CCP Wartime Decisionmaking

Why do leaders with vast expert bureaucracies at their fingertips make devastating foreign policy decisions? Tyler Jost, professor at Brown, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his first book, Bureaucracies at War, a fascinating analysis of miscalculation in international conflicts.

As we travel from Mao’s role in border conflicts, to Deng’s blunder in Vietnam, to LBJ’s own Vietnam error, a tragic pattern emerges — leaders gradually isolating themselves from their own information gathering systems with catastrophic consequences.

Today our conversation covers…

• How Mao’s early success undermined his long-term decision-making,

• The role of succession pressures in both Deng’s and LBJ’s actions in Vietnam,

• The bureaucratic mechanisms that lead to echo chambers, and how China’s siloed institutions affect Xi’s governance,

• The lingering question of succession in China,

• What we can learn from the institutional failures behind Vietnam and Iraq.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Mao, Hitler, and “Hot Hand” Leadership

Jordan Schneider: Let’s kick it off with Mao Zedong. You start the clock after independence. I’m curious, when you think about leaders like Mao who followed their instincts to achieve a remarkable place in world history — Mao bet on himself again and again and won. When Stalin pressured him to make a deal with the Nationalists, Mao said, “No, we’re going to fight and we’re going to win in the end.” Then the Japanese invaded and shifted the balance of power, and in the end, history worked in Mao’s favor.

Most leaders experience a series of successes and luck over the decades it takes them to reach power, which can build psychological confidence in their own instincts. As we think about the interaction between bureaucracies and leaders — when leaders trust their gut over other advice — how does that confidence in their instincts shape their later decision-making? When their instincts conflict with expert advice, do they trust themselves over the system?

Tyler Jost: That’s a great question. You could probably break it down into three categories of explanation.

First, some psychologists think human beings are hardwired to be overconfident. There’s a baseline tendency across the human population that when presented with gambles, people make riskier choices than they probably should, given a dispassionate look at the data.

Second, there’s a category which I think Mao probably fits into — certain personalities tend to be more risk-accepting than others. This could be because some people are comfortable with ...