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Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao's Stratagem to the Rise of Xi
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 Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or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.
248 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 26, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 6, 2025
When watching Survivor for the first time, it occurs to you that you want two types of people in your alliance: strong people, and loyal people. “We’re strong and loyal, we’ll go to the end.” After watching the show several times, you learn this often goes poorly. The loyalty-competence trade off is a bit too noble; at the end of the day, if everyone gets one vote, the disloyal, incompetent people also have a vote.
Instead, if you go to the end of the Survivor season with two other people that are disloyal and incompetent, they will not get as many votes as you by the annoyed panel. Even better for you while the game is going on: if they make an early blunder in the game, and everyone turns against them, they are now socially repugnant and an obvious choice for removal. You can now use this reputation against them for the rest of the game - they give you their vote, you consolidate power, or they don’t, and you vote them off with little to no cost to yourself. Better to be the mastermind surrounded by the weak (this applies to Survivor and psychopaths only, to be clear).
Even better: purging people means you can remove other players with the most connections / largest networks, mid-game. So by the time there’s 5 people left, the other 4 people have no connections with anyone. No one even has the ability to create an alliance except for you. More, the largest threats to your game are not players that are the smartest, strongest, etc, but they are the players with the largest social networks that can cast the widest nets to pool votes.
That is essentially the premise of this book: go to the end of the game with other weak players. You’ll always win. This is how Mao Zedong consolidated his power in the second half of his dictatorship, and ruled China until his last day on earth.
Mao had several different strategies to decentralize power below him:
- “Mixing in sand” = adding seats to politburo to dilute opposition
- exploit the “weak” factions = veterans of disgraced units, individuals with otherwise dubious political history, ostracized ethnic minorities, incompetent people that cannot do the job you’ve given them and are therefore reliant on you (worst case, you purge them, they were bad at their jobs and had bad reputations anyway)
For example, leaders of an army that made a famous political blunder during the Long March, the defining moment and founding of the Chinese communist party: “They prospered from their dishonored history because Mao could place them in important positions without elevating risks to his own power.”
This is a top 10 nonfiction book for me. It is absolutely incredible. Although heavily academic (I think it’s literally like a textbook of sorts) Shih comes with receipts and data. Which I enjoyed. I do LOVE a convincing graph.
Favorite quotes:
“Thus, a fundamental trade-off for dictators… is a choice between having experienced and well-networked lieutenants overseeing and potentially strengthening institutions in the regime and having clear information about the ruling coalitions’ ability to usurp their power accompanied by institutional devolution.”
“… being on the wrong side of history placed one in an extremely vulnerable position, which ironically helped one survive a suspicious dictator.”
“… illustrated a major pitfall of mobilizing ignorant pawns in political struggles - rivals also could exploit the pawns’ ignorance and ambition and use them against the dictator.”
“The tendency of veterans to stage coordinated resistance against the dictator explains why Mao, in his twilight years, favored the coalition of the weak almost entirely.”
Instead, if you go to the end of the Survivor season with two other people that are disloyal and incompetent, they will not get as many votes as you by the annoyed panel. Even better for you while the game is going on: if they make an early blunder in the game, and everyone turns against them, they are now socially repugnant and an obvious choice for removal. You can now use this reputation against them for the rest of the game - they give you their vote, you consolidate power, or they don’t, and you vote them off with little to no cost to yourself. Better to be the mastermind surrounded by the weak (this applies to Survivor and psychopaths only, to be clear).
Even better: purging people means you can remove other players with the most connections / largest networks, mid-game. So by the time there’s 5 people left, the other 4 people have no connections with anyone. No one even has the ability to create an alliance except for you. More, the largest threats to your game are not players that are the smartest, strongest, etc, but they are the players with the largest social networks that can cast the widest nets to pool votes.
That is essentially the premise of this book: go to the end of the game with other weak players. You’ll always win. This is how Mao Zedong consolidated his power in the second half of his dictatorship, and ruled China until his last day on earth.
Mao had several different strategies to decentralize power below him:
- “Mixing in sand” = adding seats to politburo to dilute opposition
- exploit the “weak” factions = veterans of disgraced units, individuals with otherwise dubious political history, ostracized ethnic minorities, incompetent people that cannot do the job you’ve given them and are therefore reliant on you (worst case, you purge them, they were bad at their jobs and had bad reputations anyway)
For example, leaders of an army that made a famous political blunder during the Long March, the defining moment and founding of the Chinese communist party: “They prospered from their dishonored history because Mao could place them in important positions without elevating risks to his own power.”
This is a top 10 nonfiction book for me. It is absolutely incredible. Although heavily academic (I think it’s literally like a textbook of sorts) Shih comes with receipts and data. Which I enjoyed. I do LOVE a convincing graph.
Favorite quotes:
“Thus, a fundamental trade-off for dictators… is a choice between having experienced and well-networked lieutenants overseeing and potentially strengthening institutions in the regime and having clear information about the ruling coalitions’ ability to usurp their power accompanied by institutional devolution.”
“… being on the wrong side of history placed one in an extremely vulnerable position, which ironically helped one survive a suspicious dictator.”
“… illustrated a major pitfall of mobilizing ignorant pawns in political struggles - rivals also could exploit the pawns’ ignorance and ambition and use them against the dictator.”
“The tendency of veterans to stage coordinated resistance against the dictator explains why Mao, in his twilight years, favored the coalition of the weak almost entirely.”
September 14, 2022
Great read in the lead up to the 20th party Congress next month. Shih provides a convincing argument about how Mao consolidated power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, leading to generations of power sharing that set the stage for Xi Jinping's own consolidation of power in the 2010s. Chinese elite politics rarely makes sense, but Shih knows what he's talking about!
October 22, 2022
This book changed how I look at those around personal dictators and strongmen. A new framework that is very timely with a renewal of Authoritarian Leaders today.
June 2, 2024
I've never read a book quite like this. It's a research paper, but a deeply accessible and legible one.
The author comes up with a new model for analyzing authoritarian politics. In service of understanding this model, he coins a new term, "Coalitions of the Weak," which refer to governmental bodies staffed by players who can't really wield the power of their offices, either because they are personally tainted, too junior, minimally-networked, or all three. As a result, though these bodies and their leaders ostensibly have a lot of power (in terms of their titles, job definitions, etc), they are in practice fully deferent to the dictator.
What's cool about the book is that it's political science in a very literal sense. He's genuinely doing science here, establishing a model through deep research, using it to explain past results in authoritarian politics, and even using it to make predictions. He does this well.
In my reading, his hypothesis is that authoritarians who deliberately pursue this strategy (building coalitions of the weak in the highest tiers of government) can consolidate and maintain absolute power even in the later years of their life, where they may otherwise be usurped.
His primary contention is that Mao Zedong did this intentionally and that it worked out well for him. He proves this contention rigorously with data, analysis, primary source material, and conclusions from other modern research. He explains how this model better fits the historical record of what actually happened in 20th century China than less nuanced models, like Factionalism (where dictators strictly promote people within their loyal faction), or this idea of some inherent tradeoff between Loyalty and Competency (which falls apart immediately if you look at it too hard).
The book leaves me with three thoughts:
First, that Victor is almost certainly correct about the following:
- That Coalitions of the Weak absolutely exist in government, and that his model is describing something very real
- That the establishment of these Coalitions was the centerpiece of Mao's strategy to consolidate power in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The Coalitions of the Weak strategy was employed deliberately and continuously by Mao, most obviously in the 60s and early 70s.
- That the strategy worked for Mao, and in microcosm worked for officials at other levels of government.
Second, that it's almost unbelievably accessible for the subject matter and the type of work that it is. The author explains a new political theory with crystal clarity. This book does not "read like a novel," but it does read like a friend is telling you a story (albeit one where the storyteller cares deeply about things like regression coefficients, and exactly how many friends in the army Lin Biao had in 1970). It's extremely digestible; you should check it out.
Third, that Victor C. Shih should not, under any circumstances, be given authoritarian control over a governing body.
The author comes up with a new model for analyzing authoritarian politics. In service of understanding this model, he coins a new term, "Coalitions of the Weak," which refer to governmental bodies staffed by players who can't really wield the power of their offices, either because they are personally tainted, too junior, minimally-networked, or all three. As a result, though these bodies and their leaders ostensibly have a lot of power (in terms of their titles, job definitions, etc), they are in practice fully deferent to the dictator.
What's cool about the book is that it's political science in a very literal sense. He's genuinely doing science here, establishing a model through deep research, using it to explain past results in authoritarian politics, and even using it to make predictions. He does this well.
In my reading, his hypothesis is that authoritarians who deliberately pursue this strategy (building coalitions of the weak in the highest tiers of government) can consolidate and maintain absolute power even in the later years of their life, where they may otherwise be usurped.
His primary contention is that Mao Zedong did this intentionally and that it worked out well for him. He proves this contention rigorously with data, analysis, primary source material, and conclusions from other modern research. He explains how this model better fits the historical record of what actually happened in 20th century China than less nuanced models, like Factionalism (where dictators strictly promote people within their loyal faction), or this idea of some inherent tradeoff between Loyalty and Competency (which falls apart immediately if you look at it too hard).
The book leaves me with three thoughts:
First, that Victor is almost certainly correct about the following:
- That Coalitions of the Weak absolutely exist in government, and that his model is describing something very real
- That the establishment of these Coalitions was the centerpiece of Mao's strategy to consolidate power in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The Coalitions of the Weak strategy was employed deliberately and continuously by Mao, most obviously in the 60s and early 70s.
- That the strategy worked for Mao, and in microcosm worked for officials at other levels of government.
Second, that it's almost unbelievably accessible for the subject matter and the type of work that it is. The author explains a new political theory with crystal clarity. This book does not "read like a novel," but it does read like a friend is telling you a story (albeit one where the storyteller cares deeply about things like regression coefficients, and exactly how many friends in the army Lin Biao had in 1970). It's extremely digestible; you should check it out.
Third, that Victor C. Shih should not, under any circumstances, be given authoritarian control over a governing body.
April 14, 2024
5 stars. This is an incredible work of scholarship which seriously adds to our understanding of PRC elite-level politics. This book significantly nuanced the way I view a number of key events in the history of the PRC, and at a modest 200 pages to boot. Even though some parts get a little dense, and other parts might get a little too in the weeds of PRC history for some, anyone interested in understanding elite PRC politics and the rise of Xi Jinping should read this.
The notion of a “coalition of the weak” isn’t especially novel, either in its conception or its application to PRC politics. Shih provides some theoretical offerings around this point which I take at face value, as well as some quantitative work to substantiate his thesis in the context of the PRC, which I’m not inclined to question. (I.e. there are some obligatory dense portions of the book which you could probably skip.)
Shih’s really key novel insight here, which he effectively wraps the book around, is the persistent career success of members of an historically tainted faction of CCP so-called splittist counter-revolutionaries. In other words, Shih noticed that numerous members of a group which we would have expected to see entirely purged and subsequently (re)persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, where instead promoted into various important positions by Mao and actively protected by him during the Cultural Revolution. This same group saw its fortunes continue to rise under Deng in the 1980s. It’s all super interesting stuff which you probably won’t read about anywhere else and which is worth the price of admission on its own.
Embedding this observation into Shih’s deep understanding of factionalism in the PRC and using a model of factional-competition results in a really compelling narrative which presents the history of elite PRC politics in a novel way and convincingly accounts for some of the factors that lead to Xi Jinping’s rise and domination of the CCP.
Whether you’re new to the subject and are looking to understand PRC politics and foreign policy, or you’re a long-time student of PRC history, this book is essential reading.
The notion of a “coalition of the weak” isn’t especially novel, either in its conception or its application to PRC politics. Shih provides some theoretical offerings around this point which I take at face value, as well as some quantitative work to substantiate his thesis in the context of the PRC, which I’m not inclined to question. (I.e. there are some obligatory dense portions of the book which you could probably skip.)
Shih’s really key novel insight here, which he effectively wraps the book around, is the persistent career success of members of an historically tainted faction of CCP so-called splittist counter-revolutionaries. In other words, Shih noticed that numerous members of a group which we would have expected to see entirely purged and subsequently (re)persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, where instead promoted into various important positions by Mao and actively protected by him during the Cultural Revolution. This same group saw its fortunes continue to rise under Deng in the 1980s. It’s all super interesting stuff which you probably won’t read about anywhere else and which is worth the price of admission on its own.
Embedding this observation into Shih’s deep understanding of factionalism in the PRC and using a model of factional-competition results in a really compelling narrative which presents the history of elite PRC politics in a novel way and convincingly accounts for some of the factors that lead to Xi Jinping’s rise and domination of the CCP.
Whether you’re new to the subject and are looking to understand PRC politics and foreign policy, or you’re a long-time student of PRC history, this book is essential reading.
November 9, 2025
This book gives a highly accessible overview of elite politics in China with lessons that can be applied more broadly to similar regimes. Although some googling might be required to keep track of who is who and the history in the years before the book starts, it is generally very easy and engaging to follow along. The coverage of Mao’s coalitions of the weak and Xi’s rise is excellent, however the years in-between get only a very brief treatment, lacking the nuance that the rest of the book has.
December 20, 2023
Amazing book on China's politics. Starting from Mao's promotion and protection of the veterans of the Four-Front-Army, Shih explains the power dynamics of the post-Great Leap Forward era. This is very sharp and compelling. To some extent, the collapse of the CCP's collective leadership in Xi's era is rooted in the 1980s. There are a lot of excellent predictions for the political scenario after 2022.
January 18, 2024
very interesting
This is a very interesting book. It is perhaps too detailed if you’re not interested the details of Chinese politics. But the overall message is valid for many other countries as well, namely that strong leaders almost by necessity surround themselves with weak men, which ultimately leads to chaos.
This is a very interesting book. It is perhaps too detailed if you’re not interested the details of Chinese politics. But the overall message is valid for many other countries as well, namely that strong leaders almost by necessity surround themselves with weak men, which ultimately leads to chaos.
January 4, 2024
TO Govern by one's regret, cool.
February 17, 2025
If you want to understand what is happening when government becomes for the few, read this book. It has applicability to what is happening in many parts of the world where oligarchs and government officials work to usurp power. How it happens is described well here.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews