Given the flood of books on China that has poured forth in recent years, one might think the rest of the world would have figured out that provocative country by now. But much of China’s historical evolution continues to defy Western understanding, and many of its leaders remain tantalizing conundrums—few more so than Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China. Having watched him up close on official trips, once in 2015 with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and once during U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 trip to China, I’ve encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little about what’s going on inside their heads. With a Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile permanently etched on his face, Xi’s mien is hard to read.

Opacity may have been a skill Xi learned as a child, according to Joseph Torigian’s prodigiously researched epic The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. Torigian quotes the Chinese historian Gao Wenqian, who suggests that after watching his father’s fall from grace within the CCP, Xi learned the art of “forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.” Xi Zhongxun, a close colleague of Mao Zedong’s, had been intensely loyal to both the party and its revolution, only to be repaid with political persecution, abuse, imprisonment, and domestic exile. This was the world in which Xi Jinping came of age.

As Torigian observes, the history of internal CCP dynamics confronts scholars, especially those not from China, with “one of the most difficult research targets in the world.” Not only do they have to contend with the formidable language barrier, but the CCP is so sensitive about having its dirty laundry aired in public that it goes to great lengths to distort its historical record with propaganda and to keep embarrassing documents off-limits. The result is an official history that is immaculately well scrubbed and ordered lest it reveal any fallibility.

But peek behind the veil, and a different reality reveals itself: a dog-eat-dog world of power struggles, artifice, hubris, treachery, and duplicity—yet also an enormous amount of sacrifice. By limning the life of Xi Zhongxun in such extraordinary detail, Torigian helps readers see behind the veil and understand the political crucibles in which father and son were “forged,” the term both use to describe how they were shaped by revolutionary hardship and struggle.

“The fall of Xi Zhongxun was a turning point in Chinese history,” Torigian writes. It was also a turning point for the Xi family, which spiraled into tragedy thereafter. Xi Jinping was only nine years old in 1962, when his father, a senior member of Mao’s government, was purged on spurious charges, including approving the publication of a novel about his mentor. The elder Xi was plunged into 16 years of political ostracism and violence—he was beaten so badly he became deaf in one ear—that continued until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

As one former colleague recalled, Xi’s purge caused him “psychological damage.” Yet despite all the abuse, Xi continued to insist that all he wanted to do was to “struggle his entire life for the party.” One is left to wonder why—and how all the injustices and indignities inflicted on the Xi family affected his children.

Xi Jinping’s childhood was so traumatic that being “sent down” to the countryside in 1969 to spend seven years in grinding poverty and “learn from the peasants” during the Cultural Revolution came as a relief. Of course, the whole time he lived under the mortifying shadow of his father, a “counterrevolutionary,” which was one of the lowest categories of political damnation in the CCP playbook. As Torigian writes, Xi Jinping “suffered special mistreatment” because of his father, whom he was forced to denounce. One can only imagine his humiliation as a teenager to have his application to join the Communist Youth League—a precursor to full party membership that every child coveted—rejected eight times. And then, before the Cultural Revolution finally ended, his sister, who had suffered her own torments, hanged herself in despair.

Lest any whiff of pop psychology tarnish his rigorous scholarship, Torigian insists his book “is not intended to be a Freudian analysis” of this father-son drama. Instead, he writes that his intention was to use “the life of one rather unique individual to tell the story of the Chinese Communist Party in the twentieth century.” By tapping into new Chinese, English, French, and Russian sources based largely outside China, Torigian has done that and more. Few sons ever escape the influence of their fathers, and by just laying out this father-son narrative, Torigian helps readers gain a deeper sense of how Xi Jinping’s passage to adulthood made him who he now is.

Xi Zhongxun, Torigian says, was drawn to the promise of Marxism-Leninism in a manner that was “more emotional than ideological.” Born to a peasant........

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