As a China reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Chun Han Wong has chronicled Xi Jinping’s hard-line strategy for crushing dissent against his strongman rule, his political repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and his increasingly coercive efforts to reel in the island democracy of Taiwan, as well as the domestic and diplomatic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. When the Chinese government refused to renew Wong’s press credentials and forced him to leave mainland China in 2019, he moved to Hong Kong to continue covering Chinese politics and its autocratic turn under Xi. Now, Wong has drawn on his years of firsthand reporting across China—including conversations with party insiders, insights from scholars and diplomats, and analyses of official speeches and documents—to create a lucid and historically rooted account of China’s leader and how he inspires fear and fervor in his party, his nation, and beyond.