaut showing up in middle school and telling you how cool space is.
Joseph Torigian: Yeah. He talks about them as flowers in a hothouse garden, right? They need to go out into the real world so they can survive in the real world. Interestingly enough, he thinks that young people who went through the Cultural Revolution might be a good group of successors because they underwent these terrible experiences.
Of course, the Cultural Revolution was largely about succession issues at the very top and at the very bottom — getting rid of Liu Shaoqi, the revisionist who proved to be unsuitable to the task, but also toughening young people who had been growing up in the privilege of youth in a socialist nation. Many of those youth actually did go through a period of disillusionment. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to study overseas, they wanted to make money.
Xi Zhongxun consciously contrasted himself with those other youth, and he saw a lot of danger in this spiritual crisis that many young people in China found themselves in during the 1980s. Of course, this was one of the roots of what happened in 1989.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, I mean, it is a religious attachment. There’s no other word to describe what someone like Xi Zhongxun or Xi Jinping has to the party. You have these little trials of faith, right?
The decision to go left or go right from Xi Zhongxun, as compared to all the other princelings who are having fun in Hong Kong and driving cars or whatnot. A wide swath of humanity would get disillusioned from the fact that you have all these people you idolize turn on you and say you’re a capitalist roader and making leftist deviations and being anti-party and whatnot.
The emotional effort to harmonize whatever you’ve seen and experienced and look back at that time in the wilderness from 1962 to 1978 — not as these people stealing 20 years of my life, but actually as a forging event that is making me a better party cadre, more well-honed to serve the people — requires some kind of deep spiritual belief. Even something as catastrophic as watching this party starve tens of millions of people or turn the country upside down in a Cultural Revolution is not able to shake it.
Joseph Torigian: We should remember though that even though he had this idealism, this conviction, these were not easy experiences to live through and he suffered. It was difficult for him to understand why this was happening to him. Part of it was this sense that the party was still the best future for China. But part of it was utilitarian, right? The sense that if we are going to move forward, we can’t think about the past too much.
There’s both an idealistic sense, but also this idea that if we are too reflective, if we’re too critical of the party, if we go too far, then we’re going to shake the whole house of cards and it’s going to come down with us. That was a central puzzle for the 1980s: how do we justify moving in any direction but still maintain this sense of faith even as we can’t even say what communism really is because we’re groping as we try to figure out a new direction?
That was the reason why there were so many zigs and zags in the 1980s. That was the shoal that Hu Yaobang crashed on. You could understand in theory how you could integrate reform with conservative principles because you needed to have stability to reform and you needed to have reform to have stability. But as Hu Yaobang said in his self-criticism, even though in theory that makes sense, practically it’s not easy and you need a lot of political skill. His inability to do that was one of the reasons that Deng Xiaoping scapegoated him.
Of course, Xi Zhongxun is this very close associate of Hu Yaobang and felt very strongly about that, even though he put the party’s interests first and went along even with Deng’s persecution of this very close associate of his.
Jon Sine: You cite Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government several times, primarily for its generational analysis and its examination of how faith erodes over time. But Slezkine’s central thesis is that the old Bolsheviks functioned essentially as a millenarian sect. You don’t use much of that religious language in your book, but I’m curious whether you see similar parallels. As someone who studies both Soviet and Chinese history, what similarities and differences do you observe between the old Bolsheviks and these Chinese revolutionaries?
Joseph Torigian: Culturally, they’re very similar. Xi Zhongxun, on his very first trip overseas, goes to Russia and meets these sinologists. He talks about how he loves reading a Russian novel, What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky. Of course, it has this very famous character, Rakhmetov, a professional revolutionary who would sleep on a bed of nails to inculcate his revolutionary élan. Xi Zhongxun said he wanted to mimic this person and walk around in the wind, in the rain, in the snow, and sleep on a hot kang stone bed with his shirt off. In that sense, there are some very powerful similarities.
Just like during the terror in the Soviet Union, people were sent to their execution yelling “Long live Stalin!” During the Cultural Revolution, these old revolutionaries had no idea what Mao wanted, didn’t understand what Mao wanted, and were going through intense physical and emotional torment. For them, the problem wasn’t Mao — it was that they weren’t keeping up with Mao. It was that they didn’t understand Mao. They were looking into themselves for the problem. They weren’t looking at Mao for the problem. That’s how they thought about the world.
More broadly speaking, what’s interesting too is sometimes when I give this talk, a person will come up to me and say, “You know, I was raised in a faith tradition. I went to Catholic school. A lot of what you’re saying, it’s not that unfamiliar.” Seeing meaning in suffering, redemption in suffering — it’s a universal thing.
Now, whether you call it a religion or not, or how similar these phenomena are, that’s a big discussion. Certainly, the contexts are very different. Class struggle is a message of violence. The gospel is a message of love. The gospel is also a message of individual conscience, while the party’s message is that conscience is the party’s conscience.
I don’t want to essentialize similarities or differences, but at the very least, even though many of the themes we’re discussing today seem very foreign to us, I think with radical empathy, it’s not impossible to understand these lives, and we should try to understand these lives. We should never underestimate how hard it is. We should never think that it’s easy to appreciate how culturally dissimilar or unique these situations can be, but nevertheless we’re all part of the human condition.
Jordan Schneider: I also think that one level down, at a tactical level, you see a lot of parallels in the moves that the church uses and the moves that the party uses. This whole confession, self-criticism thing, which is a central part of these guys’ lives, is this introspection and these doctrinal fights of who has the right line. Are we doing this right? The importance of words is just a really remarkable thing — they’re arguing about phrases and spending days and days trying to get the idea right, which is something that’s really important for religion and not really important for a lot of other parts of life. But it was literally life and death for these folks a lot of times.
Joseph Torigian: That’s one of the other ironies of this book. One of the communities in China that Xi Zhongxun was tasked with managing in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s was Catholics. He sees Catholics as the biggest problem for the party, partly because they’re in communion with the Pope and Xi Zhongxun sees the Pope as a tool of imperialism. But they’re also hierarchical, they’re very motivated, they’re very idealistic. They also have these texts that need to be interpreted. It’s not surprising that they have a very interesting collision both in the 50s and the 1980s, which people can read about in the book.
Jordan Schneider: But the Catholics figured out succession in a way that maybe the party hasn’t. Jon…
Jon Sine: Let’s talk about the art and science of putting together a book like this, because I think a lot of people have a perception, maybe a misperception, that the regime today is hiding everything, that if you go to the government sources, sanctioned sources, you can’t really rely on them. But when you have the background that you do, there are things that you can pull from them and you can triangulate something — I think you call it “a mosaic.” There are about 2,000 endnotes in this book, and I know that you’ve probably had to cut quite a bit.
Joseph Torigian: A lot.
Jon Sine: Can you speak on the art and the science behind putting this together?
Joseph Torigian: Well, it wasn’t easy. We’ve talked a lot about ideals and conviction, and for Xi Jinping to achieve that, you need to have a single view of history. Xi Jinping was a surprise to a lot of people, but one of the first signs that he wasn’t going to be a reformer like people thought his father was came when he gave the speech about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said one of the reasons they collapsed is they lost control of their history, and nobody took it seriously anymore.
If you want people to think that the party is an inevitability, that it just goes from one triumph to another, the more you talk about its dark past, the more dangerous that is for party rule. He has this term “historical nihilism” that he uses to describe people who talk about the party’s mistakes too much. For someone with that view to write about their father is certainly something that is challenging.
I don’t want to say that my book is the final verdict on Xi Zhongxun’s life. It really is just the latest draft. Whether or not it’s a meaningful draft has to do with whether or not there are enough new sources since the last person took a look and whether or not you’re doing enough justice to the sources that are available.
The question becomes: what are those sources? I don’t really think in terms of good and bad evidence. I think in terms of getting as much evidence as possible and then parsing it and then using it in different ways as that piece of evidence demands. You can’t just go to one archive and collect the materials and then write it up. You really need to have a detective sensibility. You need to be sensitive to possibility and limitation. You need to have a capacity for tedium.
There’s this expression “eating sawdust,” that China watchershands have used, becausewhere you need to eat a lot to get any protein. I’d probably say 99.99999% of everything I read is totally useless. But when I do find something that is really useful, it’s very, very exciting.
I was able to get some primary sources, of course. For a variety of reasons, a lot of documents or internally circulated material have become available at US institutions, as you saw in the book. Some very interesting document collections were also published in Hong Kong, as well as memoirs and party history written by insiders who had access to a lot of evidence. I did a lot of interviews for the book. I used a lot of material published in the mainland. There were these party history journals that were really pushing the envelope for a very long time that included subjects that were very sensitive — the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward.
I use official sources as well. That might strike people as surprising, but they are absolutely essential. There are cases where they changed the literal words that people said, but they’re quite rare. More often the problems are what they don’t include. But what that means is that you can treat what they do include as a hypothesis for what happened, at the very least. Then you look for other sources to back it up. It sensitizes you to things you might want to look at. Or, you use this phrase ’mosaic theory’ — they reveal a piece of evidence, unaware that I can connect it with all these other pieces of material.
The other thing I did was to make a list of every time Xi Zhongxun met with a foreigner. Then I went to speak to that foreigner, or I went to their archives, which are open. That allowed me to tell a story not just about Beijing’s relations with global communism, which I think is a very meaningful part of the book, a very significant part of the book, but even to get his understanding of Tibet, right? I interviewed the Dalai Lama. I was able to get these Tibetan language transcripts of negotiations between Dharamsala and Xi Zhongxun in Beijing and have them translated into English so I could use them in the book.
If we are taking these issues, these questions, these subjects with the seriousness they deserve — and because in a way it is a matter of life and death, right? I mean, people are dying and we’re writing about why these people are dying — we should feel a sense of moral obligation to do everything we can to get these stories right. I certainly didn’t in this book, as I say in the acknowledgments. I’m sure that in some cases somebody else will come and tell me I got something wrong, but I’m very open to that. I hope people will tell me.
I’m hoping my book will lead to further questions and other avenues for research because the world files its information very miscellaneously, which means that people may figure out that there was something I didn’t look at because I didn’t think of it. If there weren’t so many people who knew what I was working on, who said, “Oh, by the way, I stumbled onto this.”You never know what tiny, tiny breakthrough then leads to huge breakthroughs. That happened so many times in my book that there was some complete stroke of luck where I was looking at something completely different, or I was going for a long walk and I said, “You know, maybe I should go back and reread this.” Then you reread it and then it has a new meaning that wasn’t there before.
For example, the Li Rui Diaries. Li Rui (李锐) was a secretary to Mao Zedong. He was working for the Organization Department in the eighties, knew Xi Zhongxun very well, was the senior pro-reform constitutionalist comrade in Beijing during the 2000s and 2010s. His diaries are available at the Hoover Archive. Now they’re extraordinarily hard to use because it’s a diary. There’s a lot in there that’s wrong because he would write down rumors, and he wrote a lot in shorthand, which I couldn’t understand at all the first time I read it. But when you read other stuff, you go back, even if it’s just a few characters, and suddenly it has this huge meaning that was totally invisible to you the first time that you looked at it.
Jordan Schneider: For instance?
Joseph Torigian: One example was a curious incident in the 1980s where there was a debate about how to think about princelings and how to promote princelings, especially the ones that had engaged in really brutal violence as the so-called old Red Guards in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Somebody wrote a letter and it was immediately approved by Chen Yun. It raised these questions about whether or not the whole thing had been planned ahead of time in the first place.
I saw the names had been mentioned in a conversation between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui, and I wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. But I read a memoir written by the person who knew about this letter and then suddenly, because I knew that background, this very brief discussion between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui that Li Rui didn’t include a lot of information about because it was his own diaries — suddenly I knew what Xi Zhongxun thought about this very interesting moment. That would be one example.
Jordan Schneider: That is just a tiny window into the amount of work that went into this book. Because you have that moment, but you actually have a 90-year life, and on every single page you can feel the amount of sawdust that you chewed through, Joseph.
Joseph Torigian: Each chapter has its own ecology of sources. I need to mention that I relied heavily on histories written by Chinese scholars — work published both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. For his family life, I inevitably needed to rely on commemorative essays written by the children about their father. You need to take these sources seriously, but one way to approach them is to understand the broader context.
What was it like to grow up in Beijing in the 1950s? What was it like to attend that particular school? Often, instead of researching Xi Jinping directly, I would take a different approach. If Xi Jinping went to August 1st School (北京市八一学校), I’d find every book I could about August 1st School. When Xi Zhongxun was exiled to a factory in Luoyang, I’d research the history of that factory. His name might not even appear in these sources, but you can at least understand what happened to him while he was there and what he would have experienced, even if we can’t say exactly what he did or thought about it.
Jordan Schneider: Those moments showcased your scholarship at its best. People will probably flip ahead to read the Tiananmen chapter first, but I appreciated how you condensed these experiences. In just a few paragraphs, you gave readers a sense of what these worlds were like — it’s some Robert Caro-level work. You’re not literally getting a job in a factory in Luoyang, but you’re doing the best you can with the available material.
Joseph Torigian: Robert Caro is my idol. His book on research methodology is perhaps the best guide to research ever written. The only other useful recommendation I have for aspiring researchers is watching old Gordon Liu kung fu movies like 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Fists of the White Lotus. Those training sequences offer a great way to think about learning research skills.
Caro writes about trying to understand LBJ but feeling like he couldn’t get close to his subject. He told his wife they were moving to the hill country in Texas. Only when he experienced how difficult life was there did he feel he understood who LBJ became — seeing the poverty and hardship firsthand. I often wonder how different my book would have been if I had lived in Shaanxi Province for two or three years. Those are the regrets you think about. You can only write the book that’s possible with the sources available to you, but it does make you wonder.
Jon Sine: This seems like a good jumping-off point to discuss the book’s chronology. My first question is about getting into the mindset of someone like Xi Zhongxun, who was born in 1913 in a place of unimaginable suffering, death, battle, and tragedy — at least from a modern developed-world perspective. You might be uniquely positioned to answer this, having spent time reading dark literature from the Soviet archives and authors like Solzhenitsyn.
You open the book with Xi Zhongxun attempting to murder a teacher at age 14, which serves as a device to help us understand that this wasn’t particularly strange for the time — people of all ages were dying and being killed. How do you advise readers to get into the mindset of this world when Xi Jinping was growing up?
Joseph Torigian: One regret I have about this book is that people sometimes focus on the most salacious moments, like the one you described. You need to put these events in context. I’m not saying that understanding him means we should forgive him, but we should understand the conditions that led to this behavior. This book is as much about the party system as it is about Xi Jinping.
People like to think of the party as inhabited by good guys and bad guys, but it’s much more complicated. They’re all part of a system, trying to figure out what they can do in limited situations. This needs to be understood when we consider who these people were.
When Xi Zhongxun was 15 years old and attempted to kill this academic administrator, it occurred in a milieu of violence. The Nationalists were killing many of his comrades. This was an act of desperation by a frightened young person — a huge failure that wouldn’t have improved the party’s position even if it had succeeded. Not only did the administrator survive, but Xi Zhongxun and many others were arrested.
This illustrates a pattern Xi Zhongxun faced throughout his life: you need zeal and fearlessness, but too much zeal can lead to actions that go too far and trigger backlash, often making situations much worse. However, if you’re not aggressive enough, others will accuse you of being a rightist — an opportunist too frightened to use violence and risk to advance the revolutionary agenda.
There’s a famous communist text called “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder that recognizes being too radical can get you killed. But they don’t debate these questions rationally because of the ideological charge, which makes management extremely difficult and can lead to purges, arrests, and executions.
Jordan Schneider: The life-or-death stakes and emotional charge of those early years are hard to comprehend.
Joseph Torigian: Those were the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days.
Jordan Schneider: Kids these days aren’t getting horses shot out from under them or taking bullets through the leg while running from Nationalists. But seriously —
Joseph Torigian: You can see how Xi Jinping in the 1980s looked at younger people born under socialism, after all that violence was gone. When they criticized the party, he wanted to tell them what it was really like. I can see how some students would be inspired by that, while others wouldn’t be. It depends on who listens and who is moved.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay with the 1920s and 1930s. There was this one guy accused of something serious who said, “I’m going to show you just how committed to the party I am.” He was reckless in battle, got shot, and died. That tension — if you’re redder than red, you might literally end up being killed.
Joseph Torigian: You’re referring to Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor, Liu Zhidan (刘志丹). What’s fascinating about him is that even though they faced persecution and their cases hadn’t been fully rehabilitated, he would tell Xi Zhongxun that the party would eventually get things right and he should talk to others about this. Then this same person, Liu Zhidan, because he still had a black mark in his file and wanted to show his loyalty, got himself killed.
Jordan Schneider: It’s not like the Catholic Church as we know it today — this is early Christianity. There are martyrs, everything is life and death, the world is against you. To believe and commit your life to it, you need a truly revolutionary vision of how society will change.
Joseph Torigian: When you see people around you getting killed for these reasons, once the regime is established, you can understand wanting to do everything possible to ensure the regime persists not just during your lifetime, but for decades or even centuries into the future. This is something Xi Zhongxun thought about constantly — he would ruminate on how to make sure the party survives not just him, but deep into the future. This makes the fact that his son is now the leader of the country particularly interesting.
Jon Sine: There are a lot of novels in the book. When Xi Zhongxun is young, he read a novel with the same title as your second chapter (which is among my favorites of the 30 chapters, by the way). The novel is called The Young Wanderer 少年漂泊者. Xi Zhongxun sees a lot of himself in the protagonist. But I’m also reminded of Stalin. According to Kotkin’s biography, Stalin was very motivated by a novel he read before he was a committed Marxist-Leninist, which has a similar, though less tragic, heroic figure named Koba. So much so that Stalin uses Koba as a nickname for himself.
I’m curious both if you could explain the Xi Zhongxun example, but also what you think of the fact that so many of these revolutionaries were inspired by something like a novel before they even really had a conception of what they were going to be sacrificing their lives for.
Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that his life as an early revolutionary was so deeply shaped by this book. In fact, he told Xi Jinping, his son, that he reread this novel after being released from jail to rekindle his love for the party. At the time of his release, he was desperate and couldn’t walk. He was covered in eczema and boils. His father had died, apparently because of the stress related to watching what his son had just gone through. Soon after, he lost his mother and two sisters. There was famine everywhere. He couldn’t link back up with the party because most of it had been destroyed. He couldn’t go back to school because he’s a wanted man. He read this book to get himself back in the mood, so to speak. He rededicated himself because of reading this novel. Then in 1962, he was thrown out of the leadership because of another novel. It’s an interesting bookend.
Then Xi Zhongxun, of course, returned to work in Beijing in the Secretariat. The very first thing that happens is people think that the country is going to fall into another Cultural Revolution because of a movie, a movie called Bitter Love (苦恋). It’s a movie that probably should speak to him in some ways. It’s a movie that is about someone who is deeply dedicated to the party and to the nation, but who the party persecutes. It includes this famous line — “You have always loved the motherland, but did the motherland love you?”
He doesn’t like stuff that criticizes the party, but he still sees the need to reflect on the Mao era, and he’s not quite sure how to criticize it without going too far. But repeatedly, we keep seeing that movies and novels have really fundamental impacts, not just on the party, but on Xi Zhongxun in particular. It speaks to this issue of communism being preoccupied with souls and for communist writers being “engineers of the soul.” And why in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun, who in many ways was a reformer, would still say things like, “We also need to have a spiritual civilization."
People held different views on how to solve the same problems that Xi Jinping was witnessing. Some believed the solution lay in enlightenment, cultural change, science, and democracy. Mao Zedong disagreed. He thought the right path involved violence, class struggle, and forceful transformation.
In the 1980s, there was a reflection on these two different paths and how the May 4th movement represented one approach while the Yan’an Rectification represented something quite different. The Yan’an Rectification, as I write about in my book, addressed a fascinating problem — all these young people had hero complexes. They were young, entitled, and spoiled, yet nevertheless wanted to save the nation. They went to Yan’an and recognized they needed to become good party soldiers, but transforming into a party soldier proved extremely difficult. It was a wrenching, traumatic experience. However, when they emerged from this process of struggle sessions and self-reflection, they felt like completely new human beings and often experienced euphoria.
Jon Sine: Your book uses Xi Zhongxun as a lens to examine the party. However, for the first twenty years of his life, the party center hadn’t yet consolidated in Shaanxi and Yan’an. This raises a question about the story you’re telling, which relies heavily on Joseph Esherick’s excellent book Accidental Holy Land. How representative do you think this experience in Shaanxi was during these first twenty years of establishing the base area?
Joseph Torigian: The Northwesterners took great pride in the fact that almost all other base areas had been destroyed except theirs. This raises an interesting question. I’ve discussed how Xi Zhongxun was incarcerated in 1935 by his fellow communists and was still in prison when Mao arrived. Mao didn’t release them immediately and wasn’t the primary person involved in investigating. Nevertheless, if that base area hadn’t existed, it would have created a huge problem. Mao didn’t even know it was there. The Party Center only learned about this base area’s existence through a newspaper in some dusty, isolated town, which led them to investigate and eventually arrive. This raises the intriguing question: who saved whom? Did the Party Center save the Northwesterners, or did the Northwesterners save the Party? That situation was unique.
Another factor was the severe infighting in all these base areas, but it was especially bad in Shaanxi for various reasons. No clear leader emerged from the region. One potential leader I’ve already mentioned, Liu Zhidan, was killed for reasons we’ve discussed. Even before him, there was another prominent leader, Xie Zichang 谢子长, who was also killed. They weren’t represented by a single figure who could command the loyalty and affection of the entire group.
When Mao was in Yan’an, he needed to identify a representative who could speak for the Northwesterners’ group and whose promotion would signal to the Northwesterners that they were taken seriously. He chose Gao Gang. Many people disliked Gao Gang — in fact, they hated him. This left behind the potential for struggles that would emerge in subsequent years and continue to affect Xi Zhongxun’s life for decades.
Jon Sine: I was recently in Ruijin in Jiangxi, which some may know as the starting point for the Long March and the capital of that base area. When you’re there, you see the whole place covered with Mao’s little wax statues showing him standing and giving speeches. However, from what I understand of the history, he was actually marginalized for most of the period there after the Central Committee moved down around 1931.
I had a friend who recently went to Yan’an to visit the museum and see what role Xi Zhongxun plays and how he’s memorialized there. His view was the same as mine when I visited — the portrayal seems right-sized, which is pretty small. How would you right-size Xi Zhongxun’s importance, especially during the period before Mao arrived?
Joseph Torigian: He was primarily involved in civilian governance, mostly working with the Soviet structure. While that sounds important, what was even more crucial during this period were the military leaders. In some cases, these military figures who were actually commanding soldiers looked down on the civilians, and Xi Zhongxun was considered as such.
When Liu Zhidan, the commander of these forces, would interact with Xi Zhongxun and show deference to him as someone working for civilian government structures, Xi Zhongxun was quite struck by that respect. After the Party Center arrived, Xi Zhongxun was sent to some real backwaters — dangerous ones — and only gradually, as the party continued to review the 1935 persecution, was Xi Zhongxun placed in increasingly important positions.
What’s striking is that by the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, Xi Zhongxun was the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee. He benefited from Gao Gang’s rise because they were now on the right side of history, according to the view of the past that Mao was imposing on the party. You’re right that I wouldn’t place him as one of the leading figures who helped establish the base area. This was also important for Xi Zhongxun because later, when he was seen as an informal leader of Northwesterners within the leadership, he wasn’t as dominant over the rest of them as figures from other factions were seen as clear standard bearers with much more prestige and status.
Jon Sine: What about the factions that seem to emerge at this time? You have the Long Marchers, whom Mao derisively said something about — that just because you walked a lot doesn’t mean you have special status. Obviously, many of them certainly thought they did. Could you speak about the tension between the Long Marchers arriving and the people in the Shaanxi base area?
Joseph Torigian: The Long Marchers were the central leadership — the Central Committee. Many were very well educated with extensive experience. Many had studied in Moscow. Then they showed up in the Northwest and thought the locals were bumpkins. Yang Shangkun even said, “You consider this a city? I can’t believe you think this is an urban area given how undeveloped it is."
The Northwesterners had built the base area, and then the Long Marchers arrived and basically took over. People like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun continued to face the shadow of the 1935 purge — they weren’t immediately rehabilitated. The Long Marchers looked down on them, while the Northwesterners felt they had built this base area and were upset about the lack of respect they received.
Mao Zedong adopted the Northwesterners in quite striking ways. He gave them so many positions at the 1945 Seventh Party Congress that Mao’s associates from the Jiangxi base area became very jealous and quite unhappy. The story Mao told was essentially this: when he was in Jiangxi, dogmatic people who had learned in the Soviet Union told him to do wrong things and pushed him out through domineering behavior. He said that’s basically what happened in 1935 when people like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun were persecuted — because they were doing good, real, sinicized revolution and were persecuted by people who had no idea what they were doing.
For Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun, this must have been thrilling. Here was Mao saying flattering things about the Northwesterners, claiming their historical experiences mirrored his, and promoting them rapidly at the expense of his old associates.
Then something interesting happened. In the early 1950s, Mao Zedong started complaining about Liu Shaoqi. He talked to Gao Gang, and Gao Gang harbored antagonism against party cadres who had spent most of their time in the “white areas” — meaning the cities doing underground work. He didn’t understand why they had all these cushy positions when it was the “red areas” — the base areas — that had done the bulk of work during the revolution. He also thought the Northwesterners needed more respect as reflected in official party history. He was motivated by how the party evaluated their contribution to the revolution.
Part of Gao’s machinations against Liu Shaoqi were based on Mao’s encouragement and certain things Mao was saying about Liu Shaoqi. But Gao also had this view of history that explains why he was acting dangerously. Xi Zhongxun was much more cautious. He said they wouldn’t be respected because they weren’t Long Marchers — they didn’t have that credibility, status, and prestige. Xi Zhongxun felt that people like Deng Xiaoping, who was a Long Marcher and knew Mao for a long time, were people he and Gao needed to be careful of. Ultimately, it was Deng Xiaoping who betrayed Gao Gang, went to Mao, and signaled Gao’s defeat.
Jordan Schneider: We have this elite drama as well as human drama. There’s love, there’s death. What’s his relationship to his parents and his first wife?
Joseph Torigian: Xi Zhongxun’s parents died when he was quite young — fifteen or sixteen years old — leaving him an orphan for a while. After he was released from prison, he had to take care of his entire family. Then he left them to join the revolution, which led to an unflattering comment from an uncle. On one occasion, he actually referred to the party as “mother” — I don’t have that in the book, but it’s an interesting word choice. By fifteen or sixteen, the party was essentially his only family, or at least the most important family he had. He went back to his home village once or twice, but the entire emotional center of gravity of his life was the party, not his immediate relatives.
His first wife, Hao Mingzhu 郝明珠, was a very interesting figure. She came from a revolutionary family and was very capable. She did extensive work trying to explain to women why the revolution was something they needed to take seriously and why they shouldn’t be frightened by it. She became pregnant several times, but she hadn’t joined the revolution to get pregnant — she joined to make revolution. That tension apparently led to the break between them.
Jon Sine: Can we pause on his first wife for a second? One of the things that stuck with me most from your book—almost haunting—was a one-sentence line about her first husband who was killed and beheaded. She had to retrieve his body, which was severed from the head, and bury him. She was eighteen at the time. People should sit with that for a second to imagine what kind of normal setting this was, where this woman had to endure that.
Joseph Torigian: She’s also interesting because she went on to have a pretty good career in a very male-dominated institution like the Chinese Communist Party. She became a powerful individual in Shaanxi in subsequent decades.
Jon Sine: Despite this very grown-up tragedy she suffered at eighteen, you offer a very strange description — which I presume is completely factual — of the way Xi Zhongxun courts her.
Joseph Torigian: The stories in the book are funny from our perspective. They’re frightening and sad at the same time.
Jon Sine: I don’t know if you want to give that story, because it has all these elements — they’re twenty, adolescents, but also patriarchal, yet also progressive in some weird way.
Joseph Torigian: As I mentioned, one interesting thing that emerges from the book is how often the party’s own ideals and mission would bump up against something else — exigencies and political needs. You would have matchmaking sometimes to pursue political goals, even as you’re telling women not to bind their feet. It was quite a striking contradiction.
Jordan Schneider: Tell the story.
Jon Sine: I have it off the top of my head. She’s in this group, they basically show up, and they all start pointing to Xi Zhongxun and say…
Joseph Torigian: “This is the guy.”
Jon Sine: She has a shy girl reaction, runs away, and they chase her. Maybe you could pick it up from there — how that eventually ends rather swiftly in their marriage.
Joseph Torigian: There was extensive, forceful party matchmaking during this period. To put it in context, this was an organization built to achieve revolution, and these relationships were seen as something that should be built on principles of what facilitates the revolution. That led to pressure on people to marry people they didn’t know well or might not have even liked.
Jordan Schneider: How does getting married help revolution in the first place?
Joseph Torigian: To move on to the relationship between Xi Zhongxun and Qi Xin 齐心, it’s very striking how much he doesn’t want to be distracted by her, especially during dicey moments for the party, as the Nationalists were tearing up and breaking up much of what had been the Yan’an base area in the second half of the 1940s. When he meets Qi Xin, he tells her, “Why are you coming to see me? We’re in the middle of fighting this war. It’s just a distraction.”
The party was supposed to break down personalistic relationships so people wouldn’t put romance first — they put revolution first. This was something they all understood and intuited. I can’t remember if I left it in the book, but there was one time when Xi Zhongxun facilitated a meeting between Peng Dehuai and Peng Dehuai’s wife, and Peng yelled at him, saying he needed to focus on bigger things than setting up an occasion for him to see the woman he was married to.
Jordan Schneider: This reminded me of arranged marriages where the woman meets this man who’s in good standing with the party, and they get married the next day — like ISIS. ISIS would arrange marriages with women they captured as spoils. On one hand, Joseph, these guys like sex, which you bring up, but at the same time, you have these women who are incredibly conscious and want to contribute to the party. They’re also annoyed by the fact that they have to do all the childbearing. We end up in this weird dynamic where, because Xi Jinping’s mother is a very active person, they just don’t do parenting for six days a week. It shows how dedicated and religious they are — the family stuff and sex are there because they’re human beings, but they’re subordinating this to the broader goal of making revolution and having the party flourish.
Joseph Torigian: Some more context that’s not directly relevant to what you’re saying, but that we saw very commonly in Yan’an, is that the old revolutionaries had wives they had married years before getting to the base area. Many of those wives had their own seniority, prestige, and status because of when they had joined the revolution and what they had done for it. But then these men left their wives for younger party cadres — women often from more privileged backgrounds with more education. Xi Zhongxun’s two marriages were something quite common in Yan’an — they divorced their first wives and married younger wives. Sometimes that was quite controversial.
For example, in Yan’an, Mao was married to a woman who had contributed and sacrificed a lot for the revolution, and he married another person who was an actor from Shanghai who had been in movies and whose life had been affected by rumors about her love life. When Mao started courting her, some people were unhappy about that. This was another element of the social fabric of what was happening in Yan’an during this period.
Jordan Schneider: It’s funny because Xi Jinping almost goes in the other direction where the first wife is too educated and too into the Western world, ends up moving to the UK and living out a global cosmopolitan lifestyle. Then he finds this woman whose background and worldview much more echo what he had from the perspective of coming into the party and forging and suffering.
But we shouldn’t jump that far ahead. Jon, bring us back.
Jon Sine: On the topic of Xi Zhongxun maybe not being that high-ranking at the time, in the late thirties and forties, he’s maybe just an alternate Central Committee member. He’s the head of a county called Suide 绥德, a sub-region of the Northwest.
Joseph Torigian: It was northeast of Yan’an. The first big jump of his life was really in 1945 when he became a candidate member of the Central Committee — he was very young. Then the next huge jump was when he became head of the Northwest Bureau that same year. Peng Dehuai and He Long (贺龙) were also very important figures in the Northwest, but for someone that young to have a position that weighty is one of the more striking parts of his story. He repeatedly was the youngest person in these very delicate positions. He kept winning over older people to support him. He had this habit of collecting big brothers — that’s something that marked his life.
Jon Sine: I wanted to talk about the Suide period when he was there. You’re pulling out these threads of contradictions and tensions that exist within this individual, as opposed to other biographies that might have more of a clear arc for narrative reasons. But it’s a through line — is he a reformer, is he conservative? These tensions run through land reform there, they run through political rectification that he goes through. Sometimes he seems to tone it down, but sometimes he also seems to be turning it up, which just actually means purging, potentially killing, leading to the deaths of people. How do you see that period, if we linger on that, as a harbinger of some of these contradictions?
Joseph Torigian: During the rectification in 1942, at this period, it focused on transformation and education. Xi Zhongxun was the dean of a university in Yan’an for a few months. Then in 1943, he went to the Suide sub-region, which you just mentioned. Their rectification turned into something called the Confession Movement or the Rescue the Fallen Campaign. Now it was looking for spies — it wasn’t just about taking these young people and turning them into good communists, but finding which ones were spies so they could be rescued. That required a whole new level of investigation, persecution, sometimes even torture, and it completely went off the rails.
Xi Zhongxun had a reputation for being more humane and pro-reform, but the Confession Campaign — the Rescue the Fallen Campaign — was really a case of political radicalism that Xi Zhongxun seems to have been pushing and we should ask why that was the case. In some ways, it’s a puzzle because just a few years earlier, he himself had been persecuted largely on trumped-up charges that resulted from people being forced to give false confessions. He knew this would happen.
Part of it was that the party told him to find spies, and of course he was going to find spies. Part of it was war hysteria — there was fear in 1943 that the Nationalists were going to invade. Also, the Communists had their own spies, making it easy to imagine that the Nationalists were sending agents into this region.
Xi Zhongxun had reasons to be loyal to and grateful to Mao for what we just described — Mao’s new version of history that must have been thrilling to the Northwesterners, crediting them as being on the right side of history along with Mao Zedong.
But Xi went very far, and the form these campaigns took in Suide were very interesting because they focused on a school and included lurid details about many of the young women allegedly being spies sent by Nationalists to infiltrate the party by essentially being honey traps.
Jordan Schneider: To be clear, by young, we mean one of the women who ended up getting caught up in this purge was fourteen. She’s supposedly some prostitute for the Nationalists who can barely write her name.
Joseph Torigian: They had mass rallies where these young people went up and lied about having been spies and having been sent on these missions. What’s interesting is that the target of these campaigns in Suide was this school, and Qi Xin was a student at this school. That’s when Qi Xin and Xi Zhongxun first started to get to know each other. He showed off this inscription that Mao gave him that said, “The party’s interests come first” — something she never forgot.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah. Relationships that start in high school purges tend to be the ones that really see you through the decades.
Joseph Torigian: You can see it was an electric atmosphere. That’s one way of putting it. But he also told her to be careful, otherwise she would be caught up in it. On one occasion, she visits one of the students being persecuted and even interviews her. It was a messy scene.
Jon Sine: We can move forward to the part where the Japanese are defeated in 1945. At some point, maybe two or three years into the Civil War, the Nationalists chase the Communist leadership out of Yan’an. What happens to Xi Zhongxun at this point?
Joseph Torigian: 1947 was a really interesting moment. Yan’an had been the Communist capital for many years and was a symbol of the Chinese Communist Party. Then the Nationalist General Hu Zongnan (胡宗南) attacked, and Xi Zhongxun was on the front line. He screwed up a really key battle, and the party was facing a real crisis. Peng Dehuai, a very famous military figure in Chinese history, was plucked from the Central Military Commission and ordered to command the Northwest forces. Xi Zhongxun worked for him. In the subsequent battles, it looks like the two of them basically got along.
Later in the 1940s, Xi Zhongxun also spent time on governance, civilian work, logistics, and land reform, where he worked under He Long 贺龙. On the military side, he worked under Peng Dehuai, and on the civilian side, he worked under He Long. These were very weighty positions, especially for someone young.
I want to dwell on this moment for just another second — how emotional it must have been for Xi Zhongxun in March 1947. He’s in Yan’an, the Nationalists are coming, and Mao refuses to leave. Mao was really frightening the people around him by staying in the city even as the Nationalists were at the very gates. It was Peng Dehuai and Xi Zhongxun who finally saw him off and then tried to create this rearguard action to hold off the Nationalists to ensure the Central Committee could escape. To have spent that much time building up Communist forces in this area and then see them destroyed by the Nationalists must have been another very emotional moment in his life.
Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun and Peng Dehuai, serving together, would be sleeping in the same room. Apparently Xi Zhongxun was quite the snorer. You write that Peng Dehuai would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and put his shoe on Xi Zhongxun’s face to wake him up and stop him from snoring.
Joseph Torigian: Comrades-in-arms.
Jordan Schneider: Dude, that’s sleep apnea. That’s serious.
Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai was famously mean to people under him, and Xi Zhongxun sometimes acted as a peacemaker, a mediator between Peng Dehuai and whoever Peng was mad at. Xi Zhongxun’s ability to manage interpersonal relationships was emerging here. Even though Peng could really yell at people and get agitated, he also had this communist egalitarian ethos. In that sense, it’s not surprising that he would be sleeping right next to Xi Zhongxun and waking him up with his shoes. It was this interesting mix of hierarchy and egalitarianism that we see in Peng Dehuai.
Jordan Schneider: He does have this LBJ energy to him.
Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting — a few years later, there were tensions between Xi Zhongxun and Deng Xiaoping over Tibet. Xi Zhongxun was very close to Peng Dehuai and one of his protégés. Xi Zhongxun went to complain to Peng about something, and Peng said to him, “You need to be careful because Peng likes to fire cannons.” Then of course, Peng fired a cannon in 1959 at the Lushan Plenum that led to people doubling down on the Great Leap Forward in tragic ways. Xi Zhongxun could read people pretty well sometimes.
Jon Sine: People who have heard of Peng Dehuai, maybe in the China field, probably remember him from the Great Leap Forward, which we will get into. But it speaks to this — at least to me—because my conception of him is drawn from this idea of good versus bad guy. He was the good guy who tried to stop the Great Leap Forward, and people read this back into history. But when you go through the details, you realize he was a very complex person who would be very angry. Everyone at this time was a killer.
Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai, too, if you read this wonderful book by Yen-Lin Chung, which is a biography of Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution. Shortly before Peng Dehuai was targeted in 1959, there had been a campaign of anti-dogmatism in the People’s Liberation Army. Peng was just brutal to people. He especially went after this very famous general named Su Yu 粟裕. Peng was a victim, but very shortly before that, he was a victimizer — another very complicated figure.
Jordan Schneider: The LBJ thing I was going for was this cultivating of older men and having these surrogate father figures.
Joseph Torigian: I could give a whole list for Xi Zhongxun. Even later in his life, he was still making new friends older than him, like Ye Jianying 叶剑英, a man with whom he had no historic ties, no career ties. Suddenly, Ye Jianying took a shine to him, sent him to Guangdong, and became a patron to him. It’s very interesting. Apparently in 1959, the person who nominated Xi Zhongxun to become a vice premier was Chen Yi 陈毅, another very powerful marshal who apparently only really worked with Xi Zhongxun on the State Council for a few years in the 1950s but seems to have liked him. It’s really interesting.
There are reasons this might have been the case. Xi Zhongxun could be charming. These older men who liked to drink — Xi Zhongxun could roll with them in a lifestyle sense. He was good at his job, good at intuiting what people wanted, and could manage personal relations. That’s why he did United Front work. He was a Northwesterner — he wasn’t a Long Marcher. He had been orphaned, essentially, when Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, and then Gao Gang were gone. He was looking for big brothers. He needed big brothers. Maybe these big brothers didn’t really feel threatened by him because the Northwesterners as a group weren’t really that frightening.
Jordan Schneider: He was young, too.
Joseph Torigian: They were thinking about succession — how are we going to hand over the reins to somebody who knows what they’re doing? We need to test these people and give them an opportunity to show whether they’re good at it and gain experience. He was the youngest vice premier in 1959, the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee in 1945, and the youngest major figure from a regional bureau brought to Beijing in 1952. Then, when he went back to work in the 1980s, he never quite reached the top. In fact, he was sent to work for Hu Yaobang, who was much younger than him and had much less revolutionary prestige. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
There are "reasonable grounds" to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in western Sudan, said the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday.
Targeted sexual violence against women and girls of specific ethnicities was named as one of the most disturbing findings to emerge from the ICC probe on crimes committed in Darfur.
War broke out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, leading to what the UN calls "devastating civilian casualties".
ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said it was "difficult to find appropriate words to describe the depth of suffering" in the region.
The UN Security Council gave the ICC a mandate to investigate and prosecute crimes in Darfur two decades ago, with the body opening multiple investigations into war crimes and genocide committed in the region from July 2002 onwards.
The ICC launched a fresh probe in 2023 after civil war broke out once again, interviewing victims who had fled the most recent iteration of the conflict to neighbouring Chad.
Ms Khan described an "inescapable pattern of offending", and stressed that the team were working to translate such crimes into evidence for the court.
Allegations of war crimes have persisted throughout the past two years, and in January 2025 the US determined that the RSF and allied militias had committed a genocide.
The RSF has denied the claims, and said it was not involved in what it describes as a "tribal conflict" in Darfur.
Reports from the UN indicate that conditions in Darfur have continued to worsen, with hospitals and humanitarian convoys suffering targeted attacks, and food and water deliberately withheld.
Civilians in the capital city of El-Fasher have been cut off from aid entirely due to armed encirclement by RSF forces, and an outbreak of cholera across conflict zones poses a serious threat to already scarce water supplies.
An escalating famine has gripped the region, with the UN's children's agency (Unicef) reporting that more than 40,000 children were admitted for treatment due to severe acute malnutrition between January and May 2025 – more than double the number admitted in the same period last year.
"Children in Darfur are being starved by conflict and cut off from the very aid that could save them," said Sheldon Yett from Unicef.
In the past two years, more than 150,000 people have died in the conflict and approximately 12 million have fled their homes, but Ms Khan warned that "We should not be under any illusion - things can still get worse."
Nigeria's foreign minister says the country will not bow to pressure from the Trump administration to accept Venezuelan deportees from the US, following visa curbs and threats of tariff hikes.
Yusuf Tuggar told privately-owned Channels TV that Nigeria had "enough problems" of its own and would not host foreign prisoners from the US.
"We already have over 230 million people," the minister said.
"You will be the same person that will castigate us if we acquiesce to accepting Venezuelan prisoners into Nigeria," he added.
"It will be unfair for Nigeria to accept 300 Venezuelan deportees," he said, suggesting that the recent visa curbs on Nigerian travellers by the US was not "reciprocal" but a pressure tactic.
Earlier this week, the US Department of State said as part of a "global reciprocity realignment", nearly all non-immigrant and non-diplomatic visas issued to citizens of Nigeria, as well as those of Cameroon and Ethiopia, would now be single-entry and valid for only three months.
Brics is an alliance of 11 developing nations designed to challenge the political and economic power of the West. They are: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Nigeria is not a full member of Brics but it became the ninth partner country of the alliance in January.
Mr Tuggar said the threat of tariff hikes did not "necessarily have to do with us participating in Brics.
"You have to also bear in mind that the US is mounting considerable pressure on African countries to accept Venezuelans to be deported from the US, some straight out of prison," he added.
"It will be difficult for a country like Nigeria to accept Venezuelans prisoners into Nigeria. We have enough problems of our own, we cannot accept Venezuelan deportees to Nigeria, for crying out loud," he concluded.
Instead, he said Nigeria was looking "to do deals with the US" because the country "possesses" a lot of gas, critical minerals and rare earths needed by American tech companies.
When further asked what Nigeria was doing to reach a diplomatic solution, the minister said the country was discussing with the US and resolving differences.
Mr Tuggar's claim comes after the Wall Street Journal quoted internal documents and sources as saying the Trump administration was pushing the leaders of Liberia, Senegal, Mauritania, Gabon and Guinea-Bissau to accept migrants deported by the US whose home countries refuse them or are slow to take them back.
Trump also appeared to allude to this during the meeting with the five leaders on Wednesday.
"I hope we can bring down the high rates of people overstaying visas, and also make progress on the safe, third-country agreements," he said during opening remarks.
Liberia's foreign minister denied receiving such communication from Washington.
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A mystery interstellar object spotted last week by astronomers could be the oldest comet ever seen, according to scientists.
Named 3I/Atlas, it may be three billion years older than our own solar system, suggests the team from Oxford university.
The preliminary findings were presented on Friday at the national meeting of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society in Durham.
"We're all very excited by 3I/Atlas," University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins told BBC News. He had just finished his PhD studies when the object was discovered.
He says it could be more than seven billion years old, and it may be the most remarkable interstellar visitor yet.
3I/Atlas was first spotted on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, when it was about 670 million km from the Sun.
Since then astronomers around the world have been racing to identify its path and discover more details about it.
Mr Hopkins believes it originated in the Milky Way's 'thick disk'. This is a group of ancient stars that orbit above and below the area where the Sun and most stars are located.
The team believe that because 3I/ATLAS probably formed around an old star, it is made up of a lot of water ice.
That means that as it approaches the Sun later this year, the energy from the Sun will heat the object's surface, leading to blazes of vapour and dust.
That could create a glowing tail.
The researchers made their findings using a model developed by Mr Hopkins.
"This is an object from a part of the galaxy we've never seen up close before," said Professor Chris Lintott, co-author of the study.
"We think there's a two-thirds chance this comet is older than the solar system, and that it's been drifting through interstellar space ever since."
Later this year, 3I/ATLAS should be visible from Earth using amateur telescopes.
Before 3I/Atlas soared into view, just two others had been seen. One was called 1I/'Oumuamua, found in 2017 and another called 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019.
Astronomers globally are currently gearing up to start using a new, very powerful telescope in Chile, called the Vera C Rubin.
When it starts fully surveying the southern night sky later this year, scientists expect that it could discover between 5 and 50 new interstellar objects.