Speaker: Daniel Mattingly, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University

How do authoritarian leaders such as Xi Jinping consolidate political power? In this book, I examine how control over the military has been crucial for elite and mass power struggles in Chinese politics. Drawing on new quantitative data on officers in the PLA, and extensive qualitative evidence, I trace how leaders’ ties to military officers help them fend off elite challengers, consolidate power, and ratchet up mass political control.

Daniel Mattingly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He studies authoritarian politics and historical political economy with a focus on China. He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which examines how the Chinese state controls protests and implements ambitious social policies. It was named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs and received the best book award from the Democracy and Autocracy Section of the American Political Science Association. His current book project examines the role of the military in China’s domestic and international politics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale University.