Exit Interview is an audio series produced by the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Co-hosts David Mayorga, associate dean of public affairs and communications, and Ambreen Ali, senior communications and media strategist, speak with graduating students who won prizes for their senior theses, which are the culmination of a year’s worth of research, interviews, and analysis on a policy topic.

Vincent Jiang won the Myron T. Herrick Prize, awarded to the writer of the best senior thesis in the School of Public and International Affairs, for his thesis on military purges in the Chinese Communist Party and coup-proofing strategies.

Listen now:
 

The transcript below was auto-generated.

Intro: This is Ambreen Ali, and this is David Mayorga. You're listening to Exit Interview, a conversation with Princeton SPIA graduates about their senior year research.

Vincent Jiang: My name is Vincent Jiang. I'm a senior in the SPIA department. I originally come from Long Valley, New Jersey. After graduation, I'm going to be attending Harvard Law School on an educational delay of service in order to become an active-duty judge advocate in the U.S. Army, Judge Advocate General school.

David Mayorga: That is incredible, and thank you for your service, and thank you for your future service as well. Yeah, that's really incredible, and how important to go into that particular legal career in the Armed Services. I think that's really important to be there to advise and make sure that our military leaders are making the right choices rooted in law. Let's just get right into it. I read your thesis, really interesting work related to the PLA or the People's Liberation Army in China, sort of your exploration of how these particular leaders are either promoted or fired, and some of the reasons why, and looking sort of at the demographics, and sort of the backgrounds of these particular military leaders. So tell me a little bit about, in your own words, as if you were talking to a neighbor, maybe, that doesn't really work in this space, or know this space. Tell us a little about, you know what your thesis is about, what you explored?

VJ: Yeah, absolutely. So my thesis looked at the civil-military relations of the People's Republic of China. So civil-military relations is a field of political theory which examines what the relationship between the people with guns and the people without them should look like. So it's a pretty eternal question throughout history. You know, a lot of different thinkers, from Thucydides to Sun Tzu, like, have thought about this issue. In particular, we're really interested in the civil-military relations of authoritarian states, because these states tend to face unique challenges because of their non-democratic systems. A lot of authoritarian states, if you look at the aggregate of all states in the 20th century, were overthrown through coups d'etat. So that means their military came in and overthrew the government and replaced it with a military junta, or invited another person to come and take over. So this is a really interesting challenge for authoritarian leaders. They have to face the external security threat, but they also have to manage an internal security threat, and so the civ-mil relations of the People's Republic of China is particularly interesting for this reason. As everyone knows, China is a big pacing challenge for the United States, a near-peer superpower competitor. And so it's really important for people around the world to kind of observe what's going on in Chinese civ-mil relations. For those who are paying attention to news, the current President of China, Xi Jinping, has been embarking on a pretty aggressive campaign of purges. In 2014 or 2015, right after he ascended to power, he purged a lot of the generals his predecessors had appointed. And starting in around 2023, right after he secured an unprecedented third term in office, he starts really aggressively purging a lot of his inner circle of generals. So the minister of defense and the former minister of defense were both purged in ’23. He most recently just purged another very high-ranking admiral, and about a month ago he was confirmed to have purged the second ranking vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. So an incredibly powerful and important general. 

DM: Tell me, why is he purging his sort of core, you know, advisors, the inner circle.

VJ: That was one of the things that I found most interesting and confusing. So the first wave of purges made a lot of sense to me, because they were purging, you know, kind of cleaning house, getting rid of his predecessors, loyalists. But this second wave of purges is much more intriguing because he's purging people who he nominated just a couple of years ago. So he's getting rid of people who, until very recently, he trusted enough to elevate to this position. So there must be some other reason that he's purging his own loyalists, and this behavior is actually quite reminiscent of another leader in Chinese history, Mao Zedong, the founding president of China and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Because during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong also ended up purging a lot of his loyalists, these people who had kind of grown up with him, served with him during the Civil War who he, like, should have trusted unconditionally, but for some reason, decided to go after them.

DM: For many folks listening, this might sound like an incredibly niche sort of exploration, however important and timely. What drew you to this particular topic, was it a class or a conversation with a professor, or maybe even a personal connection?

VJ: Yeah, so I'm Chinese American. I have grown up speaking Mandarin Chinese while serving in ROTC. I've always been encouraged to kind of develop that talent for the purposes of the Army, and so I've always had kind of an outside interest in U.S.-China relations. I took a couple of classes at Princeton, in fact, one of them, China's Foreign Relations, SPIA 316, was the class that made me decide to be a SPIA major. I took that back in my freshman fall, and then in my sophomore fall, I took a class called Chinese Politics with the professor who would later on go to be my thesis advisor, Prof. Rory Truex. So that class is a really interesting examination of the internal workings of the PRC [People's Republic of China]. One of the units that we had was on elite politics in China, so kind of the dynamics at the highest levels, the sort of power struggles between different factions, and that stuff was really, really, really interesting and really fascinating to follow. During the class, it was the October 22 National People's Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when Xi Jinping secured the unprecedented third term. Professor Truex had a really fun interactive activity. He had us all, like, bet on the composition of the Politburo Standing Committee. That really got me hooked onto, like, kind of watching Chinese politics. It's really a black box to a lot of outside observers. We kind of can see what happens, but we don't really know the mechanisms inside. So then, my thesis was a way of trying to apply a different methodology to examining the inner working. 

DM: Can you give us a sense of what policymakers in this space, in sort of security and international affairs, could take away from your research?

VJ: I think the most interesting finding, at least it's the most top-level finding of mine, is that we find pretty compelling evidence for provincial stacking, which is a strategy of coup-proofing that's pretty well established in the literature. So basically what this means is the leader will appoint generals who have a personal connection to the leader in some way. Could be an ethnic background, could be a religious background, whatever, but in China...

DM: Or a hometown? 

VJ: Or hometown, yes. My thesis used one's home province as kind of a variable to stand in for personal ties with the leader, and what we found was that every single Chinese leader tended to over-appoint generals who came from their home province. So for instance, think if Joe Biden appointed 50% of his generals from Delaware, and Donald Trump appointed 50% of his generals from Florida, you kind of see the fluctuation of these different provinces over time. And that's really important for policymakers, because if you're going into a negotiating room with one of these generals as our defense officials, our diplomatic officials, are oftentimes tasked with doing, you want to know everything you can about the other person sitting across from you. You want to have as many details as you can on that policy sheet so you kind of know, you can assess, if the guy sitting across from me, is he insecure? Is he secure right now? Does he have a lot of power? Does he have a lot of sway? Does he have the ear of Xi Jinping, or is he kind of an outsider? Is he someone who fought his way up but doesn't have a powerful backer? So that's really important. I think strategic negotiation is one big takeaway that one can have from my thesis. Some other really important takeaways is in terms of threat assessment, one of the biggest questions that I'm sure everyone has on their minds is like, whether or not the United States and China are going to go to war, particularly over a Taiwan contingency. And I think from observing Chinese civil military relations, one can get a better sense of where Xi Jinping's head's at. For instance, if he's purging these members of his inner circle, he's probably not super confident in the ability of the PLA to win a large-scale conventional war. This most recent guy who went down, He Weidong, he was the No. 2 general in the Central Military Commission. So this is probably one of the guys who Xi Jinping is getting his daily military briefs from.

DM: And one of his, basically a potential threat?

VJ: Or a potential threat. What we think is this guy probably went down because of a pretty big corruption scandal in China. The rockets that the rocket force uses for their hypersonic missiles were found to have been filled with water. The fuel had been siphoned out, and then was presumably being sold on the black market. So for an incident like this to happen, it signals something to both the leader and to the outside world. To the leader, it shows that if members of my inner circle are willing to go behind my back and sell off national assets to line their own pockets, they can't be trusted. And then to the outside world that if these guys get purged, it also signals that the leader that doesn't have full confidence in his team. Maybe observers in Taiwan would be happy to read the results of my thesis, though they might, might mean that they have a little bit more breathing room to prepare for the event of a contingency. I think that the U.S. government should continue to monitor their developments in China, as I'm sure they are.

DM: That's incredible insight. Let's take a step back and look at the experience of, like, going through this research, a years-long project, something obviously that you're proud of. What is something that you're particularly proud of during the process, not so much the final paper, but was it something that struck you along the way, or something that you learned about yourself or learned about your pursuit of knowledge? Is there something that you want to highlight for folks? 

VJ: Yeah, absolutely. I think for, especially for future SPIA students who might be listening in, I would really encourage you to develop a sense of resilience when you're writing the thesis. My thesis actually had a number of setbacks along the way. My original topic wasn't as focused on elite politics. I kind of wanted to incorporate more of a societal dimension, analyze the composition of the PLA. One big section that I actually ended up having to cut entirely was a chapter on the one-child policy and how that might have impacted the PLA in any way. But because of data availability concerns, I was digging through these old, like, provincial gazettes, where they had some very sparse numbers about the number of recruits that were coming from each province for hours and hours, and ultimately that ended up being a dead end. It ended up being like, there wasn't enough data to write a really conclusive chapter. This was, like, November, December of last year. I frankly panicked. I, like, went to my thesis advisor. I was like, "Oh no, this project that I've been working on, like, it's not going to work out. And, like, I don't know which direction to pivot.” So I think he had some really good advice. It was the start of winter break, so he advised me to kind of take a step back, reassess, and maybe consider different directions for pivoting. So I went back to the literature, reread some of the classics of civil relations, and I found this methodology, and I'm really proud of, you know, kind of my resilience in realizing that one track wasn't working, pivoting about halfway through the thesis-writing process and then being able to put together my entire project, and I would say, just over a semester. 

DM: That's fantastic advice. You know, were your, sort of, fellow classmates, also helpful in the process, in terms of giving each other support, talking through issues, you know, sharing best practices? Was there any element of that? A community element, I guess?

VJ: Oh, absolutely. I think the SPIA community is really wonderful in that regard. We're super supportive of each other. Everyone's in it together until the very end. You know, my friends and I would give each other updates about where we're at. We had a funny thing going on where we had a spreadsheet where we would track the number of pages we had written. So that was like, kind of a competitive, collaborative aspect. So you would see people's progress, like, increase over the course of the semester, and that would encourage you to kind of catch up. And it also felt great whenever someone hit the minimum page threshold and they were like, "Oh, I have so much more to write. Like, I can write way more than just the minimum." So that was a really fun community-building exercise. Throughout the whole process, my classmates helped me brainstorm ideas, think about, like, different directions, like a pivot. And then I think after like, my first draft was finished, I really appreciated a lot of my close friends, all their help in helping me to edit and revise. So I have a tendency to write pretty long run-on sentences, and one of my best friends, like, sat me down and was like, "Okay, I've identified every single run-on sentence you've written in your thesis. You need to change all of these." That was super, super helpful. And I think just speaks to the strength of the Princeton academic community and coming together to help each other.

DM: That is fantastic, and it's so lovely to hear that you were being supported by your community. Look, you're off to an incredibly bright future. Congratulations on law school. Thank you for your service. I know you're heading in that direction, and you've been in ROTC here during your time at Princeton, and I'm sure your family and friends are incredibly proud of you. Thanks so much for being with us.

VJ: Yeah, thank you so much as well.