Autocracy Reborn: The Rise of Strongmen in China from Mao to Xi
Daniel Mattingly
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Yale University
What explains the rise of an autocratic leader like Xi Jinping? The conventional wisdom is that leaders like Xi consolidate power by exploiting weak institutions and overcoming elite resistance. However, this framework cannot account for Xi’s rise in China, where robust Communist Party institutions might have constrained his power. This talk will argue that domestic crises prompt elites to voluntarily empower strong leaders to ensure regime survival, even at significant personal risk. He makes three core claims: (1) crises create incentives for elites to cede power to a strongman; (2) leaders with strong military ties consolidate power using a mix of coercive threats and ideological campaigns; and (3) such leaders are more likely to change the regime's core ideology. Combining qualitative case studies of Chinese leadership transitions from the 1930s to the present with a database of more than 100,000 military appointments and a corpus of 110,000 speeches, this research offers a systematic analysis of transformation in the Chinese Communist Party.
Cosponsored with the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies.
Daniel Mattingly is associate professor of political science at Yale University, specializing in the domestic and international politics of authoritarian regimes, particularly China. He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China and his research examines how the Chinese state controls protest and implements social policies, with ongoing work on the military's role in Chinese politics.