In Professor Ong’s detailed and comprehensive review of Coalitions of the Weak, she raises several conceptual issues. First, she highlights the vague scope conditions of the “weak coalition” argument. In the introduction, I set forth the broad condition that the theory is most applicable to regimes with “well-defined selectorate bodies and hierarchies” (p. 11). Beyond that, indeed, the book never states the scope conditions clearly. In part, I did not do so because I do not think that coalition compositions can be reduced further to institutional or historical conditions. Ultimately, the dictator has some agency on which coalition strategy to pursue. Throughout the book, I imply that the argument is the most applicable to cases in which the dictator or leaders would like to hold power or influence for life. As Ong points out, I make many references to Mao’s poor health toward the end of his life. Indeed, the coalition of the weak is helpful toward the end of a dictator’s life because weak officials will not dare to challenge even a sickly dictator. If leaders really wanted to retire from politics for good at a certain point, they would have much less concern about ruling in poor health and would want to select strong successors to maximize the survivability of the regime, but that clearly was not the case for Mao or even for Deng and his colleagues.

Another point raised by Ong is the historical context of the Great Leap Forward, which coincided with Mao’s deployment of the “coalition-of-the-weak” strategy. Given the absence of a disaster during the 1980s, why did we still observe the tendency to promote weak successors? First, I suspect that Mao would have converged on some version of the weak coalition strategy even without the Great Leap disaster, because he clearly wanted to rule for life. The book focuses on the post–Great Leap years to control for Mao’s diminished prestige and power after the disaster, rather than to highlight the Great Leap disaster as a reason why Mao pursued the weak coalition strategy (p. 30). To be sure, after veteran elites criticized Mao in 1962, he realized the merits of removing these well-connected veterans, but he likely would have come to the same realization later. In the 1980s, many surviving veterans wished to hang onto influence, if not power, for life, which explains their pursuit of the weak coalition strategy. Again, I should have stated clearly the desire to pursue power and influence for life as a scope condition of the theory.

A more profound point that Ong raises is the relationship between the weak coalition argument and factionalism, which posits that authoritarian leaders cultivate support coalitions composed of officials who share previous experiences with them. This book is actually a critique of factionalism and does not present a “subset” of the factionalism argument. Members of Mao’s weak coalition did not have friendly relationships with him. The scribblers were too young and of junior status to have known Mao before 1965. Their junior status was correlated with the limited size of their networks, as chapter 2 shows. Members of the Fourth Front Army were criticized and demoted by Mao wholesale because they sought to split the party in the 1930s. Yet, Mao strategically used these individuals as pawns in senior-level positions in the 1960s and 1970s. A shortfall of the book is its failure to specify the conditions under which dictators pursue a factional versus the weak coalition strategy. Intuitively, when senior leaders in one-party regimes face definite retirement, especially due to pressure from other powerful politicians, factionalism seems to be the prevailing strategy. When aging leaders seek to prolong their power and influence until the end, purging powerful colleagues and installing coalitions of the weak seem to be the optimal strategies. In the Twentieth Party Congress, we have not seen a coalition of the weak because Xi is still in his prime as a leader. At the Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Party Congresses, we may indeed see a stronger tendency to use a weak coalition strategy.