Joseph Torigian

Wilson Center Research Fellow

June 1, 2026 – May 31, 2027

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Professional Affiliation

Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

Expert Bio

Joseph Torigian is a 2026-2027 Wilson Center Research Fellow.

Dr. Torigian is Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Torigian studies the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy in China and Russia.

His first book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao was published in 2022, and his second book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was published in 2025. Previously, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, a Stanton nuclear security fellow at CFR, postdoctoral fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a postdoctoral (and predoctoral) fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and a Fulbright scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Wilson Center Project

The Cultural Revolution and the Bomb

Project Summary

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a political campaign that wreaked havoc upon China’s fledgling nuclear and missile programs. The situation became so chaotic that the first man named to command the strategic rocket forces did not even know about his assignment, and he was incarcerated a few months later. By 1969, radicalism had sparked a crisis with the Soviet Union so serious that the entire leadership fled Beijing in fear of a nuclear assault. In 1976, workers in China’s missile complex were protesting publicly against the so-called Gang of Four, a group associated with the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The story of the world’s most powerful weapon during one of history’s most disastrous political experiments is crucial for understanding how Beijing thinks about the role of the bomb in international and domestic politics today.