 are going at a particular moment. So the book is about the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1957 and China from 1975 to 1981. And there is a conventional view that these transitions after Stalin and Mao had a lot in common, that there was this confrontation over economics and politics. And ultimately, there was a triumph of reformers over conservatives or radicals. And that the victories of Khrushchev and Deng Xiaoping were the result of a victory of inner-party democracy and collective leadership. This historiography has a lot in common with the political science literature, as well, on how Leninist regimes work. And that's not really a surprise, because a lot of that political science literature drew precisely upon these two cases to theorize in the first place. So I think that we can look at this literature and draw three main ideas. And I grouped them together and called them the economic model because they have this elective affinity with one of the two ways that Weber conceptualized power, which his power essentially is a little bit of a popularity contest, politics of exchange. So I break it down into three separate ideas. The first is that the leader who provides the best patronage model or popular policy platform wins the power struggle. That there's a defined group that's enfranchised to choose their leader, and the sort of median voter makes the final decision. And the power ministries do not play an independent or unique role. This, I think, is a kind of consensus view within the political science literature on Leninist regimes and how they work. So I looked at four different cases to see whether or not that way of thinking about politics was accurate. The first is the fall of Beria. And I know I'm giving a talk to people in the UK. And many of them have probably seen the death of Stalin, so they might know a little bit about that. The second case is the purge of the so-called anti-party group in 1957, when a majority of the presidium, which is what the Politburo was called at that time, moved to remove Krzysztof from power, believing that he was irrigating too much power and establishing too much of a dictatorial model. And the China cases, the first, are the purge of the Gang of Four in 1976, and then the slow pushing out of Mao's initial successor, the Manhua Guofeng from 1976 to about 1981. And these cases tell a very different story, that it wasn't a politics of exchange, but a politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and a substantial role for the specialists in violence. So in other words, two of the most important successions in 20th century world history weren't so much victories of reformers over conservatives or radicals as previous concepts have argued, but a settling of scores. So I draw upon a different idea that Weber had about power, which I call the authority model, to contrast this view with the economic model, and I break it down into three parts. The first is that personal prestige and compromising material are more important than dispensation of patronage or real policy differences, that manipulating ambiguous rules is more important than canvassing for votes, and that the position of power ministries have an outsized effect on the outcome. So this raises some methodological questions, which is how exactly you test these two models against each other. So what I did was I took those two different views of thinking about politics, and I operationalized them or weaponized them by breaking them down into very specific questions that we could bring to the evidence and give a better sense of what exactly the answer is. So in terms of fighting over what, I ask first, did the winner have a leadership style that was unambiguously more prone to consensus, collective leadership, and co-optation than that of the losers? Second, I ask of the evidence were policy differences real or were alleged differences manipulated and overblown for the purposes of political struggle? And finally, to what extent did the outcome revolve around personal prestige, historical antagonisms, and the threat of compromising personal material? So that's fighting over what? The second set of questions has to do with who decides? And first I ask, was there serious deliberation about the strengths and weaknesses of a competitor, or did the winners conduct discussions in an unfair conspiratorial spirit and present the decision as a beta company? Second, were the winners determined by a power struggle within a single defined group, or which group was in power to determine the winners? And finally, to what extent did the winners violate even ambiguous rules? So that's who decides, and finally, who enforces the rules? Did leaders consider the power ministries to be irrelevant to struggles within the party, or did they consider control over the coercive organs to be essential? And second, when members of the power ministries expressed an opinion on the power struggle, was the effect equivalent to their voting power in the political bodies on which they had a seat, or did their positions threaten the potential use of force and therefore have an outsized effect? So I'm not saying that institutions don't matter at all. People aren't shooting each other at Politburo meetings. It's a knife fight, but it's a knife fight with weird rules. So in some ways, institutions did provide a little bit of a cap on the way that these struggles manifested. And sometimes in somewhat surprising ways, but also in ways that I think make Len and his parties unique, which is also very important here. The first is that competitors will go to great lengths to present their victories as legitimately as possible. So they want to win, but after they win, it matters to them that it looks better than it really was. Second is they won't resort to any more force than necessary, which means that if they can win in a way that makes them look better, they will do it. Losers will not defect. So when Stephen Kotkin, who's written a series of biographies of Stalin, read my book, he said that this was the most important and interesting thing, which is that because the members of these parties existed in a system in which the party for them was absolutely everything, even if you're very unhappy with the decision that the party makes, you don't go and start a new revolution. You don't go and start a new party. For the good of the party, this institution to which you've dedicated your life, you essentially accept the outcome. And finally, the power ministries are not an independent force, they are invited in, in a sense they're a little bit like vampires, right? They can't come into the house unless you ask them to, but once they are in the house, they can really do a lot of damage and really matter a lot. So it's not so much the military versus the political elite, but the political elite using the military or creating opportunities for the military to play a role. So some of you may be thinking, well, we already have a very different view of these moments in time. How is it that you have this revisionist account? And especially how can you make this revisionist account in a situation where the study of Russia and China is so hard given the politics of those regimes, especially over the last few years, and especially in China where we have a leader who has explicitly said that attacks on Chinese history are a form of historical nihilism and constitute an existential threat to the regime. Despite those challenges, and we can talk about those in the Q and A, it's actually quite an exciting moment to do research on China. So Nicola Leveringhaus, for example, has written a book on just about the most sensitive topic that anybody could think of, which is of course nuclear weapons in the People's Republic of China. And the reason that's possible is because there is this group of sources of evidence that we can draw upon to continue to do research on Chinese history. And I'll talk a little bit about them because I know so many of the people in this group are students. So first of all, it's actually possible to get primary sources on China and it's possible to get them without even going to China. The reason for that is there are these databases that you can access in the West, and of course, including in the UK, that are these giant compendiums of archival material or at least internal circulation material. The one you see in the upper left corner is sort of colloquially known as the LA Collection or the Chinese Services Publication Center. This is primary source material that could fill one giant room. It's all physical material, so you need to be able to access it. So you can get it through interlibrary alone, although I do believe that there are some libraries in the UK that have a full set. So Myung-yi in the upper right corner has the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, which is also an extensive collection of primary sources. University of Freberg has the Maoist Legacy Database, also a collection of primary sources. And then also there are these sort of in-house internal circulation history journals called the Huishu Ziliang, that are available in the West that also have very interesting material. There's others we can talk about that are also the primary sources. It's also possible to buy very interesting material online, the so-called Confucius book, used book website, which we can continue to use to purchase material from the PRC, including some very rare and interesting material. Also it was possible to go to Hong Kong and it's dried up a little bit, but even over the last few years, some very interesting material has continued to be published in Hong Kong. One example on the far left is a book in a series of histories written by party historians within the PRC that published in Hong Kong where the censorship laws were less severe. But also there's been an extraordinary set of memoir literature that's also been published in Hong Kong from all people from all over the political spectrum. So the book in the middle was written by a man named Deng Li-Chun, who was a famous so-called leftist in the 1980s. And in the far right, we see a book that was written by the daughter of Hu Yabang, who was of course the famous pro-reform general secretary who's death in 1989 sparked the Tiananmen protests. And we also should keep in mind that even within the PRC, there has been a lot of material that at least up until about 2015, 2016, even though it was coming out within the PRC, quite valuable and quite interesting material. So in the far left, you see Yan Huang-Tuanqiu, which is probably the most famous party history journal. But for years, it would publish material on the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and even sensitive figures like the man Hu Yabang that I just mentioned. So putting all of this material together, we get a different sense of what happens in the two cases in the book where I talk about China. First, I'll talk about the Gang of Four and then I'll talk about Huang Bo-Feng and then I'll conclude. So people who've heard of the Gang of Four, very likely probably heard that they were a tightly knit group, very radical, exclusionary, aggressive. But what the new evidence shows is that although the gang did not consist of pushovers in any sense, and they did combine what were aggressive tactics with a desire also to coexist with other members of the leadership, that despite their policy inclinations that were different from other party leaders, those differences were not fundamental, and the gang did not have their own coherent policy platform. The gang's most serious problems were personal, especially with regard to historical problems, by which I mean a lack of major accomplishments before 1949, an association with the worst accesses of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The gang were unexpectedly arrested instead of being openly confronted at either a Politburo or Central Committee meeting. The second option, meaning the sort of political confrontation option being too risky, given the number of gang supporters in the Central Committee, and the palace guards played a decisive role in the arrest of the gang, and the military played a role as a crucial backup force. So let's look a little bit of the evidence. So this is a speech that Jiang Qing gave that is a primary source from the archive. And what we see here is language that we tend to not associate with Jiang Qing. And what we see her doing is reaching out to the old comrades, doing a self-criticism for her behavior in the Cultural Revolution, but also trying to distance herself from the worst accesses of the Cultural Revolution. So we see her here saying, our chairman, of course, meaning Mao, said that 70% of the Cultural Revolution was good and 30% was bad. I said this last time and I won't repeat it. I will think more about the 30%, meaning the bad parts. You comrades who were attacked should think more about the 70%, meaning the good parts. The chairman says that the 30% must also be treated objectively. Now this is very interesting. With regard to the 30%, originally I had thought that it was simply not my fault. Knocking down everything, doubting everything, I sent Chairman Mao a report. These were the ideas of Tao Zhu, the former Central Cultural Revolution group advisor, meaning not her. I simply had nothing to do with all out civil war. After the chairman's analysis, I then thought that even though it was not my fault, it had occurred during the Cultural Revolution. I was first vice head of the Central Cultural Revolution group. So it was necessary to think about the experiences and lessons. This man here is Zhang Tuen Chao, who was seen as the sort of ideological core of the group, the person who could be credited for theorizing the Cultural Revolution. But actually when we look at what he said, we see very surprising language. Here we see him saying when we are criticizing the mistake of using production to suppress politics, caters absolutely must not because of this give up on production, meaning that he didn't completely not care about economic growth. But also what was very interesting about Zhang Tuen Chao is we know that his political modus operandi was not to sort of push for his own clear ideological agenda, but essentially to intuit what he thought Mao wanted better than anyone else and bring it to Mao. This I think way of looking at politics in the world had a lot to do with what he saw had happened to Mao's previous secretaries, one of which had committed suicide at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. So he said, for example, I do not say anything that chairman does not tell me to say. If the chairman doesn't tell me to move, I don't move. So if the gang of four were doing self criticisms reaching out to the old guard, weren't really pushing for their own agenda, but just trying to do what they thought Mao wanted them to do, why were they so unpopular in certain corners of the party? Well, I think that one of the most crucial things to keep in mind is that they existed in a system in which prestige and authority was equated with your contributions to the revolution. When you joined the revolution, how much you sacrificed for the revolution, whether during moments of profound crisis you were able to show that you were smarter, that you saw more clearly and were able to predict the future more accurately than other people. This was the real sort of cache of political capital within the party. In an interview with an American scholar, Jiang Qing once said that to understand her, it was necessary to read an article written by Lu Xun, the famous Chinese author called Gossip is a Fearful Thing. And essentially what she was trying to say was that her entire life had been a battle against character assassination. And Jiang Qing, of course, had been an actor in Shanghai in the 1930s. And when she went to Yan An, she was looked down upon by many within the party because of that experience, because she had joined Yan An later than other individuals. Jiang Chunxiao, once when he was asked by his daughter why he wasn't more aggressive and confident in his role, he said, what base camp was started by me? Essentially meaning he didn't have the kind of prestige that other people had given their history within the party. They did have prestige in the sense that they were associated with the cultural revolution and the Mao had given the cultural revolution his imprimature. But of course, this was also a double-edged sword because the cultural revolution was so deeply unpopular within many corners of the party. At the same time, however, the cultural revolution had gone on for 10 years. Mao had given it his personal favor and the gang had had many years to cultivate support within the party, which meant that by 1976, half of the Politburo Standing Committee and most of the Central Committee were potentially inclined to, were either members of the gang of four or potentially inclined to support the gang of four. So the people who wanted to remove the gang couldn't use party institutions to confront them. They had to do something else. And what's very interesting is that one of the political events that they had in mind that shaped their thinking was one of the Soviet cases from the book. The 1957 incident when a majority of the Presidium, as I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, moved to remove Khrushchev from power. But what Khrushchev did was he stalled for time which allowed the summoning of an emergency Central Committee session, which allowed him by relying on Marshal Zhukov and Zhukov's prestige as the man who defeated Nazi Germany by using his special control over compromising material to turn the situation around. So the fear was that if the gang were confronted at a Politburo meeting, they would say that they wanted to have a discussion at a full Central Committee plenum and there the plotters would have had a much weaker case simply because of the numbers. So what they decided to do was essentially arrest the gang, prepare a case and not allow them to rally support from other corners in the party. And what's interesting is after the gang was arrested and their supporters in Shanghai were confronted and given the material that had already been collected, they looked at that material and they said, that's it. But that's the best you can do, which suggests that if there had been a more open discussion than the party, things might have gone a little bit differently or at the very least would have taken much longer. So now I wanna talk about Huaguo Feng and this is an interesting case because we often see even in media accounts that Deng Xiaoping started reform and opening at Third Plenum in 1978 and that Deng Xiaoping was an institutionalizer that cared about building post-Mao guardrails. For people who know a little bit more about history, they've probably heard an idea that Huaguo Feng was a dogmatic individual with a radical ideology, that he attempted to block the rehabilitation of the old revolutionaries, that he had his own faction, the whateverists and that he was deeply unpopular. But what the new evidence suggests is that actually, Huaguo Feng was very popular in many corners of the party, did not have his own faction, wanted to work with and co-opt the old revolutionaries and deserves credit for starting the reform process in a way that means we should think a little bit more carefully when we say that Deng started the reform process in 1978. So those of you who study Chinese history might have an immediate reaction, which is, well, what about the two whateverists? Well, the two whateverists were this phrase that appeared in early 1977 that sounded like there was not going to be a movement away from Mao's model of the cultural revolution. But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the two whateverists were, this slogan. Because the plans for Deng Xiaoping to return to work were already proceeding, this phrase was introduced because of a fear that moving away from Mao too quickly would be destabilizing, precisely because they were moving away from Mao's policies in concrete terms. So an intellectual came up with the phrase without realizing exactly how it was going to be interpreted and it was a huge disaster. In fact, at the 1978 work conference, Huaguo Feng said, at the time, I did not consider these two expressions completely enough reflecting now if only the two whateverists had not been raised, things would have been fine. So this essentially was a misinterpreted signal within Chinese elite that did not reflect what Huaguo Feng's intentions were or what he was already doing. So people of course have heard of the special economic zones. People often think that Deng Xiaoping is the person who deserves credit for them. This is a very interesting picture. It shows the father of Xi Jinping, Xi Zhongxuan, standing up in the middle, pointing at a map with Deng Xiaoping sitting down and looking up at him. This got a lot of attention because it appeared a few years ago at a museum in China. And this picture is a gross misrepresentation of history. It's supposed to be a picture of a work meeting in April of 1979 when the special economic zones were approved. But Deng was not present for most of that meeting or during Xi's most important speech proposing the special economic zones. According to one accounts, Deng and Xi did not even meet. After returning to Guangdong, where Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongxuan, was the party boss, most of his comments were about not Deng Xiaoping but Huaguo Feng, saying that it was Huaguo Feng who deserved credit and was giving support for the special economic zones. So people might have heard this expression, practice is the sole criterion of truth. There was this campaign discussion in 1978 about whether this phrase was appropriate. Many people think that the debates over a practice as the sole criterion of truth was a power struggle between Deng Xiaoping and Huaguo Feng. We now know that that's not accurate, that this began as a purely academic theoretical conversation. But Deng Xiaoping was furious at Huaguo Feng because Hua was making inroads into the military, which Deng saw as his personal bailiwick. So Deng turned it into a political wedge issue. And this was deeply unfair to Huaguo Feng because Hua, in fact, never opposed its discussion. So then that raises questions, well, what then did happen at the third plenum, the famous third plenum that allegedly started reform in 1978? Well, what happened was the old revolutionaries were upset with how slowly rehabilitation was going. And rehabilitation of the old comrades after the Cultural Revolution wasn't going slowly because Huaguo Feng opposed it, but because it was really, really, really hard because Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai had approved those cases, which meant that it was hard for them to be addressed quickly. But what's really interesting is that the son of Hu Yoban wrote that during the meeting, Hu Yoban came home and said that it was Hua Guofeng in one swipe of the pickaxe who had broke a hole in the dike, just how big the flow of history will make that hole as completely up to the power of the people. So Hu Yoban credited Huaguo Feng with the breakthrough of the third plenum, not Deng Xiaoping. There's one other thing I want to talk about when it comes to Huaguo Feng and whether or not there were differences between him and Deng Xiaoping. And that has to do with this very famous speech that Deng Xiaoping gave on August 18, 1980. Now, this speech is very famous because it looks like Deng Xiaoping making a programmatic case for political reform within the party. Deng Xiaoping criticizes feudalism within the party, says they need to move away from the legacy of Mao's strongman rule. This speech was not understood in the appropriate historical context, which was Deng Xiaoping was trying to come up with a slogan and expression justifying the removal of Hua Guofeng and did not really actually mean what he was saying. And we know that based on the timing of when he gave that speech in terms of his broader machinations against Hua Guofeng, but also because people who were proximate to the decision-making at that time also think that this was primarily about Hua Guofeng and not what Deng Xiaoping actually thought. So Deng Li-Chun, who I mentioned earlier, one of these famous alleged notorious leftists of the 1980s. And one of his memoirs said that this speech by Comrade Xiaoping in actuality was directed against Hua Guofeng. It was preparation for Hua to leave his position to find a theoretical justification. Zhao Ziyang, who was the general secretary of the party in 1989 during the student protests and was removed from supporting the students. Someone once asked him, well, why wasn't there political reform in the 1980s? Look at the speech that Deng gave in 1980. And Zhao Ziyang's response was, quote, at this time Deng was primarily addressing Hua Guofeng, he was struggling against Hua Guofeng. So this I think raises also a lot of interesting questions about how we interpret political language coming out of the PRC. So then what was Hua Guofeng's problem? Why was he removed? Well, first of all, Hua Guofeng joined the party much later, of course, than people like Deng Xiaoping or Chun Yun. So he was seen as sort of an upstart, someone who had helicoptered during the Cultural Revolution, which of course was a very deeply unpopular event for many of the old guard. He was also vulnerable to compromising material. So anybody who was able to stay in power during the Cultural Revolution was susceptible to that kind of character assassination. One of the most famous examples of compromise was the picture you see before you right now, the so-called eight-person picture. This picture was used to suggest that Hua Guofeng was closer to the gang of four than previously thought. But actually when this picture was taken, Hua Guofeng had already started the coup against the gang of four. So it was used very, very unfairly. To push him out, Deng Xiaoping resorted to devious moves, manipulation of different rules. Deng met privately with a lot of individuals and Hua Guofeng was overseas in a very sort of conspiratorial manner. And there was also a lot of lying. So the reason we have this sort of wrong sense of Hua Guofeng is because he had to be sort of tarnished and portrayed to be someone who he really wasn't to make it seem like the act of pushing him out was more tasteful than it really was. So what does all this mean for how we think about Chinese politics today? Well, some people hope that there will be another so-called third plenum that a group within the elites will force a course correction through elite revolt that a central committee will declare that Xi Jinping's model is not working and therefore needs to move to a different approach to the outside world and also politics at home. But this revision of the third plenum historiography suggests that even at this moment that was seen as a rare golden era of inter-party democracy was not actually in fact such. I think that this research also shows that generally speaking policy differences don't really determine the outcomes of elite contestation. So the idea that Xi Jinping will be punished for perceived incompetence or that there is a competing coherent faction and leadership are unlikely. It also shows that suggesting that Xi Jinping is different from Deng Xiaoping is not quite accurate in the sense that Deng Xiaoping was someone who didn't really care that much about party institutions. And as I mentioned with regard to this famous speech in 1980 didn't really believe what he was saying very often when it came to this idea of overcoming the legacy of Mao's strongman rule. And that altogether what we see based on this new evidence is that despite what so much of the previous historiography said as well as the political science literature that Leninist regimes are ultimately not popularity contests. So I'll stop there and I look forward to the Q&A. Wonderful, thank you so much, Joseph. And please write your questions in the Q&A and I have a couple of my own of course that I'll start with. Joseph, I found it a fascinating comparison of the two states. But I'm gonna focus obviously on more on China. I really loved your chapter five on Hua Guofeng. I think there is still quite a limited amount of literature in English anyway. On this political figure. And so I thought it was absolutely wonderful. So I've got two big, I guess, questions to start off with. And the first is, you are presenting quite a challenge to different disciplines, right? Like you yourself recognize you're challenging the historiography of the third plenum. For instance, you're also challenging I think in terms of political science and international relations debates very much the legacy of Deng Xiaoping and also the framings of the Chinese political system as it were and what the implications are for today. And in many respects you as yourself acknowledge, I think towards the end of the book is that you are problematizing how we understand China, right? It's harder. You're basically telling us the story is a lot more complicated and it's messier. There isn't this linearity as it were, right? So my first question is why do you think the dominant framings and interpretations, particularly on the China side of the story, why have those dominant views endured for so long? And particularly around the third plenum and sort of how Deng Xiaoping was framed and in particular sort of the push for collective leadership. Why have those views endured for so long? And obviously you can say, well, that's because I've come across new evidence. But it would seem to me that there's likely to be not simply sort of, you're not just presenting a historical revisionist piece of work here but also there's likely to be some pushback I would imagine politically thinking here to these very notions, right? Because as I said, I think it makes it very difficult. Now you're saying it's much harder the past. It's not as clear cut our understanding of China. So it's maybe unfair question, but why have these views endured for so long? And then the second question is about the issue of time and how that feeds into our understanding of sort of the Chinese political system now and moving forward. I was really taken with the role of sort of different forms of personal prestige that you talk about in the book. And by the way, for those of you listening in, the book in the conclusion even sort of has some words to say about the North Korean regime as well, which is quite fascinating. When you talk about sort of the role of revolutionary prestige as being important or martial prestige, you've got me thinking about not just the current leader in China, Xi Jinping, of course, and how he doesn't have that level of martial revolutionary prestige that Deng Xiaoping had. And that's the point you make well in your book. You talk about how hands-on he is, for instance, as opposed to Deng Xiaoping, even if they both share the sort of centralized strong leader approach. So my question is as time goes on and of course leaders are not gonna have that direct link to the revolutionary past, are they? It's just because of a matter of time as it were. What's going to replace those types of personal prestige? What do you expect based on your research to see replacing and having legitimacy in that process of replacing prestige? Because it seems to me that the system is well-primed just to continue to support prestige, manipulation and coercion, those practices. I mean, the system is well-primed for that. But it's more about the content of the prestige really and the type of prestige moving forward. So as time passes, maybe not quite now, but 50 years or more, what types of prestige do you think the political system or the party, sorry, the party will be promoting and legitimizing as it were? So take what you like of those questions, Joseph, but I thought I'd just kick off a wonderful presentation with some questions that I found fascinating from the book. Nicola, I can tell that you read the book very closely and I'm terribly grateful to you for that and for asking such very interesting questions. When it comes to your first query about why do these wrong ideas about the past persist? It's one I've reflected on. I think the most immediate reaction is that these are things that are really, really, really easy to get wrong. And we see that even at the time within the Chinese leadership, so many people were making incorrect judgments about what had happened, right? So it's not the idea of dumb Westerners who are incapable of understanding China just not getting it. I mean, these are just systems that are inherently misinformation factories, which is one of the reasons why policy mattered so little because you often just have no idea what the other person really represents, right? The other is that the winners get to tell the outcome. The winners get to say what happened and the winners are very powerful and they get to push the narrative in particular ways, right? And in China, revising previous historical judgments is really, really, really hard, right? And I think that actually Xi Jinping is more careful than people give him credit when it comes to addressing previous party decisions on what the past means. He, we can talk about what the policies actually are, but he's very explicit that he isn't rejecting reform and opening. And then what he's trying to do is address the problems that reform and opening created that everybody recognized exists and he is overcoming them to sort of save reform and opening. The other thing I wanna talk about is we do have this problem sometimes in the West with, I think, Fadism and a little bit methodology, right? Where if you have this view of thinking about the world and it's easier to do with one particular method, it's more likely for you to think about the world in a particular way. But I think also just sometimes it's not even a methodological thing, but just intuitively to say that policy differences don't matter, it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? It's a very counterintuitive idea for people from the West to think that you wouldn't be punished for making mistakes or that actually by being popular in some ways will actually make you vulnerable because people will want to feel engaged by you. So I think that's also important. The other is that like there has been a bit of a sort of freezing in the study of elite politics in China and part of that I think is because this kind of research for some people isn't scientific enough, although I think that I see a lot of rigor in the amount of work that needs to be done to go through all of this. And I think that the questions I ask are rigorous ones in the sense that there is a yes or no answer based on how you look at the evidence, but there's been several decades where people haven't been working on this and this is stuff that's not easy to learn, right? So a lot of what I learned, I had to learn from people who are not in the United States. And then of course, the final thing I'll say is that the people who really do know about the past, it's harder sometimes for them to write in English or it's even sometimes hard for them to write about at all. So to a pretty significant extent, I feel that in terms of discipline, disciplines and that kind of thing, I'm actually more of a translator in some ways than I am some other things. And I'm trying to sort of bring to the most speaking world a lot of the important work that the Chinese historians have been doing. Finally, your question about revolutionary prestige, I think is an absolutely fascinating one. You were talking about how the Chinese or the kind of Chinese Communist Party is increasingly distant from the revolutionary past and how this creates challenges for a prestige legitimacy. I think that's exactly why Xi Jinping talks so much about party history, right? So one of the most striking things when you read the political report from 20th Party Congress is that we need to study party history. We need to study the past. And the very first thing that he did after the 20th Party Congress is he went to Yanan, which was of course the communist base camp during the wars against the KMT and the Japanese. He has drawn a little bit about, he has drawn a little bit upon his father's prestige. So his father, of course, as I was talking about before was a very high-ranking figure in the PRC after 1949, a prominent revolutionary course from before 1949. And it's interesting that the way they talk about that is how the Jiafeng, like the family style sort of helped inculcate in him the right way of looking at the world that makes him a person that's best, a better, the best person to lead China. He talks a lot about his experiences as a sentown youth as something that was a process of struggle where he became tough, but also saw what the peasants were like and how poor they were and how much they suffered and how that rededicated him to the cause. That's also part of his legitimation narrative. But also I think that when we read how the party characterizes him and legitimizes his rule, it's a distant echo of this revolutionary prestige stuff, right? So the idea that COVID is like a war, it's like a battle and that Xi Jinping was the one who won it because he was the person who saw the right way of moving forward. Now, of course, that worked for a little while because, but then the new variants came which made a very, very different situation. The implications of which we have seen over the last few days, which is a very dangerous thing. But I'll also say that Xi Jinping is someone who's close control over the organs of the party who conduct investigations so that he understands the power of compromising material. He uses compromising material very effectively. There was an article recently by Chunhan Wang in the Wall Street Journal where he talked about how Xi Jinping used that as a powerful element of his rule. But you're right, like it was conceivable that Xi Jinping could be vulnerable even though I don't think that he is because he does, this is such a leader friendly system which is a lot for him to do so much. But that's true in a way that it was, it would be totally inconceivable for Mao Erdan, right? So Mao won the revolution for people to reject him would mean rejecting themselves. It would be totally inconceivable. And for Deng, it was not quite at the level as Mao, but there was the sense that he was the boss and that one of the reasons for that was history had created the conditions that made him the right person for the job. And there was one very prominent leader who didn't want there to be a violent crackdown on June 4 and ultimately went along and took the party line and somebody asked him why he did that. And he said, if Deng is wrong, I'm wrong along with him. If he's right, I'm right along with him. There wasn't this idea that you would buck the core it was just totally inconceivable. So that's the best I can do for your questions. Thanks, I mean, thanks, I mean, I think it's fascinating. And I think I'm, I mean, time will tell but it's very, for me, it's sort of also moving forward a lot will depend on how the succession politics end up, right, vis a vis she and in the future. I think he's still far too young for us to have any sense, right? But, but, you know, I'm whether, for instance, links to past leaders will start to matter more, you know, your, your, your link to, you know, whether it be Mao or Deng and whether that'll become a source of personal prestige as it were. You know, and similarly, a lot of these sources of personal prestige are domestically driven, right? I mean, they're very much about, you know, a particular point in China's history, right? At the start of its history, as it were. And obviously the side to that is, of course, of the fighting against the Japanese, but I wonder again, if in the future, and I'm thinking here, I see quite a far off future, you know, China might have to, personal sources of leadership prestige will have to look beyond the Chinese nation as it were and look to, you know, the international stage. You know, I'm here, I'm thinking like the Belt and Road and other sort of bigger projects depending on how they end up evolving over the next 10 years or more. So I guess, yeah, I think it's, there's a lot of fertile ground here to think about how personal prestige, political personal prestige in China will evolve within this one party authoritarian system when it eventually will sort of have less, you know, strong and obvious links to a particular point of time, right, of the early story, as it were, the genesis of the PRC. So I think it's a fascinating story. Okay, we have a question from Nick. So I'll read it out, Joseph. I know you can probably read it, but I'll just read it out anyway. Thanks very much, Joseph. One question from me. One, not asking you to predict what the removal or resignation of Xi from power would look like in a world of mass information and disinformation, are there any subtle indicators that an international audience should look for that would suggest genuine disapproval within the CCP vis-a-vis Xi's position that could indicate a desire for change in leadership? So, yeah, are there any sort of things that we should be looking for from the outside that suggest that Xi's claim on power and his role is unstable? Yeah, so the first thing to say is that it's very easy to misinterpret signals in this regard, right? So let me give you an example. People were wondering whether Li Keqiang, the premier, was challenging Xi Jinping earlier this year by talking about the economy in a way that some people thought implied was an implicit criticism of zero COVID. And one of the things they did was compare it to this famous meeting in 1962 called the 7,000 Catter Conference. And why did they do that? Well, the idea was that in 1962 at this giant meeting of seven, it was actually more than 7,000 caters where there was a review of the mistakes of the Great League forward. And so there was a very famous speech by Liu Shaoqi that was especially sort of blunt, but also there were comments made by another man named Peng Zhang that seems critical of Mao himself. So I've talked a little bit about a revisionist's story of 1978. There's also new evidence on 1962 that suggests that understanding of that event was also wrong and that these comments that Peng Zhang made were misunderstood. Now, what's interesting is I had always looked at these comments by Peng Zhang and thought to myself, why would he say that? It doesn't make sense because it would be inconceivable that you would criticize the top leader at a moment of crisis, but also I think that everybody was like the mouth faction, but even within that kind of parameters, Peng Zhang was like a student of Mao, like so Mao as his guru. They were extraordinarily close, right? So I was like, why did he say that? And then on one occasion, I was talking to a party historian and I said, what was going on here? And he started grinning and he was like, yeah, this is like one of the most interesting and wrong verdicts of party history. And what had happened was Deng Xiaoping had seen Mao make those comments about himself and told Peng Zhang and Peng Zhang was like repeating a version of what Mao had said. It was really interesting as Cheng Bo-da who was Mao's own secretary criticized Peng Zhang for making those comments because even he didn't know what was going on, right? But what this suggests is even if moments like 1962 are not really cases of someone bucking the core, it makes it less likely that what Li Keqiang was doing was something similar because it makes it more hard to believe that there would be open debates within the leadership in the way that people could interpret now. What I often think happens is that the party pursues multiple goals at once. A party always pursues multiple goals at once. So to say that it only cares about zero COVID or only cares about the economy, I think is not accurate. So when you're trying to do both of those things, it's very easy to sort of wonder whether or not there are different signals coming out of the headquarters or whether there is more than one headquarters, right? But also like for example, in the Deng era there were the four cardinable principles which is a very conservative formulation but there was also reform and opening which was all about reform. So sometimes Deng would say more about one or the other or sometimes somebody in the leadership would say more about one or the other and this would be seen as a power struggle but often it would either be deputies fighting against each other but they would be doing it by going sort of through the top leader and saying look what the top leader said to use as a weapon against somebody else but not actually pushing against the top leader because ultimately the game is to intuit what the top leader wants and bring it to them better than anybody else not to pressure the top leader to do what you want by implicitly or explicitly threatening a challenge against them, right? The other thing to keep in mind is if we're picking up on signals but differences within the elite, Xi Jinping has too which means that he will likely do something about it very quickly, right? It's one of the most interesting documents that I saw in the archives was a letter written by Molotov to the leadership after Khrushchev was published in 1964 and essentially he said if you look at every single document from every single person for years of Khrushchev's will you will not see even the slightest hint of a disagreement with Khrushchev, right? So counterintuitively it was precisely because Khrushchev thought he was so strong that the plotters who thought that Khrushchev was gonna move against him which is why they felt a need to do not any policy differences. They were able to get the jump on him but even then they thought they weren't gonna come out on top, right? But the idea that people on the outside would be able to see this, I think is first of all unlikely because I think that it's unlikely there would be a move against Xi Jinping but also because you wanna be as conspiratorial as possible. You don't wanna like have this open warfare within the party because first of all it's damaging the party and that's one of the reasons Xi Jinping is so powerful. But I think so I think that as I said I don't think Xi Jinping is invulnerable I think he's very strong but whether he is vulnerable it's likely that we on the outside will be the last to know about it but in the meantime there will be a lot of signals that might make it seem like he's under pressure which based on our understanding of history helps us get a sense of why those signals are likely being interpreted when they're looked at in that sense. A lot more questions I could ask and I'm gonna use my position here because it's not often we also don't we don't get much time ourselves to talk to each other as well with the lockdown circle. So I mean, there's a lot of isn't there there's a lot of inflated talk around the relationship today between Russia and China and the depths of that relationship particularly in light of the war in Ukraine and so forth. And I think your book really gives some interesting sort of historical context as it were to that relationship and the degree to which historically speaking both these nations were looking at one another and you also sort of hinted this as well in regards to North Korea as I say at the end of the book how these sort of communist states end up not necessarily mirroring each other but having different and having somewhat different stories but driven by some of the very same dynamics as it were, right? So I guess my question is and particularly given you've probably seen this yourself you know, there've been some recent photos haven't there of Kim Jong-un taking his daughter to see weapons tests and so forth and his house test. So my question to you is the extent to which you know, this historical snapshot that you present in your book you think remains valid today in terms of these nations that still you know, there's still communist nations the extent to which there is scope and the likelihood for looking at one another when the time comes. I mean, again, it's still very, you know Kim Jong-un doesn't say like Xi Jinping quite young that doesn't seem to be an issue that needs to be sort of seriously considered right now in terms of succession politics but in the case of Russia perhaps that is something actually more likely of the three. So the degree of looking at one another within the sort of the communist category as it were what do you see the scope for that? Yeah, that's a terrific question and I think Xi Jinping in particular is a sort of case study and how much China learns from Russia because Xi Jinping is absolutely fixated on the collapse of the Soviet Union, right? So Xi Jinping has a very deep long interest in Russia. What's interesting about Xi Jinping is he was born in 1953 and that year the most prominent slogan in the propaganda apparatus was the Soviet Union of today is China's tomorrow. His father who worked at the State Council for Joe and Lai during the 1950s one of his jobs was managing the Soviet experts who went to China to help rebuild after the wars. Xi Jinping's father visited Moscow in 1959. In fact, he left Reitz at the mausoleum of Lenin and Stalin. He came back, he brought pictures and souvenirs which Xi Jinping said, I forget which was which but one of them was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution but he said his father had a very positive impression. Xi Jinping said that when he was a stunk down youth he loved to read this Russian communist novel called What is to be Done by Cheney Shevsky in which one character, Ahmetov, famously liked to sleep on a bed of nails to inculcate his revolutionary will. And Xi Jinping, I think his first trip overseas after he became the top leader, which was to Russia he met these Russian sinologists and he said, people think that my generation is oriented towards the West but I wanna tell you that I grew up under two different literatures the Chinese literature and the Russian literature. His advisor at Tsinghua when he wrote his dissertation in the 1990s wrote a book with some Russian scholars about the differences between Chinese and Russian reforms. Xi wrote an article in the 1990s where he said that the Soviets got their reforms wrong because they tried to do political and economic reform at once in a way that the population couldn't handle. When he first came to power a lot of people thought that he was going to be a reformer because of what they thought as his father being a reformer but the first big sort of red blinking light the warning sign was a speech that he gave about the collapse of the Soviet Union in which he said first that the Soviet Union collapsed because they lost control over their ideology. They lost in part of the reason for that and he was explicit about this was they lost control over their history that they had allowed too much criticism of past leaders and the behavior of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. And then he said, and this is kind of scary given the context of what's happened in China the last few days was during the moment of truth and there were all of these protests against leadership meaning 1991 of course in the Soviet Union that no real man came forward which was I think his way of also telling the party that if he was ever faced with the same situation that he would be a real man, let's speak, right? Even when you look at these speeches that Xi Jinping gave that were leaked about Xinjiang he brings up the Soviet Union twice. Once he says is we can't completely persecute religion because then we'll be like the Soviet Union and his question underground and it's hard to control and it's more radicalized. And then he also says, I think something that's even more interesting which was look and see which were the first Soviet social republics that left? They were the most economically advanced ones and he was talking about the Baltic countries of course and that was his way of saying that to resolve the ethnic issue in China, it's not purely about economic growth there's an ethnic element there too that we need to consider. So Xi Jinping I think its meaning in life is the party. The CCP was an outgrowth of the Russian revolution. The Russian revolution of course ended in 1991 and that's something that Xi Jinping unambiguously thinks about all the time I think so. That's interesting, thanks Joseph. Okay we have another question, I'll read it out by Daniel. So he's asking you Joseph, how do you see your work as being in conversation with the book Hanoi's War where policy differences seem to have been at the core of the leadership fights within the North Vietnamese leadership during the American war? Daniel, I've read that book but I haven't read it recently. Why don't we talk by email so I can review the book and give you a better answer because I'd be afraid of mischaracterizing what I know is a wonderful book's arguments. Any other questions from those that are listening in today? I should say Joseph, I think you're doing yourself quite a disservice by just saying that you're just a translator. I think your sources are incredible and the sort of the research that you have done in order to build the arguments you make in your book are incredibly impressive and that's because of your very incredible language skills but I think you do talk to different disciplines as well and that's very powerful, right? I mean, I think still the study of China is still very siloed, isn't it? Whether you're in political science, whether you're in history and obviously I'm speaking more from the UK angle here but within UK academia, it's still a very siloed study and a lot of people who are in the international relations or political science side of things don't necessarily have a good grasp on the history or political economy of China and I think the book does many things but it does bring sort of the history of the party, the Communist Party in China and it's equivalent in Russia but it brings party politics, doesn't it? Into our understanding of China's leaders, both past and present in a way that I think is easy to understand for many different academics, right? Not just those that are China experts, for instance. And I see that there's a couple of more questions that have been piling up. So the first question is about sources. So how do you find primary sources in the UK? And I think there may be students on the call here, Joseph, that are very keen to sort of think about because you're opening comments were about just because it's getting harder to do certain types of research in China. It doesn't mean to say that it's necessarily impossible, right? As I think we'll have students here on the call who will be very curious about the types of sources you can use, for instance, in the UK but maybe you can speak to sort of some of the broader areas of research that aren't completely close off. And then there's a question on China's position on the war in Ukraine. Maybe Rebecca can add a bit more to that question in the sense of how that feeds into sort of the approach of the arguments of the book. But maybe start with the sort of the question around sources. Sure. Well, let me first say that thank you for your wonderfully warm remarks. They really mean a lot, especially coming from you as someone I know really, really, really works hard to get material on what is a really, really, really difficult topic. I'd love to chat more about the benefits and challenges of doing interdisciplinary research. And I'm at a policy school in the United States where I feel very welcome to do that kind of thing. But it's not always easy in certain kinds of places. And for some reason, I thought maybe the UK would be easier for that kind of thing. But maybe that's wrong. I'd love to continue to hear about your views on that. Yeah, sources. So I have a talk actually that's a little bit longer than the one that I just gave that's sort of a big picture of how I do research on Chinese politics. So maybe in the future, you and I could maybe do a panel or something like that together in Ecolab because I'd love to learn from you. So I know you've got a lot of tricks up your sleeve. And I guess the first thing to say is one of the reasons I like to do this kind of research is I get to hang out with people like Fred Tevis and Morin Sun who are the sort of legends of doing Chinese politics. And what's so interesting about those two is when you go up to them with a new piece of information and a new piece of evidence, they listen to you because they see history as an iterative process. And they know that they will continue to learn new things and change their minds. And that's part of the rigor, I think, of what I like about the kind of thing that I do, especially with them, is because it's a community that knows how hard it is. And there's a sense we're all on the same team and we're comfortable with our views evolving. But what this also means is that my book is not the final word on the content. And that because the information is so imperfect, invariably people will find new things and challenge me on certain parts. And that's because the world files this information very miscellaneously when it comes to Chinese sources. So we can't just go to one archive and collect the material and write it up. I think we kind of need a little bit of a detective sentiment, maybe. There's one way of thinking about it and to be a little cunning about how we get sources. So for example, one thing you can do is if you're studying China is, for example, interested in a particular leader, it's very easy using databases to figure out with whom they've met and where they've traveled. And you can go to those archives and get the archival material from them. So for example, like during the Cold War, you could go to the countries that were very regularly meeting with China and see what Chinese leaders were saying. And that's like primary source material, even if it's not from China, so to speak. The other is you can use open sources, I think, very effectively. So for whatever you're using, you're going to want to find all of the newspaper articles that are relevant to whatever it is that you're working on for that period as well. Every time I see a new name that I haven't seen before, I immediately run it through Worldcat. I run it through Google Books. And very often, something very interesting will turn up. And then you can get it easily through Interlibrary Loan. And a lot of the time, it's something published in Hong Kong. So it's out of censorship. You also will want to use stuff from the PRC. Like I mentioned, party history journals. But as Nikolay has used, it's a tremendous effect. There's also biographies, chronologies, document collections. And none of those are perfect. But when you take it all together and you're aware of the imperfections of each of those, you can make a mosaic. And certain things will be a little bit more defined. Certain things will be less defined. But ultimately, the question is whether or not there's enough new sources to make a new swing interesting. And whether or not the topic is important enough that we should at least have done our best so that there is a version of the best for people who need to see something on that topic, have at least a sense of what the latest scholarship is. So that's both a philosophical and a practical answer. But also, I feel like every day I learned something new about this, it's almost like a lifestyle in terms of being sensitive to chasing leads and having a sense of which avenues are fruitful. Make friends with librarians, because librarians are extraordinarily important. Make sure lots of people know what you're working on. As I just said, if the world files information mislamously, nobody's project is exactly the same. And if you stumble upon something that was lucky for you to find and you know is relevant for somebody else's project, you should give it to them, right? Especially if it's really important for their projects. Because even if some people use something that, and they get ahead of you a little bit on it, you should really think of, I mean, I know it's a competition, right? But in your heart of hearts, what I hope you want to do is make the very best version of what you can do. And part of that is establishing good relationships with people. So just some random thoughts that don't very systemat. Yeah, thanks, Joseph. And you do practice what you preach. And you do share and you don't act in a siloed fashion, right? And I think that's the sort of a, you know, in terms of thinking how you move your research forward and how you learn more, even if things get maybe tighter or tougher in certain areas and that didn't exist before. Sharing what you have, because as academics, we don't always use what we find, right? We just keep it there and sharing that. And I think places like the Wilson Center, right, have been fantastic in really pioneering that effort of sort of trying to put things together and translating it so it's made accessible to people who don't have, you know, multi-lingual skills, for instance. So I think sort of sharing and acting more as a community really is kind of key, right, academically speaking. And for some, I think it will also, I think there's still a lot more room, I don't know if you disagree or agree, but I still think there's a lot of room for more comparative study. And your book is, you know, the exception, I think, to the rule, right? I mean, I think there's still generally China experts don't necessarily look to Russia or North Korea still, right? So you are holding a button now that you can't drop, Joseph, as it were. And I think that's sort of the way forward, right, for sort of doing cross comparisons. That would be very interesting. There is one last question I did ask Rebecca to elaborate. And it may be unfair because it's talking about a very, you know, it's an ongoing issue, but I think it speaks probably to the framing of China, right, which gets back to my original question, I think, which is, you know, why certain ideas endure and certain arguments about the past and why certain arguments about the past in this case, Deng as a reformer and promoter of collective leadership, for instance, might be used politically to make a strong case about Xi Jinping in a particular way, right? And frame him in a particular way. And I think this question maybe is in the same vein, which is, you know, how, you know, the invasion is framed so very differently in China, in particular, Rebecca, you mentioned the China daily articles as opposed to how it sort of framed in more Western places. So I guess the question is about the consciousness of Xi Jinping relative to the strength of Russia. So is this question of how she looks at Russia? And there's a question about information, disinformation, I guess, as well, that you've been speaking to. Yeah, so this also raises questions about interpretation of political language, right? And what exactly the position that China has toward the Russian Federation? And here, again, it's a little bit hard to do as China is pursuing, as I mentioned earlier, once again, multiple goals at once, right? So on the one hand, I have no doubt that China believes in the strategic partnership with Russia, that the strategic partnership is very important to the Chinese, that I'm sure the views that the Russians have about the origins of the war are shared by many within Beijing, to it that the Americans are to blame for not taking Russian core interests into account and were essentially pushed into the war. I think that that is probably a pretty common view within Beijing, but at the same time, they also want to protect their economic interests. They want to protect their reputational interests. So when they talk to some people, they emphasize those strategic partnership more when they talk to other people, they emphasize respect for territorial integrity or they distance themselves from the Russians. So sometimes people will look at a comment that some Chinese leader makes and say, oh, look, they're distancing themselves from Russia or look, now they've doubled down on the relationship, right? And I think the better way to look at it is, first of all, the partnership is resilient, but that sometimes you can lean a little bit more in one direction than the other within the confines of the partnership or you're just speaking to different audiences. And that makes it very easy to sort of look at any one statement and think that it's a fundamental shifts in policy. And of course, whether or not they can maintain this sort of balance is hard to guess. I think if there's an accidental escalation in Europe or there's God forbid, I think this is very unlikely on the use of a nuclear weapon or the Russians are really putting pressure on the Chinese to support them more, what kind of tension that puts on and that kind of thing, we don't have a good sense of. But for now, I think the Chinese will probably just continue to maintain the partnership but then sort of maneuver within that as things develop. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Joseph. I've thoroughly enjoyed learning about your book and the conversation afterwards. So I thoroughly recommend everyone take a look at your wonderful book. It's already on my reading list for all my classes here in the department. And I know it will be for many others at other universities. Joseph, thanks for taking the time to talk us through some of the key arguments and for answering some of our questions. I think this is a topic that's incredibly fascinating and shows how good history work has contemporary relevance today as well. So thank you so much. And thanks everyone for dialing in. And for those of you that watch this at a later time as a recording, I'm sure you'll agree it's been an incredibly stimulating. Yes, thank you very much. A very stimulating talk. So thank you, Joseph. Nicola, you were much, much too generous but it was a real honor to come and to hear your thoughts and to catch up. And I hope we get to meet each other in person sooner rather than later. But this was a real pleasure and let's keep in touch and thanks to everybody for coming. Indeed. Thank you.