Joseph Torigian is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a Global Fellow in the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program, and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was a Visiting Fellow at the China in the World Program at Australian National University, a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a Postdoctoral (and Predoctoral) Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a Predoctoral Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. His first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was released with Yale University Press, and The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was published by Stanford University Press in 2025.

Last Updated: March 26, 2025

Media

04.30.25

ChinaFile Presents: ‘The Party’s Interests Come First’

Joseph Torigian & Jeremy Goldkorn
Joseph Torigian discusses the life of Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, and how his legacy shapes the worldview of one of the world’s most powerful leaders today. Torigian’s new book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father...

Conversation

12.02.22

Jiang Zemin, 1926-2022

Julia Lovell, Ian Johnson & more
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin died on Wednesday at the age of 96, shortly after anger about the zero-COVID policy had boiled over into a wave of protest last weekend. Jiang took the country through the boom years of the 1990s, a time now...