Economist Podcast About Xi Jinping With CWP Alum Joseph Torigian

Xi Jinping is the most powerful person in the world. But the real story of China’s leader remains a mystery. The Economist’s Sue-Lin Wong finds out how he rose to the top in a new podcast series.

At China’s 20th Communist Party congress in October Mr Xi is expected to ignore convention to secure a third term as party chief. He may rule China for the rest of his life.

This eight-part series is the epic story of Mr Xi’s turbulent past, how he has changed China and how he is trying to change the world.

https://www.economist.com/theprincepod

I study the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. My philosophy as a scholar is to select topics based on the widest gap between the under-utilization of available documents and their theoretical and empirical importance, extract broader lessons, and use those lessons to help us to understand two nations of crucial geopolitical importance – Russia and China. My research agenda draws upon comparative politics, international relations, security studies, and history to ask big questions about the long-term political trajectories of these two states. In particular, I am interested in how leaders in those countries create security against threats from within the elite, their own people, and other states.

Previously, I was a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a 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, a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. My research has also been supported by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, MIT’s Center for International Studies, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, the Critical Language Scholarship program, and FLAS. I am also a Global Fellow at the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center.

Photo Credit: By Officia do Palácio do Planalto - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79804675