Victor Shih's Coalitions of the Weak has many virtues, most important of which is that it has a novel, important and consistently argued point throughout. The central thread is that Mao had a stratagem, especially pronounced in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the challenge to his power represented by Liu Shaoqi and others. That stratagem was “to favor either very junior or historically tainted officials, whom I call coalitions of the weak… Mao hollowed out the bulk of the state and party bureaucracies” (pp. 2, 4).
Shih goes on to argue that in the wake of Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping, though strongly networked himself, was balanced by other strong personalities and this leadership chose “always nice” successors who were weakly networked – another coalition of the weak. In the wake of Tiananmen in particular, Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao were chosen precisely because they were weakly networked and this “laid the groundwork for Xi Jinping… to claim ultimate power in the party” (p. 5). It was the very weakness of Jiang and Hu that set the stage for Xi to maximize his power by again surrounding himself with weakly networked, dependent and variably competent underlings – a perhaps subtler reprise of Mao's stratagem.
Chairman Mao consistently adopted the strategy of pulling close to him persons who survived by dint of his grace, individuals who owed him everything. For instance, throughout his career Mao drew on the support of selected members of Zhang Guotao's shattered Fourth Front Army whom he had personally “saved.” Likewise, in the Cultural Revolution, the Chairman used as his henchmen ideologues who had no power base beyond that represented by the Chairman's support – “the scribblers.” Competence often was an entirely secondary consideration for Mao.
An example which Shih mentions, and which I found in my own research on leadership, was General Xu Shiyou. Early in his career, Xu became caught up in Mao's struggle with Zhang Guotao and the subsequent rectification campaign in Northwest China in the mid- and late-1930s. Nearly 40 years later, Xu recounted how Mao gave him salvation early on – he was politically born again. “Great leader Chairman Mao paid me a personal call. Smiling, Chairman Mao took my hand and sat down to have a heart-to-heart talk with me… From that day on, Chairman Mao had given me a new political life” (Lampton, Paths to Power: Elite Mobility in Contemporary China, University of Michigan, 1986, pp. 211–212). Later, in 1971, amidst the purge of Lin Biao, Xu Shiyou protected the Chairman on his harrowing return to Beijing to confront Lin. Mao cultivated total dependence.
In building his argument, Shih uses both fine detail derived from hundreds of primary language documents, as well as quantitative analysis that, among other things, measures the thickness of networks in various leadership cohorts to assess their relative dependence on the supreme leader. Also to be admired is Shih's comparative approach across leadership eras in China, from Mao to Xi on the eve of the Twentieth Party Congress, currently scheduled for October 2022.
Shih's analysis raises several questions, two of which I address here:
First, the book's central thread lends itself to the facile interpretation that the Chinese political system systematically promotes incompetence in order to achieve supreme leader dominance. The implication could be drawn that policy and outcomes are always secondary to loyalty. At a minimum this was less true for Deng and Jiang Zemin, than for Mao and perhaps Xi Jinping.
If one considers the entire PRC period (1949–2022), 73 years, about 50 per cent of that period (1978–2015?) was “relatively high performing.” Economic growth, military modernization, China's role in the global economy, development of export industries, and the domestic infrastructure build-out all were exceptional. It is hard to square an elite selection bias in favour of weakness (however defined) with this high, sustained performance. Also, the reform era had a high density of engineers in very high posts, and in my experience they were generally very data- and performance-driven – they were not uniformly sycophants. The word “engineer” doesn't appear in Shih's Index.
Shih's model is ascriptive, not achievement-driven. I found it interesting that the entire reform period leadership got less discussion than Zhang Guotao and his forces in the 1930s and thereafter. Zhu Rongji has one entry in the Index and Jiang Zemin very few. Qian Qichen, who was the Zhou Enlai-like face of Chinese foreign policy for much of the reform era, and very credible abroad, has no index citations. I also give Jiang Zemin credit for sharing the stage of national and international leadership with Zhu Rongji. Jiang tolerated a strong independent figure precisely because of their common commitment to high performance and shared policy goals. It takes a strong leader to coexist with other strong and competent leaders. When such coexistence occurs, high performance may provide its own legitimacy and strength.
This raises for me a second question. Is the coalition of the weak the dominant strategy over time and/or do different leaders pursue different strategies? Moreover, can central elite politics lean toward coalition of the weak dynamics while, at lower levels, locality and organizational performance and bureaucratic politics play larger roles? Shih seems to suggest this when he says: “Politics may be characterized by neopatrimonialism at the top and bureaucratic turf war and fragmented authoritarianism in the middle” (p. 197). In my interaction with municipal, provincial and ministerial-level leaders over the reform era, I generally have been struck by their competence and confidence – for example, Li Yuanchao (when he was in Jiangsu).
In short, this is a monumental book for specialists that raises important questions and advances a novel frame for the analysis of Chinese politics.
