Policy Changes and Leadership Transitions in China and the Soviet Union

People still think of Chinese history as this two-line struggle because that's the story the Chinese tell. But everything from Mao Zedong's relationship to Liu Shaoqi to anything that happened during the 1980s, it was not a problem of competing policy platforms. It was a problem of getting the politics of your relationship with the top leader right when it was hard to guess what they were thinking and they were changing their mind and they were suspicious of you.

Joseph Torigian

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Joseph Torigian is a Research Fellow at the Harvard History Lab. Previously he was an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center. He is the author of Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:48
• Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng - 2:33
• Khrushchev Consolidates Power - 16:16
• Will History Repeat? - 30:11
• Connections to Contemporary China - 38:31

Key Links

Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao by Joseph Torigian

Harvard History Lab

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