Political scientists have found that early life experiences powerfully affect future leaders. Drawing on a variety of sources, this article investigates the formative role of Xi Jinping's youth during a tumultuous time period in Chinese history. Xi's life before and during the Cultural Revolution help explain his toughness, idealism, pragmatism, and caution. However, the evidence on how Xi's childhood and young adulthood shaped his view on how to best handle political contradictions is ambiguous.
The ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 was a key moment in the history of elite politics in one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet political scientists and historians have long seemed uninterested in Khrushchev's downfall, regarding it as the largely “inevitable” result of his supposedly unpopular policies. Archival sources that have recently come to light cast serious doubt on this assessment and demonstrate new ways of measuring contingency. By showing the countermeasures Khrushchev could have taken, the importance of timing, and the sense among the plotters that their move was highly risky, this article demonstrates that Khrushchev's defeat was far from preordained. The lesson of October 1964 is not that policy differences or failures lead inexorably to political defeat, but that elite politics in Marxist-Leninist regimes is inherently ambiguous, personal, and, most importantly, highly contingent.
Despite significant advances in both quantitative and qualitative methods over the last few years, the discipline of political science has yet to explicitly address the special challenges and benefits of studying specific historical events marked by high levels of contingency. The field of security studies, where concrete historical cases have always played a major role in the development of the subfield, should place special focus on the specific challenges and benefits to the study of such events. Taking full advantage of what event-specific research can teach us, however, will require thinking about generalizability, evidence, the role of contingency, and falsifiability in ways that are not yet fully understood in the discipline. More clarity on such questions will benefit our understanding of like nuclear crises in particular.
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