DRAFT: Night Thoughts on Dictatorial Court & Courtier Politics...
With the exoteric subject of the post being the rise of Deng Xiaoping to paramountcy in China in the late 1970s at the head of a coalition of PLA Fourth Front Army veterans, and the esoteric subject being obvious. Why any dictator not superstrong cannot afford even semi-competent senior lieutenants. Behind the paywall as I still hope to turn it into a, you know, actual essay, rather than a gnawing on the bone that is an analytical problem…
In my view, very smart by UCSD’s Victor Shih. From his book Coalitions of the Weak:
Shih, Victor C. 2022. Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/coalitions-of-the-weak/>
Why a dictator cannot afford a too-competent and too-connected lieutenant. And why in the 1940s Zhou Enlai—in his cups (or was he?)—would tell U.S. naval attaché staff that he had no higher ambitions than to rise to be #3 in the hierarchy of the CCP:
Victor Shih: Coalitions of the Weak: ‘The rise of Deng has never been satisfactorily explained…. He headed the Second Field Army, but there were a dozen or so other commanders…. Deng took a tough stance against “Two Whateverism,” but why was he able and willing to do so?… Mao needed Deng rehabilitated so that he could strengthen command over the military… [but with] so many veterans who had joined the party before the end of the Long March, why was Deng uniquely suitable to put the military in order? Why was he rehabilitated so soon after the fall of the Gang of Four?… The composition of the core leadership group in the 1980s—Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Ye Jianying, and Li Xiannian—in many ways seemed unlikely.