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"In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed "I don't know who you are." An embarrassed Wu said "Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade." Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding "I didn't know that" (Mao 1975). It was both surprising and expected that Mao had failed to recognize Wu. On the one hand, Wu's elevation into the Politburo and into the vice premier position had been recommended by Mao himself at the 10th Party Congress less than two years before Mao shook her hand (Teiwes and Sun 2007: 101). It was therefore astonishing that Mao failed to remember the name of his hand-picked political rising star. On the other hand, Wu was far from a revolutionary veteran with whom Mao had worked for decades like Deng Xiaoping or Ye Jianying. Mao greeted those two warmly at the meeting by calling them by their nicknames, "Xiaoping" for Deng and "Old Marshal" for Ye (Mao 1975). In contrast, Wu had only joined the party in 1958 and had been nothing more than a model worker until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (Huang 2007). With the formation of the revolutionary committees at every level of governments starting in 1967, Wu found her career enjoying a rocket-like rise toward the center of power. Still, among the millions of model workers who had benefited from a class-based promotion system instituted during the Cultural Revolution, Wu's elevation to the Politburo was striking"--
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. Coalition of the Strong: Mao's Predicament After the Great Leap Forward; 3. 'Counterrevolutionary Splittists' in Mao's Ruling Coalition; 4. The Scribblers Mafia: Radical Ideologues in Mao's Coalition; 5. Realizing the Coalition of the Weak: Politics in the Late Mao Period; 6. The Collapse of the Coalition of the Weak and Power Sharing in the 1980s; 7. Weak Successors: the Final Calculus of the Founding Generation and the Rise of Xi Jinping; 8. Conclusion.
About the author
Victor C. Shih is Ho Miu Lam Chair Associate Professor in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation (2007) and the editor of Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions (2020).
Summary
Through the lens of late-Mao and contemporary elite politics in China, Coalitions of the Weak inquires how leaders of one-party autocracies sought to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, providing an important and previously missing key to understanding elite political development in China in the past sixty years.
Foreword
An exhaustively researched account of late-Mao power strategy and its consequences on elite dynamics in subsequent decades, including the rise of Xi.
