Speaker: Tyler Jost, Assistant Professor of Political Science, International & Public Affairs and Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies, Brown University

Moderator: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University; Fairbank Center Associate

When are China’s leaders able to extract quality information from their diplomatic, defense, and intelligence bureaucracies during international crises? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War, examines the Chinese national security bureaucracy in comparative perspective. Jost highlights how China’s leaders face a trade-off between institutional designs that offer political security and those that yield quality information. He illustrates this intuition through detailed historical cases on the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war.