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For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao's successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi's rapid consolidation of power after 2012.
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.
