Researching elite politics in China

This is a hybrid (in-person and online) event.

Research on Chinese elite politics has never been easy - not only have outside observers often struggled to accurately grasp the nature of Chinese politics, but even the highest-ranking Chinese officials have commonly misunderstood each other's intentions. Now, Chinese President Xi Jinping sees competing narratives about the CCP's past as existential threats to regime security. Yet, counterintuitively, the field remains far behind exploiting the sources that are now available for studying the history of Chinese elite politics. In this talk, Torigian will explain how collections of primary sources at American and Australian libraries, digital databases, party history journals, books published outside of censorship in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a variety of other sources make research into Chinese leaders possible even now.

About the Speaker

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington. Previously, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton-Harvard's China and the World Program, a Postdoctoral (and Predoctoral) Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a Predoctoral Fellow at George Washington University's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. He studies elite politics and foreign relations in China and Russia.