Why China Won’t Collapse

Does the West keep getting China wrong? Princeton's Rory Truex on Xi Jinping, 
why authoritarian regimes outlast predictions of their collapse, and whether AI surveillance could make dictatorship permanent.

For decades, analysts have predicted the end of the Chinese Communist Party — and been wrong every time. Rory Truex explains why the CCP is not simply a repression machine but a system with a responsive side, why Xi Jinping's consolidation of power may have made the leader stronger while making the party weaker, and what his own public opinion research reveals about the gap between what Chinese citizens tell surveyors and what they actually believe. He also argues, in his view, that America is passing through an authoritarian chapter of its own — and that Washington habitually underestimates the resilience of the regimes it wants to change, a lesson he applies directly to the US-Iran war and Pakistan's mediation effort.

ABOUT THE GUEST
Rory Truex is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where his research focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian systems. He is the author of Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China (Cambridge University Press) and hosts Civic Forum, a video podcast and speaker series on the challenges facing democracy in the United States and beyond. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics and Comparative Political Studies, and his 
commentary in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and the South China Morning Post.