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CCP Bureaucracies in War

CCP Bureaucracies in War

Update: 2025-11-02
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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.



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CCP Bureaucracies in War

CCP Bureaucracies in War

Jordan Schneider