Honoring Joseph Fewsmith: An Important Career, Defining Scholarship, and Lessons for Today’s China Challenge

Evan S. Medeiros CLM Issue 88 June 2026.pdf

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Joe Fewsmith came of age as a China scholar under conditions that shaped everything he later became. China was largely off-limits to Americans—it was a time of great constraints in China studies. You could not simply fly to Beijing and talk to scholars and officials—which became his stock and trade.

So, Joe did something that turned out to be unexpectedly formative: he went to Taiwan, mastered the language, and wrote a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, using historical materials, on the topic of merchant organizations and local elites in Republican-era Shanghai.

As Alice Miller relayed to me, Joe was a student of Tang Tsou at Chicago, and he emerged from that experience as an advocate of Max Weber’s assessment of power and interest in politics, a framework that would shape Joe’s analysis of Chinese leadership for the rest of his career and would inform some of his greatest contributions.

His first book, published in 1985, assesses the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek's Nanjing Republic and Shanghai's merchant class, which he concludes was a variety of corporatism. At the time, this seemed to be the work of a careful historian. What it actually is, however, as his career would prove, is the establishment of a method for analyzing elite politics in China.

Before joining Boston University in 1991, Joe spent nearly a decade at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) in Washington as an analyst and then as chief of the China branch. This involved patient, meticulous work: translating and analyzing the Chinese-language publications of a still largely closed party-state—Kremlinology with Chinese characteristics.

Joe Fewsmith was the OG of Pekingology.

He developed what colleagues later described as an encyclopedic command of elite politics—of the personal networks, factional dynamics, administrative procedures, and bureaucratic idioms key in political signaling in China.

Joe effectively wrote the source code for assessing and analyzing elite politics in China.

Building a Field at Boston University

Joe then built a field from his perch at BU.

He brought all of that to Boston University in 1991—some 35 years ago. He then spent the next several decades building one of the strongest China studies programs in the country, teaching thousands of students, mentoring junior faculty with exceptional generosity, and producing seven books that track the full arc of Chinese politics, from the Republican era through the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule.

Teacher, Mentor, a Public Intellectual

Joe was a teacher, mentor, and a public intellectual.

By all accounts, Joe’s classroom was legendary. Students sought him out for his deep knowledge and sardonic wit, and their loyalty to him endured long after they left BU. As a mentor to junior faculty, he was unusually generous. Professor Joseph Torigian of American University told me about regularly bumping into Joe in the bowels of the Fung Library at Harvard—where Joe always guided and encouraged his work on party history and elite politics.

One further measure of his seminal role in the field: when Alice Miller and the late Mike Oksenberg were establishing the China Leadership Monitor in 2000—the quarterly publication that became essential reading for anyone trying to track Chinese elite politics—they asked themselves who should be their regular contributor on leadership politics and political reform.

As Miller recalls, there was only one obvious choice. Joe signed up, and during the next fifteen years he wrote forty-six articles—forty-six—for the Monitor, each one demonstrating why Miller and Oksenberg’s choice was so obvious.

Contributions Ahead of His Time

Perhaps Joe’s greatest contribution is that he refined and ultimately perfected a methodology for studying elite politics—and he innovated in his thinking and now in our understanding of elite politics. He refused to follow the dominant paradigms of the field and, as a result, his scholarship was ahead of its time.

Joe effectively created his own methodology: ground-up, empirical, qualitative, and relational (i.e., based on extensive interviews)—and skeptical of theory imposed from outside the Chinese context.

His extraordinary networks, spanning government officials, academics, and experts across Chinese provinces and localities that most foreign scholars never visited, give his writings an authority that pure library scholarship cannot match.

Iain Johnston at Harvard wrote me about his numerous debates with Joe, during their annual trip to China and Taiwan, about the “quantification of analysis” (e.g., large N text analysis, content analysis, LLMs, etc.). Joe worried that these new methods de-contextualized language and risked devaluing some texts while overvaluing others.

That was Joe: open, curious, and affable, but clear in his analysis and strong in his views. I don’t think Joe ever would have backed “post-Pekingological analysis.” That’s Iain’s term, not mine. (And people criticize Washington for being wonky….)

Joe’s seven books trace an arc across the full sweep of modern Chinese politics, and he effectively revolutionized the study of elite politics in China.

• Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China (1985)

• The Dilemmas of Reform in China (1994)

• China Since Tiananmen (2001, updated 2008)

• Elite Politics in Contemporary China (2001)

• The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (2013)

• Rethinking Chinese Politics (2021)

• Forging Leninism in China (2022)

  
  

The Fewsmith Opus

Let me say something about those books because they are not simply a scholarly record. If read in sequence,  they constitute something close to a continuous argument about how China’s political system works, and why some of our assumptions often turn out to be wrong.

Joe’s first major work on the reform era, The Dilemmas of Reform in China, published in 1994, grew directly out of his FBIS years analyzing economic policymaking under Deng Xiaoping. Tracing the political conflicts of the Deng Xiaoping period, it insists that there was genuine diversity of opinion within Chinese elite circles—that the leadership was not a monolith, that debates were real, and that outcomes were contested. This may seem obvious in retrospect, but at the time it was not the dominant view.

China Since Tiananmen, which appeared in 2001 and was updated in 2008, is the standard text for an entire generation of students, including me. It traces the politics of the post-Tiananmen transition: how the leadership managed the aftermath of 1989, how reform proceeded under constraints, and how the party rebuilt its legitimacy through economic performance rather than political liberalization. The book is analytically clear and empirically dense, and it shaped how a generation understands the mechanics—and hydraulics—of the Chinese political system.

His 2013 book, The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China, may be the book that is most directly relevant to what I want to say about today’s world. It appeared at a moment when many Western analysts were cautiously optimistic. There was talk of legal reform, of institutionalization, of governance modernization. Joe looked at the same evidence and reached a much more sober conclusion—that political reform in China had never been about liberalization. Rather, it was always about regime preservation. The CCP could adapt—it is, in some ways, a remarkably adaptable institution—but its adaptation served the goal of perpetuating its own rule, not of moving toward the kind of accountable, constrained governance that Western observers hoped to see. That argument was contested when he made it. It appears prescient now.

Then came Rethinking Chinese Politics in 2021, which I want to pause on because it may be Joe’s most important contribution.

If you have not read this book, then run—don’t walk—to the nearest bookstore to purchase a copy. Or just tap on your Amazon app really quickly.

This is not only a book but also an event. It is a small book, some 189 pages of text. But it is packed with insights derived from nearly four decades of China watching.

And it is the type of book that many scholars aspire to—I know that I do. It is a collection of refined analytical judgments of deep consequence derived from decades of research and study.

Let me explain why it is so important.

The conventional wisdom in much of the China field—in the 2000s and thereafter—holds that elite politics under Hu Jintao was gradually becoming institutionalized. There were norms governing leadership succession. There were rules constraining the behavior of top leaders. There was collective decision-making. Some analysts even argued that the post-Deng system had developed something like internal checks and balances. The implication was that China, while certainly not democratic, was not arbitrary, and it was governed by durable institutional constraints that made its behavior somewhat predictable and somewhat more moderate. Joe disagreed.

This argument produced a well-known intellectual debate with Alice Miller, another prominent expert on elite politics and former editor of the China Leadership Monitor.

In Joe’s view, rooted in his Weberian framework and his reading of the Mao era, leadership politics during the early reform years played out as an irreducible struggle for power and dominance. Miller, while sharing Joe’s Weberian instincts, was more impressed by how deliberately Deng Xiaoping sought restoration of an orderly institutional process after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. From that divergence—in office conversations, in contrasting pieces in the China Leadership Monitor, on panels and in conference debates, over lunch and dim-sum across four decades—emerged an analytical debate that sharpened and deepened both of their thinking.

Joe’s eventual conclusion, reached in his 2021 book, was the following. I think you have the causation backward. What you are calling institutionalization is better understood as a balance of power among competing factions. The Hu era appeared to be constrained not because institutions were strong but because no single faction was strong enough to dominate the others. The equilibrium was factional, not institutional. This conclusion can be read in part as the culmination of that long argument. It is a synthesis that took the evidence of both positions seriously—and in doing so, produced something more penetrating than either argument on its own.

And if Joe was right, then it had a very significant implication: the argument that China was not arbitrary would last only as long as the factional balance held. If someone came along with sufficient political skill and will to break that balance, the apparent institutional constraints would dissolve.

And Joe was right. That someone was Xi Jinping.

Xi's consolidation of power—abolishing term limits, sidelining rivals, concentrating decision-making in his own hands, embedding his personal authority through loyalty campaigns in the party and the military—was not a violation of Chinese political institutions. It was a revelation of what those institutions actually were: temporary equilibria masquerading as durable rules. Joe had seen it coming because he understood the underlying mechanics and hydraulics of elite politics.

Joe’s final book, Forging Leninism in China, which was published in 2022, focuses on the period from 1927 to 1934, and at first glance it might seem like a departure into history. But it carries a message that is deeply relevant today.

Joe argues that the CCP’s extraordinary organizational resilience—its ability to survive defeat, purge, exile, and the pressures of governing a continental nation of over one billion people—was not built by Mao from the top. It was built from the bottom up. The party's roots ran far deeper than any individual leader or any particular ideology. That is why predictions of CCP collapse, which have been made repeatedly and with increasing frequency in recent years, have proven to be consistently wrong.

A final note on Joe’s extraordinary productivity: Alice Miller recalls that in one of the last email exchanges she had with Joe, just days before he passed, she asked him what he planned to do next. He had, after all, just published two new books. Joe replied that he didn't have anything in mind at the moment. But, she notes, if I listened closely, I could hear his imagination ticking away. That image captures something essential about Joe: even at age 76, even mere weeks before his death, he was still at work, still curious, still looking for the next question.

Implications for U.S.-China Relations and Taiwan Today

I want to turn now to where all of this leaves us—to U.S.-China relations, the Taiwan issue, and to the big question of what Joe's life's work demands of us as we navigate such change, volatility, and complexity in all our interactions with China.

Let me be unusually direct about where we are today with U.S.-China relations and Taiwan. I think Joe would want that.

We are at the early stages of a long-term and likely arduous strategic competition with China. Both sides are still setting the terms and negotiating the boundaries of that competition. Both sides are probing and testing the other, implicitly and explicitly. To be clear, this is not the Cold War redux. It will be far more challenging for the United States and its allies and partners. The competition is broad spectrum: military, economic, technological, and ideas—about domestic and global governance.

The relative stability of today and of 2026—Trump’s year of summitry—is an illusion. It is a geopolitical chimera that distracts us from the fact that—when looked at over the past ten years—competition is intensifying, expanding, and diversifying. Both sides are using more confrontational strategies toward the other—recall the trade war of 2025. China has been preparing these tools for years. It is ready. Are we? There are deep domestic political forces in both countries incentivizing this competition—and they are growing. Channels of communication have atrophied and narrowed. Crisis management and confidence-building tools are basically nonexistent, mainly due to Beijing’s mistrust of U.S. intentions and the view that they are tools to enhance U.S. competition—not the means to moderate it.

A common question that many scholars and analysts ask these days is the following: is a Cuban missile crisis–like event needed for both sides—as it was for Washington and Moscow—to accept the concept of restraint in their security competition? I find this question not only sobering—but harrowing.

On Taiwan, the situation is just as serious, but it is even more urgent. The Taiwan Strait today is the most dangerous flashpoint between the United States and China on earth. China’s military pressure on Taiwan has intensified dramatically in recent years.

Data from Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense paint a worrisome picture.

Since 2020, PRC incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ have increased approximately 287 percent, and since  2021 median line crossings have increased approximately 222 percent. The PLA conducted encircling operations of the entire island on at least five occasions between January 2024 and February 2025. The expansion of PLA operations east of Taiwan—off the Pacific coast—is the most militarily consequential geographic shift. It suggests rehearsal of scenarios to close off Taiwan's reinforcement and resupply routes, which run primarily from the east.

Since May 2024, the PLA Navy’s monthly presence has never dropped below 190 PLAN vessels—a floor that formerly did not exist—with China Coast Guard ships adding a further layer of roughly 24 vessels per month.

Beijing’s language has grown blunter and more menacing. Its exercises appear increasingly similar to a blockade, giving it the ability to seamlessly move from exercise to actual military operations. Its gray zone tactics have allowed it to put more pressure on Taiwan and further obscure the line between coercion and violence in a manner that makes it difficult for the U.S. and others to help Taiwan.

This is perhaps the most significant and under-appreciated deterrence problem in East Asia today.

Beijing’s propaganda apparatus tells the people on Taiwan that they are an abandoned chess piece, using the example of Ukraine as a warning.

At the same time, U.S. policy toward Taiwan is more uncertain than it has been at any point in decades, navigating the tensions between robust arms sales and a transactional approach to relations with Beijing that introduce their own ambiguities. As the May summit between Trump and Xi approaches, the prospect for a change—even a minor one—in declaratory policy is real and should be guarded against.

This is a situation that demands a crystal-clear understanding of the nature of the China challenge, the requirements for responding to it, and specifically the tools to deter Beijing’s coercion and predation—both military and economic.

Key Lessons from Joe

This is precisely where Joe’s work becomes indispensable. Joe’s work offers us at least four lessons relevant to the challenges we face today.

The first lesson is to be clear-eyed about the political leadership we are dealing with. The factional balance that constrained Chinese behavior during the Hu Jintao era is gone—long gone. We are now dealing with a personalist and Leninist autocracy. This is a system in which decision-making is effectively concentrated in a single individual who has systematically removed the internal checks that might have moderated him.

The implications for U.S.-China crisis management and Taiwan are serious: the moderating voices within the elite that once might have argued for patience and restraint no longer exist—as far as I know. As Joe taught us, Xi operates in an environment where subordinates fear delivering inconvenient truths. This is a structural feature of personalist rule in a Leninist political system that makes miscalculation more likely.

Second, as Joe repeatedly reminded us, the CCP leadership is intensely preoccupied with its political legitimacy.

This has become even more intense as the leadership has become all about the person of Xi—and as the economy faces challenges that heretofore were the core source of performance legitimacy.

As a result, CCP leaders have become hypersensitive to any and all transgressions against that legitimacy—criticism of the CCP or slights to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. This has created the conditions for a major miscalculation, especially during a period of crisis.

As Joe frequently taught us, a fundamental weakness of any Leninist political system, especially a personalistic one, is the succession problem—how are the next leaders chosen without weakening the current leader. As that succession dilemma becomes more pronounced in China, the perceived threats to CCP legitimacy become more acute, increasing the risk of miscalculation.

A third lesson is: take seriously what CCP leaders say. This is, in a sense, encapsulated in the entire discipline Joe practiced: the careful, patient, linguistically grounded reading of what the Chinese party-state actually says, to itself and to the world. Understanding this does not mean accepting it, but we need to know what the party-state is debating and what it is saying to itself. Deterrence requires clear and credible communication, and we need to know how the CCP thinks in order that we may do this effectively.

Going forward, in China policy, especially in a world in which  China possesses asymmetric economic leverage, U.S. policy makers will need to be able to tolerate, use, and even manipulate risk in ways that generate leverage in negotiations with China. Doing this effectively will  require not only that we send the right signals but that we understand how they are received. After six years on the staff of the NSC, I have some experience in this, and I can assure you that it is a complicated business.

A fourth and final lesson from Joe’s work is about the organizational resilience of the CCP. Do not count on internal Chinese fragility to solve the China challenge or the Taiwan issue. There is a temptation in Washington to assume that China's economic slowdown, its property crisis, its demographic challenges, or its military corruption scandals will somehow constrain Beijing's ambitions. As I argue in a recent article in Asia Policy, the 2025 trade war was initiated because of such assumptions by the Trump administration, triggering a nearly year-long economic contest in which Beijing brandished new and powerful weapons—and ones from which we have little protection.

Joe’s final book about the early years of the CCP teaches us to be skeptical of any assumptions. The CCP has survived worse. Betting U.S. and Taiwan security on a CCP collapse is not a strategy. It is a wish.

Our Obligation

Joe represented one of the first and best of an entire generation China hands. Scholars with genuine linguistic fluency, long-term personal relationships inside China, and the kind of patient, ground-up knowledge that takes decades to build and that produces clear analytical judgments.

This loss should alarm us. Not because we cannot produce new scholars—we can, and we must. But the conditions that shaped Joe’s knowledge are increasingly difficult to re-create. The era of frequent interactions between American and Chinese scholars, of regular travel, of the kind of relationship-building that gave Joe his access and his insights, are now constrained in ways that would have been difficult to imagine twenty years ago.

The China Joe knew—in which a U.S. scholar could visit provincial party schools, attend expert roundtables, and maintain friendships across the Chinese intellectual establishment—is not fully accessible to many of us now and to the next generation.

This is a strategic deficit and one that we collectively need to address. We need to ensure we rebuild independent, academically grounded Chinese-language experts upon whom governments and society can draw.

Most importantly, we need experts who ask—without reference to a political agenda—are we actually reading China correctly or are we projecting our worst fears or our greatest hopes onto it?

Joe asked this question his entire career, and he was never afraid to debate it. In fact, Joe’s commitment to this question was unwavering. His track record was truly remarkable.

As we face a U.S.-China relationship and a Taiwan Strait that is becoming more complicated and dangerous, the question of how we understand China's leadership, its intentions, and its constraints cannot be more consequential. Joe spent his career giving us the tools to answer these questions seriously. The greatest tribute we can pay him is to put them into practice now.

About the Contributor

Evan S. Medeiros is the Penner Family Chair in Asia Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he also serves as Director of the Asian Studies Program. He previously served for six years on the National Security Council staff, first as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and subsequently as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Asia.