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Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. He has also held numerous other fellowships. His latest book, Prestige, Manipulation and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, was published in May by Yale University Press. Torigian spoke to The Wire about common misconceptions surrounding China’s post-Mao era, the failures of institutionalization in China, and how elite power operates in authoritarian regimes. 

Q: What is the origin story of your new book? Why did you write it? 

A: When I started my PhD program, I thought I was going to write a typical international relations theory dissertation about rising powers. But then I took a class with the late Roderick MacFarquhar, who was a professor in the Government Department at Harvard. What was remarkable about this class was that each week we would read a different book in Chinese by a Chinese historian about a crucial event in PRC history since 1949. What impressed me about MacFarquhar was that he seemed to always be the smartest person in the room. His command of history and intuition about the motivations of Chinese leaders gave him this unique insight into whatever topic we happened to be discussing. 

At the same time, the kind of work that MacFarquhar was doing was seen as something hard for younger people to pursue because of various disciplinary reasons. Many people were also put off by how hard it was to study Chinese elite politics rigorously given how opaque the system is. But I thought it was important to continue the kind of work MacFarquhar did, and, moreover, there were all of these exciting new opportunities in terms of material that people were not yet looking at. Unlike MacFarquhar, however, I also wanted to be more explicit about what new versions of history told us about how we should look at Leninist regimes more broadly and theoretically. 

How were scholars thinking about Leninist regimes? 

A lot of scholars were thinking about Leninist systems as the kind of political regime where a leader would essentially compete within some defined group and would come out on top based on whether they promised the best policy platform or the most patronage. But the new evidence showed that in the transitions in both China and the Soviet Union after Mao and Stalin policy differences mattered quite little. The bigger story was questions of historical seniority and antagonisms, the ability to manipulate ambiguous rules and, of course, the military and political police. 

One argument in your book is that, in elite power struggles, raw power tends to supersede ideological conflicts. Can you expand on that? 

I recently published an article called “Xi Jinping and Ideology” for the Wilson Center, so people interested in a fuller account of how I think about ideology beyond elite power struggles can look there. As for the book, certainly one of the most surprising findings is how little ideological differences either sparked or resolved these elite power struggles, both in China and the Soviet Union. 

Why did outside observers used to give so much play to ideology? Well, when there was a power struggle, afterwards the victor would always have a habit of portraying the defeated as having formed a faction that had coalesced around some policy line that was different. That was a way of making their victory look more savory than it really was. Also, it’s a little bit counterintuitive to think that policy differences don’t really matter all that much in Leninist systems. Living in western democracies, very often we think that this is really at the very heart of politics. 

To a certain extent, policy mattered, but in ways that you wouldn’t suspect. When a leader was associated with very popular policies, sometimes that would actually make them a target. For example, [former Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy] Beria in 1953 – one of the reasons that his competitors worried about him was precisely because he was creating this political capital by introducing reformist policies that he had hoped would make him a more attractive figure. As for [former Soviet foreign minister] Viacheslav Molotov, he was a threat not so much because he represented a separate ideological “line,” but because he was seen to have a lot of authority interpreting ideological questions given his past history. 

Also, often you would see during a power struggle that a small difference would be magnified, or made up entirely, and turned into a political weapon. That habit makes it very easy for people on the outside to misconstrue what’s going on. 

In other words, researchers shouldn’t take a leader’s professed motivations for one act or another at face-value. 

When we do research on Chinese politics, we should always keep a few things in mind. The first is that we have had a very bad track record understanding Chinese politics on the outside as events were transpiring. As my book suggests, even with events that happened many decades ago we’re only still slowly figuring out that Western scholars got them wrong. On the other hand, looking to history, which is one of the few things that we do have, allows us to take whatever evidence we have publicly and ask simple questions. Like, does this make sense? Is this the best explanation we have for what’s going on based on continuities with Chinese history to the extent that we think they’re strong? As E.H. Carr wrote, no facts exist independently, only through analysis, which means you need to interpret them through some general idea of how the Party works. 

In the book, you discuss historical “misconceptions” around Hua Guofeng [China’s leader after Mao’s death]. What are those?

For people who have studied China, if they learned about Hua Guofeng, the historiography that they were taught was likely that he was this figure who was selected by Mao as successor but was swiftly removed because he wanted to continue a sort of Cultural Revolution Lite. He did not want to rehabilitate the old revolutionaries. He was deeply unpopular within the Party. The famous Third Plenum in 1978 was a rare case of inter-Party democracy which selected for Deng because Deng was more popular and reformist. 

We now know that this narrative is basically wrong. Hua Guofeng deserves the credit for many of the elements of reform. He wanted to work with the old revolutionaries and try to co-opt them, including Deng. The Third Plenum was less about real ideological differences than historical verdicts. This was a moment in time that was more about a shift in authority relations within the leadership as opposed to a showdown among competing policy platforms in which Deng, this alleged reformist, came out on top.

You make a point in the book of “taking the Gang of Four seriously.” What do you mean by that?

The most common treatments of the Gang of Four [a group of Mao loyalists including his wife Jiang Qing] treat them as caricatures. But as more evidence has come out, we, perhaps unsurprisingly, see a more complicated version of these individuals. For example, some of the most surprising evidence that we now have are signs that the Gang of Four were actually sending out olive branches to the old guard, to the old comrades, and were doing self-criticisms about the worst abuses of the Cultural Revolution while also trying to distance themselves from those moments in time. We know that the Gang actually were not as in close concert as we had thought. The Gang didn’t really have their own policy agenda beyond trying to intuit what Mao wanted and giving it to Mao. 

Also, there was real popularity for the Gang of Four at certain levels within the Party hierarchy. Half of the Politburo Standing Committee were members of the Gang of Four. There was a fear that if the Gang were confronted in a meeting as opposed to arrested, they would play for time and a Central Committee meeting would be summoned. It was ambiguous as to whether the plotters against the Gang of Four would be able to come out victorious in that kind of situation.

Why was Deng Xiaoping “China’s last best chance for real institutionalization,” as you write in the book? 

A lot of people thought that the Deng era was truly a moment in which the CCP reflected on the lessons of the strongman era of rule under Mao and moved to collective leadership; that Deng was constrained by other people within the elites that were also prominent revolutionaries and had very different ideas about reform; and that there was a serious system for allowing a serious discussion of policy issues. There is some truth there. People could speak out more, especially if Deng’s positions were ambiguous or he had not yet made a decision or he was not involved in some policy issue. And it was definitely the case that a lot of people did want to move away from strongman rule into more institutionalization, including the father of Xi Jinping, Xi Zhongxun. 

But we know from, for example, Wu Guoguang, who has since become a professor in the West but who worked for Zhao Ziyang [who served as premier and general-secretary in the 1980s], that although some leaders were thinking seriously about political institutionalization, their ideas were quashed by Deng. 

In a system where your status is commensurate with your contribution to the revolution and your ability to control the military, Deng’s power really was quite absolute, so his passing might have been a lost chance.

Deng said the CCP was unlike the United States, which, in his words, had three governments, meaning the three branches. He praised the Soviet Union and said that all they had to do was have a meeting and they could invade Afghanistan (a rather revealing anecdote). He thought Chinese politics only functioned with a core leader. He said the party could only have one “mother-in-law” – meaning him. 

When Hu Yaobang [CCP general secretary during the 1980s] heard that Deng was considering retirement, Hu said that Deng really was George Washington. Washington, of course, was an individual who had incomparable prestige as one of the great heroes of the American Revolution and who used that power to support institutionalization of early American democracy. But Deng chose not to do that after all. 

Zhao Ziyang, when asked why he could not have done more to change the system, said something like “What power did I have? I did not have the power of someone like Deng Xiaoping.” Deng came from that first generation of leadership. In a system where your status is commensurate with your contribution to the revolution and your ability to control the military, Deng’s power really was quite absolute, so his passing might have been a lost chance. But even under Zhao the changes under discussion were hardly revolutionary. 

What’s the impact of that legacy of neglecting real institutionalization then? Are you suggesting that China has weak institutions today? 

Let me put it this way. When Xi Jinping came to power, he inherited an extraordinarily leader-friendly system. Many of the advantages that he wields are very similar to Deng Xiaoping’s. Those strengths include taboos within the Party against factions; a special relationship with the political police and the military; the ability to decide when meetings are held, what the topics will be, and who gets to attend them; a general sense within the Party that it functions best when there is a core who can make final decisions and push them through; no clear rules on succession or age; a fear that any move against Xi Jinping would put the whole system in danger; and also this narrative that has equated the Party’s legitimacy in the figure of Xi Jinping. 

In one important sense, Xi Jinping is even more “institutional” than Deng Xiaoping. Deng was the core, certainly. At the 13th Party congress in 1987, there was a decision that Deng would be consulted on major issues. But Deng was never the general-secretary of the party and the division of labor was never totally clarified. Deng was also constantly worried about views that he was “ruling from behind the curtain.” That created a lot of pathologies during the Deng era. 

For example, people like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, these two general secretaries, lost Deng’s trust and were removed in part because it was unclear to them that what they were doing were things that would deeply distress Deng. And Deng also wasn’t involved in day to day decision making, so when he would suddenly make a choice, it was often unexpected and destabilizing. Arguably, none of Xi’s acts, with the possible exception of last year’s regulatory blitz, match Deng’s unpredictable behavior, which included the invasion of Vietnam in 1979, the approval of the SEZs in 1984, the purge of Hu Yaobang in 1987, the disastrous price reform of 1988, the unpopular decision to use force to clear the 1989 protests, and the 1992 Southern Tour. 

Given all that, has Xi fundamentally departed from Deng’s path?

That’s a tough question to answer for several reasons. The first is it depends on which issue area we’re looking at. When I look at the work written by my colleagues on Xi Jinping, on specific issues it’s striking how much continuity there is. Courtney Fung says that China’s behavior at the UN isn’t dramatically different from before. Wendy Leutert’s and Sarah Eaton’s work on SOEs suggests that methods of Party control have deepened under Xi Jinping, but they are not really fundamentally different from what was going on under the Hu Jintao era. If you look at the division between SOEs and private enterprises within the economy, Andrew Batson shows that ratio actually hasn’t changed as dramatically as many people think. In terms of foreign policy, people like Rush Doshi and Andrew Chubb have attributed more aggression in Chinese foreign policy to the Hu Jintao era. And Hu Jintao was far from a political liberal when it came to dissidents. 

… the 2021 history resolution acknowledges that Reform and Opening created real problems. But the document also says that Xi Jinping is addressing them not to end Reform and Opening, but to save it.

The periodization question is also tricky because it’s used by people who both like and dislike Xi Jinping. Look for example at Zhu Jiamu, an intellectual who has provided a lot of the ideological explanation of what Chinese leaders are trying to do. He wrote an article in 2009 in which he said that a new era began in 2002, which is when Hu Jintao came to power, because Hu Jintao talked about scientific development and the costs of economic growth at all costs and the danger of bifurcations in society because of a growing gap between the richest and the poorest. 

But Zhu wrote another article in 2021 in which he frankly admitted that he changed his mind and said the new era began in 2012. That’s not because there were new policies, but because Xi Jinping actually executed the policies that Hu Jintao had started. According to this narrative, Xi was only able to do so because of his authority and ability to bring discipline to the Party. 

Significantly, when you look very specifically at how Xi Jinping himself characterizes his rule, he is not rejecting Reform and Opening. In fact, twice he has visited a statue of Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen to commemorate reform of opening and the special economic zones. Zhu Jiamu attributes “leftist” views to Deng, like Deng’s criticism of peaceful evolution and bourgeois liberalization and Deng’s introduction of the very conservative “Four Cardinal Principles.”

Certainly, the 2021 history resolution acknowledges that Reform and Opening created real problems. But the document also says that Xi Jinping is addressing them not to end Reform and Opening, but to save it. The idea that he would reject Reform and Opening directly neglects the extent to which Xi Jinping views continuity as important in how Chinese history is described because he sees faith in the CCPs path as necessary to its legitimacy. Xi said you cannot reject either the thirty years before or after Reform and Opening began – so, rejecting Mao or rejecting Reform and Opening would both technically make you what he calls a “historical nihilist.” He likely wants to avoid the charge that Reform and Opening is over and that the Cultural Revolution is starting again, which is what we saw on the banners that hung over the bridge in Beijing shortly before the Congress. 

Setting aside the question of what he’s actually doing, when you read the resolution, the signal it tries to make is that China will not repeat the mistakes of the late Mao era but that China should also avoid full westernization. So he can visit Yan’an, but he can go to Shenzhen too. Yan’an is a weapon against people who aren’t sufficiently “red,” and Shenzhen is a tool to fight off the neo-Maoists. He can move among these themes at his convenience. He’s a politician. Similarly, Deng would use Reform and Opening as a weapon when ideologues talked in ways that threatened economic growth, and then he would use the Four Cardinal Principles to hit people that went too far when criticizing the Party. 

What do you make of Mao-Xi comparisons? 

When I think about Mao, several things come to mind. The first is that there were lots of different Mao’s. For years, people that he defeated in power struggles were not persecuted, and they often would continue to fill important roles within the Party. Crucially, one of the reasons so many people within the Party respected Mao so much was because he had so often demonstrated flexibility and innovation. His legitimation story was all about how he rejected dogmatic individuals who were sent by Moscow. 

That demonstration of competence, most dramatically manifested in the CCP’s victory in 1949, meant Mao’s power was awesome. His comrades could not reject him because it would mean rejecting themselves. That’s why they were incapable of stopping him when he broke the earlier contract that protected them from purges. Xi’s powerful, but he’s not the source of meaning in his comrades’ lives like the way Mao was for his compatriots. 

In any case, as for whether Xi Jinping’s power approaches Mao or not, we wouldn’t know because Xi Jinping’s leadership hasn’t gone through the stress tests that Mao did. If we think about the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping has certainly made mistakes, but none of them approximates these worst mistakes of the Mao era. 

With regards to these comparisons between Mao and Xi, it’s also useful to note that Xi has repeatedly criticized the excesses of the Cultural Revolution – on several occasions, he even said he devoted himself to the party to prevent another Cultural Revolution. His experiences during that decade were wrenching. He had a half sister that was persecuted to death. He was incarcerated, and it was so bad that in the 1980s he told one interviewer he thought he was going to die. 

Certainly, there are some similarities between Xi and Mao. They both exist in a system where there’s a belief that you need a strong leader. Both Mao and Xi have this preoccupation with ideals, conviction and political will. Xi has a real sense of historic mission. He wants to have a legacy. 

I’m not sure how Xi actually feels about Mao, but Chinese leaders can have an emotional yet simultaneously thoughtful attitude toward the late Chairman. Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun suffered a great deal during the Cultural Revolution, but never lost faith in Mao. Yet Xi Zhongxun also deeply reflected on the lessons of Mao’s strongman rule and could not have condemned the Cultural Revolution in more powerful terms. 

In any case, whatever his personal feelings, Xi Jinping would never want to completely debunk Mao because of his view that when you lose control of your history, you lose control over people’s beliefs. That’s a recipe for disaster, just like it was for the Soviet Union, in his mind.

Why did you decide to include Russia in this book? Why tackle both?

Similarly to China, when I was doing the research for my dissertation, it was a really exciting moment to do research in the Russian Federation. The extent of declassification of the archives in Moscow was really something. We were able to get Politburo documents and personal files of top Russian leaders, but also new memoirs were still coming out, as well as diaries and document collections put out by very professional publishing companies in Russia. It allowed for a comparison to see whether there was any external validity to the conclusions I was drawing about Chinese politics and whether those broad arguments for transitions and the nature of power in Leninist regimes were equally applicable to the Soviet Union. 

… Leninist regimes are different from other forms of authoritarian ones because there is still some emotional attachment to the Party. When you lose a power struggle, you don’t exit and try to overthrow the CCP. You still put the stability of the Party as paramount.

Sure enough, when I looked at this material, what it showed was a very similar story, in which these people that we used to think were “Stalinists” like Molotov and Kaganovich were actually quite close to Khrushchev, or at least closer than we thought. The bigger story was that they were afraid that Khrushchev was achieving a new dictatorship. They felt that if they didn’t move first, then their own positions were going to be in danger.

How should we think about the collapse of the Soviet Union? 

How you think about the collapse of the Soviet Union has very clear implications for how you should think about China today. If you think that the Soviet Union’s collapse was inevitable because of the competition with the West, dogmatism, the failure to achieve meaningful economic reform, and a political system that was unresponsive, then you would have one set of policy prescriptions for China. 

But if you think that the Soviet Union was actually doing quite well, that its fall was not inevitable, that Gorbachev was a stooge for the West, and that Western economic and ideological infiltration weakened Party control, then you’re going to come to a very different set of conclusions. Everything that we’ve seen suggests that Xi Jinping’s view is the latter, especially as evidenced by a speech he gave on the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after he came to power. He said that the Soviet leaders lost control of ideology and no “real man” came forward to use violence to resolve the crisis when it came.

How is that collapse interpreted by the CCP? 

We know that Xi Jinping is personally deeply curious about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s very clearly dedicated to the Chinese Communist Party and believes it was an outgrowth of the October Revolution. The year that Xi Jinping was born, in 1953, the most prominent slogan was “the Soviet Union of today is China’s tomorrow.” His father, Xi Zhongxun, helped manage the Soviet experts in China. Xi Zhongxun visited Moscow in 1959 to discuss the next five year plan for China and he left flowers at the mausoleum of Lenin and Stalin. 

Xi Jinping told a group of Russian sinologists on his first trip overseas that his generation was raised under two literatures, the Russian and the Chinese. He talked about how he admired this character Rakhmetov in the book, What Is To Be Done [a novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky], who slept on a bed of nails. Xi Jinping said that to emulate him he used to walk around in the wind in the rain so he could inculcate his own revolutionary élan.

In the 1990s, the adviser for Xi’s dissertation wrote a book with Russian scholars about the different reform stories in China and Russia. And if you look at those documents on Xinjiang that were leaked, Xi Jinping, again referred to the Soviet Union, noting that it was the most economically advanced Soviet socialist republics that first left the USSR, which suggested that ethnic politics weren’t purely an economic challenge.

How can your historical research here inform our understanding of Russia-China relations today? 

During the Cold War, they were a formal alliance, and this created serious challenges when China believed the Soviet Union wasn’t providing enough support. Back then, it was China that was taking action seen in Moscow as destabilizing and threatening to Russia’s interests. Ultimately, Mao’s conclusion was that the reason for the lack of Soviet support was that the Soviets weren’t really communist anymore; they had become revisionists. 

Personalities and individual leaders can matter a great deal. Mao respected Stalin but also was upset about perceived lack of Soviet support during the war against the KMT. Then Khrushchev did not have the ideological chops or awesome prestige that Stalin did, as compared to Mao, who won the revolution in 1949. Mao treated Khrushchev with little respect. After Khrushchev was purged, for decades there weren’t any meetings between Russian and Chinese leaders. The fact that Putin and Xi are so close is somewhat of a historical anomaly. 

Even though the relationship now isn’t as close as it was during the 1950s, in some ways, it’s more resilient. Partly that’s because ideology doesn’t present the same set of problems that it did during much of the Cold War. Putin and Xi seem to get along personally. Also, the arrangements that they’ve set for each other don’t require either of them to sacrifice their interests fundamentally when any of them are facing a confrontation with the West. Many people in Beijing probably see the Russians as a natural partner because of what they see as a very aggressive and antagonistic foe in Washington. At the same time, Beijing will try to avoid severe economic and reputational costs and hope that the Russian invasion of Ukraine won’t hurt China too much.

In terms of making sense of today’s CCP, what can policymakers take away from your book? 

The lessons of my research for this particular question are twofold. One is less encouraging and one is more encouraging. The discouraging one is that our track record is bad. My research shows the extent to which even people at the very top echelons of the Chinese political system didn’t know what was going on. Top officials deliberately mischaracterized each other. For people like us, we really need to be very humble and be sensitive to all of the ways that these systems are misinformation factories. 

On the other hand, if we look to the past and get a sense for how the CCP tends to work, to get a better intuition for how people in this system think, then we can both be more sensitive to what’s new. But also to the extent that continuities persist, they can help us adjudicate competing hypotheses about what’s really going on. 

Xi Jinping has an older idea about what Leninist systems are – that they are organizational weapons that encompass your entire self and personality, that your meaning in life is sacrifice to this collective. It is about making yourself part of something bigger.

For example, if you see the CCP as a system that’s almost always very leader-friendly, then you’re less likely to hope that there is going to be a fundamental course correction forced upon Xi by some coalition in the CCP. If new evidence reveals that even events like the 1978 Third Plenum weren’t actually a quasi-democratic moment that forced change on a hesitant leadership, then hope that something like that will happen in the future is something we have less reason to believe is possible.

Do you think Xi is more or less vulnerable than people think?

I don’t think there’s a consensus on Xi Jinping right now. We have some people who think that he’s invulnerable. We have some people who think that he’s under serious pressure. I certainly think that it’s the case that generally speaking leaders in the CCP, especially after they’ve been in power as long as Xi Jinping, tend to get what they want. 

The most likely danger for Xi Jinping would be if there is a lack of trust among the top leadership that’s created for one reason or another and that the people surrounding them feel that they need to go after first, but even then that would be a risky step for reasons I outlined in an article I wrote for Journal of Cold War Studies on the fall of Khrushchev in 1964. If that is the situation within Zhongnanhai we would most likely be the last people to know about it.

How does your analysis apply to other authoritarian regimes? 

When Steven Kotkin, Stalin’s biographer, read my book, he said that the most interesting thing for him was about how Leninist regimes are different from other forms of authoritarian ones because there is still some emotional attachment to the Party. When you lose a power struggle, you don’t exit and try to overthrow the CCP. You still put the stability of the Party as paramount. I don’t think that this belief is quite as strong as it certainly was in the early years of the Soviet Union or the PRC. But it does help understand why Xi Jinping cares so much about ideology in the sense that he very clearly sees one of the fundamental threats to the regime as a lack of people believing in the Party’s mission.

For a long time many people only joined the Party because they wanted to get ahead, because they wanted a career, because they wanted to make money. Xi Jinping has an older idea about what Leninist systems are – that they are organizational weapons that encompass your entire self and personality, that your meaning in life is sacrifice to this collective. It is about making yourself part of something bigger. That’s the kind of Leninist system he is trying to reestablish.

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