Victor Shih on ‘coalitions of the weak’ and how China is ruled

The governance of authoritarian regimes like China is notoriously opaque and hard for outside observers to understand in real time. But history and the different governance techniques used by prior Chinese leaders can provide useful insights into how China’s internal politics work.

I recently spoke with Victor Shih about his book Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 and what we can learn about the governance of China from Chinese history, particularly the Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 period and Mao’s governance through “coalitions of the weak.”

Victor, an associate professor of political economy and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at UC San Diego is an expert on the elite politics of China as well as Chinese banking policies and fiscal policies. He was recently appointed as the director of the 21st Century China Center at the university.

We discussed the theory that Victor develops in his new book about how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite. We started with Victor explaining the phrase coalitions of the weak and how to identify “weak” government officials. Victor used a variety of detailed and vivid historical examples as case studies to show how Mao gradually replaced the densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials, the ones he calls “scribblers.” We delved further into the methodology and the type of evidence used in the book, as Victor also relies on statistical analyses to complement the historical accounts.

We also talked about the famous Lín Biāo 林彪 incident and Victor helped shed new light on the mystery of Lin Biao’s death and also what this says about the hazards of being a leader in waiting in China. We ended with Victor applying his theory to analyze the Politburo Standing Committee from the 20th Party Congress and for the years to come.

Christopher Marquis: My first question is about the title, Coalitions of the Weak. Can you explain what that means? I guess in some ways, it encapsulates the core thesis of the book, too.

Victor Shih: As you know, in the literature on authoritarian regimes, it is commonly agreed on by pretty much the entire field that dictators cannot rule by themselves. They need a support coalition of officials to help them govern. Just at a very basic level, even if you were to carry out repression, or try to promote economic growth, one person cannot do everything. So you necessarily have to delegate a lot of these tasks to officials. And then in most cases, those officials will have to delegate further to lower-level officials. There’s one branch of this theory that was started by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. It would argue that actually it’s very elitist, it’s an authoritarian regime. So only a small handful of officials have to help the dictator to stay in power.

My contribution is that while, obviously, no dictator can rule alone, when the authoritarian regime is fairly institutionalized with existing party structure and military structure, you don’t necessarily have to place the most politically savvy officials at the upper echelon. In a sense, you can place someone with very little experience, or someone who’s highly compromised or ostracized because of some traits in senior-level positions, and because the regime is sufficiently institutionalized, they can just issue an order. They can say, “Oh, move the division from Point A to Point B, and the lower-level people are going to obey,” because the regime is sufficiently institutionalized, whereas in less institutionalized regimes, you do have to make sure your close lieutenants are more savvy.

The advantage of doing it that way is you don’t have to be afraid of your lieutenants. The biggest problem in a dictatorship is that there’s no clear rules on leadership. There are no elections, ceremonies that inaugurate new officials, and voting, but that’s not the real power struggle. So the votes are in many cases not meaningful. As a dictator, you’re always afraid that your lieutenant is going to try to replace you, and when you place weak figures around you, it has the advantage that they literally cannot replace you.

Christopher Marquis: But then there are trade-offs to that strategy, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. That’s a really interesting theory, and I think it’s counterintuitive in a number of different ways. The idea that you don’t want threats or to build up alternative power centers, that makes sense. But my assumption would have been I would want people that I have known a long time, have been with on the Long March, and have served with in the military. Those long, deep, dense ties would give me the trust. But you’re saying actually there is a different underlying dynamic. It would also be good if you could actually define what you mean by weak, and how do you identify weak?

Victor Shih: To answer your first question: That is when Mao first used it, in the 1950s. And the literature is very clear about this. You have this Yan’an roundtable, so to speak. So let me first define what a strong official in an authoritarian regime would be. Someone with a lot of experience in government, or in carrying out the initial revolutionary process that brings the regime into power. And, as you know, Levitsky and Way have a new book about that: how in the Soviet Union and also in China, the regime initially worked very well, because you had these very experienced, dedicated revolutionaries, very dedicated to the cause, and also densely networked. They had large networks of followers from their days of being revolutionaries and fighting guerrilla warfare in different parts of the country, and so they were able to bring these networks wholesale to Beijing or to Moscow.

And these networks helped them govern in a sense because at the beginning of the regime, obviously, both in the Soviet Union and in China, the institutions were relatively weak. So, to consolidate these institutions, you do need these informal networks, and it was very helpful to have these very experienced revolutionaries with large networks, to begin the tasks of governing. But the problem is that these very experienced revolutionaries also saw themselves as the equals of the dictator. Thus when they saw the dictator messing up, or if they themselves were ambitious, they tried to replace or sideline the incumbent.

So that’s the problem with these very, even historically, very loyal people, like Liú Shǎoqí 刘少奇, because he had displayed a lot of loyalty to Mao during the Yan’an rectification. Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 was very loyal to Mao through a whole series of political struggles going back to the 1930s prior to the Long March. But in the end, they saw themselves as equals of Mao, and they basically said, “Well, if you mess up, if I think you’re making the wrong decision, I will challenge you because I have my dense network of followers, and we’re all comrades here. Why shouldn’t I criticize you?”

This is kind of what happened after the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), which was a huge disaster for China, 30 million to 50 million people starved to death. China had a massive kind of economic hit, and people were criticizing Mao directly. So now over time — I don’t think he arrived at this overnight — but he had this notion of using the Fourth Front military, which, although they were very experienced revolutionaries, they split the Party in the 1930s in the middle of the Long March. They divided the Long March against the order of not just Chairman Mao, but also the entire Central Committee, or most of the Central Committee. Zhāng Wéntiān 张闻天 was the Party secretary at that time and they disobeyed him and went south into Sìchuān 四川 instead of going north to Yan’an with the main Long March column. So that was a serious crime.

The Long March, when the Party was on the edge of extinction, was a very bad time to split the party, and Fourth Front Army veterans had this mark in their record for the rest of their careers. And Mao was cultivating this group all along through the 1940s and 1950s. I think intuitively, he knew that because these people had this black mark, they couldn’t challenge his power, and that they would be useful somehow. And he was also using what I call “scribblers” (笔杆子 bǐgǎnzi) in my book, these very junior ideologues writing propaganda. Mao’s use of scribblers evolved slowly, as the challenges from his fellow veterans became stronger and stronger after the Great Leap Forward.

Christopher Marquis: Got it. So it sounds like in some ways there are these types of officials that make up the coalition of the weak: There are the very junior propagandists, who are so inexperienced that they can’t challenge Mao. And then these potentially compromised people from the Fourth Front Army with the black mark, his critics.

This is another interesting thing. It’s an important nuance. I think that at least the standard idea is that Mao suffered lots of critiques and direct criticism following the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, the famine, etc. And so he basically just wanted to purge critics. But what you’re suggesting is there’s something deeper there, a more general governance strategy to avoid threat. Is that reasonable?

Victor Shih: Yeah. I think Mao slowly came into that realization through the first two to three years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he did rely on Long March veterans, but they were purged. Then Mao replaced these people with other Long March veterans. And then finally, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, plus a whole bunch of people were purged.

When thinking about your question, something that Rod MacFarquhar, my adviser at Harvard, who wrote a number of books on the Cultural Revolution, always said that Táo Zhù 陶铸 was the key figure to understand. Tao Zhu was a veteran revolutionary who had his own agenda, such as trying to protect people in his network. Despite the fact that Mao clearly wanted to purge them, Tao tried to protect and promote his own followers into higher-level offices. After a while, Mao realized that Tao was not reliable. Because he’s a veteran, because he had his own network of followers, he had a lot of information on elite dynamics as well as a strong network. These veterans just started to deviate from Mao, and basically Mao says, well, okay, well, he had to go, too. So Tao Zhu was purged.

In terms of the scribblers, one thing that initially I didn’t think I would find but actually in the end discovered, was that they really were pawns in that sense. In the classic chess sense that you can use them, and you can even promote them to important positions, but they were very expendable. A whole bunch of junior propagandists were sacrificed because there were always more of them. How many propaganda writers were there in China? A limitless supply of them at that time.

And so, as the upper tiers were purged, more junior people moved up. And then in the late Cultural Revolution, Mao just promoted a whole bunch of worker representatives who were just ordinary workers, farmers, even in some cases into very senior-level positions, because they were not going to disobey his order, they followed Mao’s instructions to the dot.

And because the Party was still institutionalized enough, when they issued an order, it would still be carried out. And China didn’t have especially dire challenges at that time. This little-known fact about the Cultural Revolution was that China had positive economic growth the entire time. And the biggest threat was the Soviet threat from the north, which was why, for a while at least, Lin Biao was kept in power.

Christopher Marquis: Good question about Lin Biao, but first I want to ask a little bit about the type of evidence you use. That was one of the things I found really interesting. It wasn’t just a historical discussion, and like you are describing it now in a narrative sense. But you actually use network methods and analyze degree centrality. You do other types of statistical analyses to actually be able to tell. That it’s possibly this theory that you have as opposed to some of these other, more commonly assumed ways that things progressed in the Cultural Revolution. Can you say a little bit more about the evidence that you use in the book?

Victor Shih: I guess it is just a product of my training, and also where I’ve worked over the years. I went from Harvard, where I was advised by Rod MacFarquhar, who’s a very historically focused person, who insisted on all the right details and the exact dynamics of elite politics, to Northwestern, which is a big place for historical institutionalism. So there, people really cared about institutions, to UCSD, which is a very data-driven kind of place, but of course, even before I arrived at UCSD, I began to collect a lot of elite biographical data.

It’s just a product of all these different colleagues and mentors, demanding that I do different things. And actually I ended up being pretty happy with the end product. As I was finishing a book, I remember my UCSD colleague Sam Popkin challenged me, saying, “How do you know these people are weak?” I knew I had to measure the network centrality of these people and just plot it, which satisfied him. The whole argument, including the last substantive chapter about Xi Jinping’s generation, is a lot more persuasive because of that type of evidence.

Christopher Marquis: A contribution is really showing all the different sorts of tools for researchers to use, to understand the structure of elite power, but before getting more into the current day, I want to ask you about Lin Biao. The fact that he disappeared on a plane is well known, but many of the details you present I did not know. Can you talk a bit about how your research and theory contribute to understanding the Lin Biao episode?

Victor Shih: The official Chinese government’s perspective is that he had a plot, he wanted to assassinate Mao, and so Mao had no choice but to start a purge on him, which sent him into a panic. He first tried to fly to Guangzhou, but then, he turned the plane around and there was a crash.

In another version, suggested by Frederick Teiwes, Lin was totally innocent, like he was just trying to keep his head down. He was trying to basically not get in trouble, to keep his head down as much as possible. But Mao was getting old and paranoid, and so that’s why Mao purged him, and on the eve of the purge, he panicked, got on a plane, and it crashed.

What I find to be true is a little bit closer to the first version, the official version. I don’t think he was wholly innocent, because basically if you observe what happened during the Lushan Conference, after the Lushan Conference, based on accounts of people who were sympathetic to him, who wrote accounts after they got out of jail when they really did not have anything to protect or hide. These accounts suggest that Lin Biao gave the green light to begin advancing theoretical revisions at the Lushan Conference, which Mao did not approve. Lin Biao was encouraging others to advocate for that perspective.

Then Mao wanted Lin Biao to show his loyalty by purging Wú Fǎxiàn 吴法宪, the head of the Air Force at the time and a very close follower of Lin Biao’s. So this is when I think Lin Biao was really trapped in a very bad dilemma. On the one hand, of course, you want to show your loyalty to Mao by purging Wu Faxian. If he had done that, arguably Mao would have been satisfied. He would have been fine. But, on the other hand, Mao had chosen Lin Biao to be his successor already by that point. And the first thing he did was to purge his own follower, who would still follow him. Also his own power base would have become weaker.

So there’s this classic kind of commitment problem, and for Lin Biao, he chose to protect his own faction. He tried to protect them. But for Mao, this was very alarming. Mao’s internal thinking likely proceeded in this way: “What’s going on? I told you to do this, and you’re not doing it. I’m not dead yet. I’m still alive. Are you disobeying me?” So the mutual suspicion just got stronger and stronger, and that led to the plane incident. I don’t disagree with the government perspective. If Lin Biao had been totally innocent, he would have done what Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来 had done multiple times, which was to purge his own followers. That would have assured Chairman Mao.

Christopher Marquis: Got it. My last question: I just want to understand how the theory you developed helps in understanding current and future China. You have some analyses in the last chapter looking at the degree centrality of different recent Party congresses. I don’t know if you’ve done it yet for the 20th Party Congress. My question is: How does this governance strategy shape how Xi governs, if at all? Clearly, he wants people who are loyal to him. What does your book say about empirical predictions about the future of China?

Victor Shih: As you know, my last substantive chapter was on how Xi came into power. He did have some competitors, but he successfully got rid of all of them. For the 20th Party Congress, some commentators said, “Victor, you are wrong, as there are all these densely networked individuals.” We did a special report just before the 20th Party Congress, and one of the contributions is from me, where I do measure the networks of different potential Standing Committee members, and indeed their networks overlap with Xi Jinping’s own network to a large extent, all the former Zhejiāng and Fujian officials. I would say at this stage, Xi is still playing a kind of a factional game of relying on densely networked officials who historically had shown reliability and loyalty to him to occupy senior positions, with Lǐ Qiáng 李强 a prime example, but also people like Hé Lìfēng 何立峰, the vice premier.

Here are a couple of exceptions. One is Wáng Hùníng 王沪宁, who has no network because he worked in a think tank, and also Dīng Xuēxiáng 丁薛祥 from Shanghai. But unlike these other officials in Xi’s orbit, he never worked outside of Shanghai or Beijing. So he went from Shanghai into the central office in Beijing, so his network is relatively small.

I would say it’s too early to know if the coalition of the weak is going to manifest. If that happens, it would start manifesting at the 21st or even 22nd Party Congress because we’re looking forward to potentially 20 to 30 years more of Xi Jinping. He’s like 70, which is 10 years younger than Biden, so why shouldn’t he be in power for at least another 10 years, maybe even longer?

Christopher Marquis: Definitely something to keep in mind in the coming years with regard to Chinese governance. One of the things I did very much appreciate about your book is how it puts forth not just a narrative about the late Mao years, but also a theory about governance in the later days of a dictator’s rule. Mao is the key example, but you also discuss Stalin a bit and it will be interesting to see how it applies to contemporary dictators who may be soon entering that period.

Thanks so much, Victor, for taking the time to discuss your book.

Victor Shih: Thank you.

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