Speaker 1I was under the impression that the bureaucracy had high capacity. I saw their fancy technology. And then after a few weeks, when I started to realize that all these investigations actually resulted in non-punishment of the factories. So that's when my prior turned into a puzzle. Why am I seeing this gap between my belief that the bureaucracy is strong, but then the fact that no enterprise gets punished?
Speaker 2Welcome back to Scope Conditions. From the University of British Columbia, I'm Alan Jacobs.
Speaker 3And I'm Yang Yang Zou from Dartmouth College. Most of the time, we don't know what's going on. Most governments around the world, whether democracies or autocracies, face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention, the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive, aren't always the issues on which bureaucracies, or agents of the state, have the ability to solve. What do these public agencies do when citizens' demands don't line up with? Either the supply of state capacity, or the incentives of the central state.
Speaker 2Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, examines one way in which bureaucrats try to square this circle. In her recent book, The Performative State, Public Scrutiny, and Environmental Governance in China, Iza argues that state actors who need to respond, but lack the ability to respond, are the ones who need to respond. But those who lack the substantive capacity to do so, can instead choose to perform governance for their public audiences.
Speaker 3Iza explores the puzzling case of China's Environmental Protection Bureau, or the EPB, a bureaucratic agency set up to regulate polluting companies. This issue of polluted air became a national crisis during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, when athletes were struggling to breathe, let alone breathe. Since then, Chinese citizens have been directing their pollution-related complaints to the EPB, which, Iza found, has been given little power by the state to impose fines or shut down polluting factories.
Speaker 2But that doesn't mean the civil servants working in this agency do nothing. Instead, Iza documents how and why they routinely deploy symbols, language, and theatrical language. Iza also records the political gestures of good governance to give the appearance of dynamic action, all while leaving many environmental problems utterly unaddressed.
Speaker 3We talk with Iza about how she uncovered these performative dynamics through months of ethnographic research in which she was embedded within a Chinese environmental protection agency. She also tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, Iza tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, we talk about how her findings about performative governance in the environmental space translates to China's COVID-19 response.
Speaker 2We hope you enjoy this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, make sure to follow or subscribe. And check out our website, ScopeConditionsPodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Now, here's our conversation with Iza Ding. Hi, Iza. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2In your book, you tell us that the environment is one of the hardest public policy problems that the Chinese state faces today. Can you give us a sense of how... How severe the environmental problems are that China faces and what it is that makes this such a knotty problem for the Chinese state to address?
Speaker 1Sure. So let me begin by saying that COVID now has been the public policy problem the world collectively faces since 2019. But during the period of this study, which is before COVID, the issue of pollution was especially pronounced in China. And I can give you some examples. Beijing's air pollution was the most infamous. So it made it into the New York Times on January 13, 2013, as the airpocalypse. So particular matter 2.5 level on that day or the day before was over 500, which is the upper limit of air quality meters. So if we go back to peruse the news in those years, and especially around 2013, 2014, we see headline after headline about the airpocalypse and rivers of blood, toxic rice, cancer villages, and so on and so forth. And we can also find study after study on how pollution reduces the life expectancy of Chinese citizens by a significant number of years. So air quality, to be sure, has improved in recent years. But if we look at the actual numbers, for instance, in 2014, in 2022, the average particular matter 2.5 concentration was 6.5 times the World Health Organization guideline. So it's still a serious problem. In addition, it is also a problem that is hard to solve. So if we think about economic development, all the interests align quite well, and especially in the early reform era. So the central government wanted GDP growth. The local governments also wanted GDP growth. Because officials get promoted through that. And the enterprises, they wanted to make money. And citizens, they wanted employment. They wanted higher income. So all the interests align on the issue of economic development, at least in the early reform era. However, if we think about environmental problems, the interests are not aligned at all. First, we have, obviously, the tradeoff between economic development and economic growth. And environmental protection. Now, many would argue that this is not necessarily a tradeoff, or we can do things to not make it a tradeoff. For instance, we can promote renewable energy so that we can get both economic development and environmental protection. But for the most part, it is still a pretty serious tradeoff. And I think even though China has made significant progress on renewables, environmental protection, and enforcing, environmental regulation means putting people out of jobs, means closing down enterprises. And obviously, people do not like that. And that is why it's a hard problem for the Chinese government to solve.
Speaker 3So the examples that you just gave about the cancer villages and the airpocalypse that was happening in Beijing, that went back about a decade. And it got a lot of international and national spotlight. It put environmental issues in China in the national consciousness. When in China's history did the public start paying serious attention to environmental problems?
Speaker 1Environmental problems, to be sure, have always existed in China. They go back hundreds of years, if not longer. It first went on the government's agenda in the 1970s after China joined the UN and went to the Stockholm Conference. So you see that this term, environmental protection, started to be used more and more and appear more and more in the People's Daily. And so it became an issue that people are aware of. But I wouldn't say that this was an awakening. There's perhaps some consciousness and especially amongst the elites of the pollution problems in China. But I think if we're talking about the general public, I would say that in terms of public scrutiny over environmental issues, it laid quite dormant for a long time. And I think it was within the past 10 years that we see moments awakening. And I can talk about two of those moments. So one is the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. In the months leading up to the games, some foreign athletes, they were training in Beijing and then they reported experiencing respiratory issues. And then that made it into international news. So people within China and outside of China started to pay more and more attention to air pollution, and especially in Beijing. Also during that year, the American embassy in Beijing installed rooftop air quality monitors and started to tweet out hourly air pollution data. And then back then, Twitter was not yet blocked in China. So a lot of Chinese citizens started to follow American embassy's Twitter account and then started to realize that pollution is bad. And I would say the other Another moment of awakening was January 2013, when Beijing's apocalypse, as I mentioned earlier, made it into the New York Times. And so it's interesting that even though it is a national problem, and it has been a national problem in both times, it was Beijing that caught the attention, both domestically
Speaker 2and internationally. So like most states, the Chinese state has a specific bureaucratic agency tasked with addressing environmental issues. This is the Environmental Protection Bureau, or the EPB. How effective would you say China's EPB is at protecting the environment? On the whole,
Speaker 1does it do a good job? I would not call the EPB effective at environmental protection, especially not during the period of this study. So the last time I did interviews for this project was 2019, and that was before. The pandemic. I've not done close observations since then, but I can say that I wouldn't call the EPB effective in summer 2019. And this might sound counterintuitive, as air quality in China, and Beijing in particular, has improved in recent years. But what I want to highlight here is that the subject of my study is not what explains the improvement or deterioration of air quality in China. It's certainly a part of the book, but the main subject of the book is that it looks at bureaucratic behavior. So that is what I'm looking at. And surprisingly, the street-level bureaucrats I was observing had very little authority and not even the legal authority to enforce environmental regulations. So for instance, back then, in the law, these local EPBs, they could not close down factories. When you see factory closures, so those decisions usually come from, you know, Beijing and come from sources outside the bureaucracy. So that also some of the more hardcore environmental measures that we were reading the news in recent years, they come from the central government. But the bureaucracy itself, especially at the street level, was very ineffective. They had little capacity to implement regulations. And I think the best example is that they didn't even have the legal capacity to do that.
Speaker 2So you're saying the EPBs are not effective in summer 2019? The EPB, which has all these inspectors that go around to industrial facilities and measure how much pollution is being spewed into the air or the water, they could come along and see a factory that's just dumping all kinds of toxic chemicals into the water. And they do not have the authority to get that factory to stop doing it.
Speaker 1Yes. To be sure, the factories were also very good at pretending that they were not dumping these toxic chemicals into the water. And I can share with you many stories I observed in terms of performative corporate social responsibility. But on the EPB side, they could issue fines, but they rarely did that. And they could not close factories that had to come from the municipal party committee. And we know that for municipal government or for provincial government for the central government, and not an individual government, they could issue fines. But they rarely did that. And they could not close bureaucracy, they have to balance a few things, including environmental protection, including employment, including economic development. And usually the environment takes the back seat
Speaker 3because the economy is the most important. So what we're hearing is that the EPB on a local level is not an effective agency in the usual sense, because they're not implementing fines, they don't even have the legal means to shut down factories. But just because they are ineffective, it doesn't mean that they are inactive. And in fact, you point out that the EPB is a very active agency. So that's puzzling. To explain why you call what they're doing performative governance. What is performative governance? And in what ways does it differ from substantive governance?
Speaker 1I define performative governance as the state's deployment of visual, verbal and gestural symbols of good governance for the audience of citizens. Its main alternative, as you mentioned, is substantive governance, which is governance that is geared toward giving people what they demand and what they deserve. In the book, I say there are three dimensions to performative governance. One is symbolic responsiveness. The second is benevolence. And the third is visibility. So on substantive governance, the most important thing is visibility. And I think the best example is just that their petition office is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including on the Chinese New Year, and every citizen complaint will hear back within two to three days. So during my time at the agency, I recorded how every single business hour was spent and 75% of the hours were devoted to answering citizen complaints. And most of those investigations of complaints were done by citizens. The second dimension to performative governance is benevolence, or what the government calls service-orientedness. This notion of service-orientedness first appeared during Hu Jintao's rule, and eventually also made it into Xi Jinping's China Dream speech. And the idea of the service-oriented governance is that instead of what the government calls the management-oriented governance that was in the earlier era, where the government decides what people want, and then give people what they want. Service-oriented governance listens to people first about what they want, and then provide for them. So it treats citizens as their customers, and it sees itself as service providers. Whereas in the past, the state was more like a parent. So in my typology, I call this type the paternalistic governance. So some of the examples of service-oriented governance are, for example, the state of the United States, which Service-oriented governance includes serving people tea. If the citizen decides to come to the EPB's office and make a complaint in person, so they will be offered tea and be asked to rest in the EPB's comfortable leather couch, which is, by the way, the only leather couch at the agency in the building. When citizens call the bureaucracy to make a complaint, the bureaucrats are taught to not hand up the phone on the caller first, regardless of the content of the complaint. So I was there one night observing the bureaucrats. Actually, after business hours, there was somebody who was there all night answering citizen phone calls. And one of the callers complained about his neighbor's air pollution generation. And as the conversation went on, you realize that this guy really had a problem with his neighbor. Also, there was one phone call in which the guy complained about air pollution, but then all of a sudden he broke down and mentioned to the bureaucrat his wife had just left him, and he was very depressed. So then in that case, the bureaucrat started to give advice on his marital problems and so forth. Bureaucrats learn to be responsible. They play therapists to the citizens and oftentimes act as their punching bags. And obviously, when people yell at you, you cannot yell back, because if you yell back at people, they are going to complain to somebody else, and then you might get fired. I just saw in the news that a few weeks ago, there was a new regulation in Beijing saying that there's a new rule that if a bureaucrat receives two complaints about them from citizens, then their bonus could be cut. So it's not a rule that should be cut at the end of the year. So you have to be very nice when you talk to people, because if your attitude is bad, then people can complain about you to somebody else. And the last dimension of performative governance is visibility. So obviously, the audience of performative governance is not just those people who come to your office and not just those people who call you up on the phone. China and just like elsewhere, a very small fraction of the population ever complains to the government because people are busy. So then the larger audience of performative governance is not just those citizens, but the wider citizenry who are paying attention to what's happening in the news, paying attention to what the government is doing, but perhaps not paying that much attention. So they are the critical, the pivotal audience of performative governance. So then the inspections and the responses would then be published online and sometimes appear in the news. And you'll read news stories about inspectors, they're battling the snow to catch polluters, staying up all night to catch the polluters. And I stayed up all night a couple of nights with them to see how they did their inspections. So you see a lot of those mostly accurate, but sometimes dramatized stories of how hard the bureaucrats work. So you see a lot of those mostly accurate, but sometimes dramatized stories of how hard the bureaucrats were working at resolving citizen complaints, even though at the end, most of the times the complaints remain unresolved.
Speaker 3Now, those were some great examples. I think from your examples, we can tell that the bureaucracy that's in charge of protecting the environment, it seemed like. they were really taking on a sort of social worker therapy role for citizens, but they were not actually taking steps to protect the environment. Yes, and in part, because they didn't have the
Speaker 1authority to do that. Based on my conversations with some of the bureaucrats, I think they would love to if they could. I think a part of that is that they couldn't. But then what happens when you couldn't do something? And I think the intuitive answer and the logical answer is to say, okay, then you do nothing. And this was indeed the case with a bureaucracy, I would say in the 1990s. And if you read accounts on environmental implementation in China, during this period, you see a lot of mentions of inactivity, inaction. And then you see depictions of environmental bureaucrats sitting in their offices, drinking tea, watching the stock market and gossiping on instead of doing things. So that's kind of a logical, next step, you would think. But then in my book, I argue, because there is this dimension of public scrutiny, which heightened during the last decade, this is when you have performative governance is the under the conditions of low capacity, but high scrutiny, in which case you couldn't sit in your office and drink tea anymore. And you have to get in front of the news and get in front of the citizens and showing them that you really care about them.
Speaker 2Let's dig in to your theory a bit more. So as a sort of backdrop or foil to your argument, we have this sort of ideal typical notion of the modern state with a rationalized bureaucracy. Could you give us a brief primer on sort of the quintessential Weberian state and what it looks
Speaker 1like and how it's organized and operates? I would say that there are two Weberian takes on the notion of the modern state. The first is that the modern state is a sort of social structure of the state. And these are very different takes, if not opposite takes, and both can be found in contemporary social science literature. So let me explain. The first chapter of my book has this long discussion about the state. And it starts from this most popular definition of the state in political science and in sociology, which is the state is a monopolizer of violence. So Weber calls the state a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the state. And so Weber calls the state a human community of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. So that's the first sentence we learn, or at least I learned in a political science class on the state, at the graduate level, perhaps. So Weber said this in his famous speech called Politics as a Vocation. And what's so interesting is that in the very next sentence, Weber immediately clarified, and he said that force violence is certainly not the norm, or the only means of the state. Nobody says that. But it's interesting that that sentence often gets overlooked in the literature. And the most popular definition of the state in political science remains to be that the state is a monopolizer of violence, a la Weber. And of course, Weber himself was inspired by Trotsky and others, but that's a different story for a different time. So this first Weberian take sort of agrees with America's ideological take on the state as the big brother, the protection racket, the grabbing hand. And this ideological take sees the state and the market, or sometimes society, as rivals. And that's obviously inspired by Adam Smith, who was then inspired by Francis Hutchison and Epicurus, but that's also a different time. Smith became the torch holder for this image of the state as the grabbing hand and a rival of the market and society. So here you have something very interesting. So even though Weber and Smith are seen as theoretical opposites when it comes to theories of economic development, in particular, the role the state plays in economic development. But when it comes to the definition of the state, scholars have chosen Weber's line on violence, which sort of agrees with a Smithian take on the state as this violent and predatory force. So this leads me to the second Weberian take, which is Weber's writing about bureaucracy. In particular, his writing about bureaucracy in economy and society. Now, to be sure, when Weber wrote about bureaucracy, he didn't only have the state in mind. So he was thinking about organizations, including state agencies, but also private enterprises. So his most famous writing on bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic and the spirit of democracy, is the one that he wrote about the spirit of capitalism. He was kind of inspired by these American enterprises that he saw during his trip to the United States. And that also inspired his writing on bureaucracy, and this notion that modern bureaucracies are rationalized. And rationality to Weber means that the division of labor means the esteem for technical expertise. And it means the impersonal execution of rules. So if we think about it, Weber's writing about bureaucracy, he was kind of inspired by these of rationality. We can see that both in capitalist enterprises, we can even see that in academia. But importantly, the political science literature pays attention to the state and state bureaucracies. And I would say that even in China, you see a lot of rationalization of the state, both during the period of socialism, and also during economic reform. Different forms of rationalization. And so I think there's a lot of rationalization within the Chinese bureaucracy. And I think that is undeniable. And that's also what I saw during my participant observation within the state. However, despite this larger trend of rationalization, and what my book is showing that there's also a performative side to the state that sort of pushes back against rationalization of the state and pushes back against this image of state. And I think that's also what I saw during my participation observation within the state. However, despite this larger trend of rationalization, that is impersonal, that is functional, that consists of those single cogs in an ever moving mechanism, according to Weber, or these appendages to the machine, according to Marx, we also see a performative side of the state that is personal instead of impersonal, that is charismatic, or that is gentle, instead of being cold and being calculating and being impersonal. So I would say, that is the key feature of Weberian rationality. So you both see that in the evolution of the Chinese state. But you also see a lot of elements of impersonality, in my observation of the Chinese state. And in the past, a lot of times, people wrote about charisma, people wrote about dictators were charismatic. And obviously, that is also against bureaucracy. But what I'm showing in my book are these street level performances, the street level performances, the street level performances, street level impersonality, and the street level performances, these bureaucrats were carrying out
Speaker 2for the audience of society. So you identify this phenomenon of performative governance, whereby state actors really make a show of very visibly responding to citizen preferences and complaints and interact with citizens in ways meant to demonstrate benevolence toward them. But you argue in the book that performative governance is just one of several different governance modes that we're going to observe in the world. So in the book's core argument, you're asking us to think about a two-dimensional space that's sort of defined by these two features of an agency's context. There's the agency's capacity, and there's the level of scrutiny that it receives from the public. And together, these two features of the agency's context determine the kind of governance, that it's going to exercise. Let's start with capacity. So how do you define capacity in this
Speaker 1argument? I define capacity as the state's logistical ability and political authority to perform its functions. The main unit of analysis in my book is the bureaucracy. So my theory is about bureaucratic behavior, but I think my typology has implications for state behavior as a whole. And importantly, I should say that I'm not a bureaucrat, so I'm not going to show how bureaucratic capacity vary within the state across different bureaucracies.
Speaker 3And in the book, you also say that capacity is not only infrastructural, but superstructural.
Speaker 1Can you tell us what you mean by that? By infrastructural capacity, I mean the things that you can see and touch. So for instance, the amount of money, number of personnel, equipment in the state, the amount of expertise the state or a single bureaucracy possesses. But I think capacity is also about the superstructural power. So authority cloud or influence the bureaucracy wields. And superstructural power is critical because in the case of the EPB that I'm observing, at least in the city of Lakeville, where I did my fieldwork, if you look at the EPB, And if you look at their text messages, technology both were pretty good the people working there especially younger bureaucrats they all had master's or phd degrees in environmental engineering sciences and then the technology at the epb also was pretty good so they had these law enforcement ipads that every bureaucrat had and then they had these fancy pollution sample collectors so during the inspections my job was to carry the airbags that was used for air sample collections and i know that these bags were pretty expensive they were made in australia so if you just look at money personnel and expertise and equipment you can't really tell if this bureaucracy is strong or weak and i argue that state capacity is relative and which is why we also need to pay attention to the super structural dimension of state power which is to say that if the bureaucracy is incapable of enforcing regulations on enterprises perhaps because those companies had powerful allies within the state more powerful allies
Speaker 2then i call this bureaucracy weak okay so that's capacity and then the second feature of an agency that is important for determining its mode of governance is scrutiny so what exactly do you mean
Speaker 1by scrutiny i define scrutiny as the degree to which the bureaucracy is placed under critical examination for its behavior so if we look at the classical literature on bureaucracy scholars write a lot about scrutiny from within a lot about principal agent problems so principles scrutinizing the agents but in my book i add public scrutiny to the equation and focus on scrutiny from wider society on the bureaucracy which theoretically should not be something that holds the bureaucracy accountable for its behavior and especially in democracies where you have the independent civil service and the idea is that you could insulate bureaucracy and its experts from politics so that they can carry out their expertise um in isolation from the great greater political struggles going on the public that's interesting so you're saying that we would
Speaker 2typically think about the kind of scrutiny that bureaucrats are under as a kind of top-down scrutiny as in are they implementing policy in the way that their superiors or that the central government wants them to implement it but that often bureaucrats are actually under the gaze of the public who they're supposed to be serving or interacting with at the street level and that this can matter for the way in which they carry out their jobs is that right yes it is
Speaker 1indeed right and to be sure there is a lot of internal scrutiny within the chinese bureaucracy because that is the definition of bureaucracy is that you have the hierarchy of authorities and i think any bureaucracy we're in it could be a state agency it could be a economic enterprise it could even be a university i think the lower level of bureaucracy is the lower level of the state and i think in our information age where the behavior of the state even the street level agents is exposed to the gazing eyes of the public and on social media for instance twitter or weibo it means that a big part of the state is now under public scrutiny and then for them it is no longer viable just to be these drones that carry out the the orders from above they also have to do to appeal to the citizens to assuage their concerns in part to ensure their own career security because we know cases in which bureaucrats get fired because they've done things or said things to anger the public even in democracies so that's really interesting so what your argument is telling
Speaker 3us is that because of the information age because the public can see more what bureaucracies are doing your everyday street level bureaucrats end up looking a little bit more like what we think of typical politicians have to deal with and that politicians have to typically answer to the public and so for your typology first taking state capacity we can have either high or low state capacity and then taking your other variable public scrutiny we can have either high or low levels of scrutiny and so this gives us a two-by-two typology of bureaucratic behavior that means it gives us actually four types of bureaucracies can you walk us through the four
Speaker 1types when capacity and scrutiny are both low state behavior is inert so in this case the state or a single bureaucracy within it it's incapable of solving the problem in question and it's also under no public pressure to do so when capacity is high and scrutiny is low state behavior is paternalistic so in this case the state is like the parent of a small child with a lot of power over their trusting unscrutinizing offspring and just like a parent the paternalistic state can use their power to engage in either good or bad behavior so in social science terms they can be either developmental or developmental and they can be either developmental or developmental or predatory and indeed in the china literature both terms have been used to describe powerful agencies within the chinese state like the national development and reform commission and state-owned enterprises so when capacity and scrutiny are both high state behavior is the most substantive the state in this case has the ability to fulfill its promises to the public and public opinion will hold it accountable if it does not so those are the three other quadrants and then lastly when capacity is low and scrutiny is high we have performative governance so in this case again the bureaucracy does not have the ability to resolve citizens problems but they have to do something to assuage high public pressure and public opinion and so in this case they can't just do nothing so they have to get in front of the citizens appearing benevolent appearing responsive even though they do not have the ability to fulfill
Speaker 3its promises so i think many of us would naturally want to put the chinese state in the cell that is high capacity and low scrutiny so in the very paternalistic cell yeah i mean for example you
Speaker 2tell us in the book that the chinese state is a very paternalistic cell and they're not a paternalistic cell and they're not a paternalistic cell so in the book that the chinese state employs more than seven million civil servants which sounds like very high capacity and then of course it's an autocracy which we might assume means low public scrutiny and so i think our instinct might be to classify china as a case in which we should expect paternalistic governance which is what you get when you've got high capacity and low scrutiny but in your book you reveal that there
Speaker 3is variation in both variables within the chinese state depending on what bureaucracy we're looking at so let's start with capacity what determines whether a bureaucracy has high or low capacity capacity comes from a few
Speaker 1different sources and most importantly delegation from the central government and for instance in recent years the epb has acquired more capacity and especially after the 2018 super ministry's reform so where does this capacity come from it comes from the central government giving the capacity to the bureaucracy but sometimes the bureaucracy could also use its own agency so it could do things to acquire more capacity i'll use another example that's the same bureaucracy the epb so in the early 2000s the epb had a very entrepreneurial deputy minister who engaged a lot of activism In particular, collaborating with societal actors such as NGOs and collaborating with international actors such as foreign NGOs and even international governments and organizations to elevate the salience of the issue of environmental protection in order to acquire more power from the state. And a related question to that is then how can we tell which bureaucracies are stronger and which are weaker if we were just kind of look at them and read through their job descriptions? And I think in general, if the agency has power over personnel, over administrative approval or over public finance, then you have a strong bureaucracy there and obviously also over economic planning.
Speaker 3And how about scrutiny? How does scrutiny work for an agency in the Chinese setting? Why should unelected bureaucrats working for an unelected agency? government care about public evaluations of their behavior? They care because public evaluations
Speaker 1of their behavior can exert a tangible impact on their career outcomes. And this is not predictable. So sometimes you get fired, sometimes you don't when you upset the citizenry. But when you do that, you're going to get punished a lot of the times. So the street level bureaucrats, they have to do their best to assuage citizen outrage and their complaints in order to protect themselves from the blames that are going to fall from above and from the punishments in case these smaller complaints amalgamate into a large scale public opinion crisis. And I would add to that by saying that as a whole, we do know that the Chinese Communist Party cares about public opinion. And it cares about public opinion because it is a revolutionary party. It came to power through mobilizing the public to join the revolution that overthrew the Anxing regime. So from day one, the party cared a lot of public opinion. So I think there is this political culture of complaint or a political culture of using the petition system to assess public opinion and then to adjust policies. But what I'm looking at is really the variation over time, and the variation within the state. So given this knowledge that the Chinese government cares about public opinion, and obviously, if the government as a whole doesn't care about public opinion, they won't punish the agents who have angered the citizens. So given that condition in the background, then when do we see that agency will do things to assuage public concerns? And when do we see that they won't? And what are the conditions under which we see the variation of state behavior? Then my book looks at what are the conditions under which state behavior varies from agency to agency?
Speaker 3That's really interesting, because in democratic settings, when you have elected officials, I think a bureaucrat can say, you know, if they're getting a complaint from citizens, a bureaucrat can say, take it up with your elected official, that's not on me. But actually, in this setting, because there are no elected official, your street level bureaucrats are like the frontline people who have to bear the brunt of the state's problems. And so a supervisor in a bureaucracy can say, hey, the citizen had a problem, you didn't do a good job, as a street level bureaucrat handling it, you're going to get fired. And so that's the sort of accountability mechanism here is that bureaucrats actually have to fear just being fired.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's not electoral. And it's very informal. So we can't really predict when somebody's going to get fired, when somebody won't get fired. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do. But the idea of it, you know, the potential of getting fired, or even getting reprimanded, or even upsetting your superiors could play a role of how you're going to behave how you're going to face the citizen who's complaining.
Speaker 3And in that way, it's very much like, as you were saying before, the bureaucracy kind of becomes like customer service, you know, you have a citizen who's like, I don't know, a Karen who's complaining, and they're basically saying, you know, I'm going to talk to your manager. And it operates like a customer service representative. And there are Karens, and there are non-Karens.
Speaker 2And if I understand right, you're also saying not every part of the Chinese state receives that same level of scrutiny that the EPB, this Environmental Protection Bureau does in the current environment, because there's a lot of attention to environmental problems these days. But there are surely other agencies of the Chinese state that actually receive low scrutiny, right?
Speaker 1Exactly. Public opinion is extremely capricious, and it's extremely malleable. So during the period of this study, I think air pollution and environmental pollution in general had the public's attention. But if you think about what happens after 2018, since the trade war with the United States, and especially after the 2019 pandemic, you see this dramatic change. This dramatic shift of public attention from issues like pollution to the pandemic and to U.S.-China relations, and now to the economy, because there's economic slowdown and potentially a crisis. And therefore, it's somewhat hard to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time. But I would say if you are a street-level bureaucracy that has more efficiency, and you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time, you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time. But I would say if you are a street-level bureaucracy that has more efficiency, and you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time, you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time. But I would say if you are a street-level bureaucracy that has more efficiency, and you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time, you're able to predict where public scrutiny is at a certain moment in time. If you have face-to-face contact with the citizenry, such as the EPB and such as the Urban Management Bureau, and even the police, you are obviously under greater public scrutiny just by exposure.
Speaker 2Let's talk more about the empirics of the study. One of the reasons we were really excited to feature your book on the podcast is because methodologically, you do something that not many of our guests have done. In particular, you use ethnography. And you actually... You actually embedded yourself for five months in the EPB in a city that we know it's a pseudonym, but that you called Lakeville. Could you tell us a little bit about Lakeville and why you chose it as your study site?
Speaker 1Lakeville is a wealthy city in the Yangtze River Delta, which is the area surrounding metropolitan Shanghai, where I understand Yangyang has family in. So it is polluted. So air quality in Lakeville is on par with the nation's average. And slightly worse than Shanghai's, for the listeners who've been to Shanghai in recent years. And so when I started my fieldwork, so this book came out of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, I wrote in my prospectus that because it's a wealthy city, because it's on the coast, because it's close to Shanghai, I would find substantive environmental governance in Lakeville. So this was originally my good... My good case of environmental governance, which as the good comparativist, I would then contrast with a bad case of environmental implementation in inland China, in Guizhou. But when I got there, got to Lakeville, starting with my good case, what I observed was that substantive environmental governance was utterly lacking. And what I saw there was performative governance instead.
Speaker 3So what was it like doing... And what was it like doing ethnography at the EPB in Lakeville?
Speaker 1I spent five months at the Lakeville EPB, and I showed up every day, I had my own desk at the agency, I swept floors, I made tea, I climbed smokestacks. I also follow these inspectors on to their inspections, I got into the sewage ditches with them, and I was there to observe them. So I wasn't there to promote good governance. So I was very conscious in not interfering with their behavior, not interfering in the way they do things. And by the way, they did nothing illegal. It was just normal kind of bureaucratic life at the bureaucratic agency. And then during the inspections, I would help carry these air sample collectors. It was actually quite light, so it's not a heavy thing, because it's, again, good technology, well-made, and then carry these airbags. But I didn't really assume the role of a civil servant. For both ethical and practical reasons, for practical legal reasons, you have to take this really hard test to actually become a civil servant, and I'm sure I cannot pass the exam. Obviously, I don't want to, but if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to actually pass the exam and beat the hundred others who wanted this post in the agency in the civil service exam, but also for ethical reasons, obviously, both for research and politically. So my daily life is like that.
Speaker 3And so even though you weren't actually working there, you didn't take the exam, you were participating in some of the activities, you were there every day. Were the other agents welcoming of you? Were you working with the same people every day?
Speaker 1The bureaucrats were very welcoming, and it was indeed, I did my fieldwork in a period where the general political atmosphere was welcoming to foreign researchers. So they were very nice to me, and people had questions, they had curiosities about life in the United States, they had curiosities about Harvard, about Boston, and things like that. But what I realized is that, you know, after a few days, people's attention is always on themselves, it shifts themselves, they have their life to worry about, they have to do their job. So they kind of just accept you as one of them. Or they ignore you because they have things to do, things to worry about. So I wasn't really there as some kind of external auditor from the World Bank or a special guest or a... an official who's monitoring them. So there is no reason for them to kind of worry about my existence. And I became friendly and became friends with some of them. So it was kind of a very natural process of just joining this group of bureaucrats and kind of following them around
Speaker 3and just looking at how they do things. And so I guess there's something to be said about using ethnography as a method, because you spend so much time with them, and you were there every single day, your presence over time kind of just became very normalized. And so you could see their day to day in a way that you wouldn't have if you were just coming in as an interviewer and doing,
Speaker 1you know, interviews for a few days. Yes. And when I did my ethnography, and actually, when I look back at the ethnography, and I think I had some methodological reflections, and one of the reflections is that with ethnographic methods, we often worry about this thing called observer effect, which is the equivalent of that is Hawthorne effect in experiments. And the idea is that if our subjects know they're being observed, will they change their behavior for our audience? You know, what I noticed is that people don't pay that much of attention to other people in general. In my case, just after a few days, I was quickly normalized. And I've read some recent studies coming out of AER and APSR showing that Hawthorne effect is perhaps not as strong as we had previously thought. So in other words, we social scientists are not as important as we thought we were in our subjects usually just could not care less about us. And that was kind of one of the many surprises I had while I was doing my ethnography. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important. I had while I was doing my ethnography, you know, nobody thought I was special. Obviously,
Speaker 2I am not special. You've told us that you initially went to the Lakeville EPB, expecting it to be substantively effective, in part because it was in this fairly affluent city. But then observing and talking with the officials there, you realized that something else was going on. What is it that changed your mind and got you thinking that what you were seeing was actually not so substantive, but rather much more performative?
Speaker 1So I went into Lakeville with a prior that I would see substantive governance. And as we know, priors are really strong. So that remained my prior for a long time. I was going there expecting to see that. So I thought for a while, that's what I was seeing, especially in the early stages where when I was talking to the people, I was talking to the people, I was talking to the people, I was talking to the bureaucrats, and realizing, wow, how knowledgeable they are, how well educated they are. And as we know, if we take Fukuyama's argument, and that's our measurement for state capacity is education and the capacity of the individuals within the state. So it was under the impression that the bureaucracy had high capacity. Also, I saw their fancy technology, and so forth. And then after a few weeks, when I started to realize that all these investigations actually resulted in non punishment of the factories. So that's when my prior turned into a puzzle. So I couldn't quite figure out why am I seeing this gap between my belief that the bureaucracy is strong, but then the fact that no enterprise gets punished. And then during the inspection, one day, I had my aha moment, a bureaucrat told me they were being performative. So he said, we're just doing face work. And face work also happens to be the title of one of Irvin Goffman's papers on impression management. So that was the moment when I realized, okay, all these inspections were carried out, not with the intention of punishing the enterprise, and in fact, the bureaucrats were well aware of their lack of capacity, and especially their lack of authority to punish the enterprises. So what they were doing was showing their responsiveness to citizen complaints, when the citizen complains, you immediately go conduct an investigation, and then you report to the citizen, this is what you did, this is what you found. And in the process, showing your benevolence, to the public, showing them that you care about them, and showing them that you're trying really hard, making really hard efforts at resolving their complaints. So that's when I realized that what the bureaucracy was doing was performative governance instead. And let me give you an example, which is the foul air law enforcement operation. So in the middle of October 2013, the bureaucracy noticed an increase in the number of people who were involved in the law enforcement operation, and there was a huge amount of citizen complaints about air pollution and targeting a few specific industrial districts. So what the bureaucracy did is immediately when it realized there was a spike in citizen complaints, it launched this, what they call foul air law enforcement operations, because citizens in the complaints were referencing the foul smell of local air. So they began the operation by driving around the industrial district in their law enforcement vehicles, and they drove around the industrial district in their law enforcement vehicles, and with the windows down, their heads out of the windows, kind of sniffing down the street for smelly air, and then came up with a list of 30 enterprises that were most suspicious of generating this foul air that was bothering the local citizens. And then for two weeks, every day, these inspectors would visit two to three enterprises, take air samples, and sometimes talking to the citizens about which hour is the smell. the worst, and so on and so forth, and also conducting these ad hoc, what they call night inspections. So attacking in the middle of the night, because after a few days, everybody in a district learned that the EPB is in town. So then miraculously, everybody's air pollution treatment facility was perfectly running when they got to the enterprise. And because the factories talked to themselves, so then what EPB did, and they didn't have to, nobody was telling them to, the bureaucrats decided, that they would actually shift their inspection to 2am in the morning, where they would surprise visit these factories and take air samples, and then go back and analyze these samples, but obviously taking pictures of them being there in the middle of the night and also reporting what they did to the citizens. So at the end of the operation, so these air samples would then be analyzed by the environmental monitoring station, which is the Department of Environmental Protection, which is a subsidiary of the EPB. And the decision was made that only four of the 30 enterprises had violated environmental regulations. And because I was there every day at every enterprise, I knew it wasn't four. So I was really surprised to see that. And even with these four enterprises, the fine was really small. So it was a few $1,000. And sometimes the industrial output of these enterprises in the district could exceed $1,000. So it was a few thousand dollars. And it's really a slap on the wrist. It's really nothing for these factories to pay periodic fines, rather than turning on their pollution treatment facilities, because electricity costs a lot more money. So then after the determination was made, every citizen complaint would then receive a response from the bureaucracy. In the response, which is also published online, the bureaucracy would thank the citizen for their support for their governance measures. And then it would open with this sentence of greetings, thank you so much for writing to us. And then we did this thorough investigation, we did this and that. And sometimes they even include that said enterprise was not found to have violated environmental regulations. But still, we're going to do these things to make sure we do better in the future. And thank you so much for your concern with the local environment and for your support for us. So that's the end of the foul air law enforcement operation. And then to make sure I'm not exaggerating, I actually went back to the APB's website every year after my fieldwork to look at the complaints. And the same enterprises were still receiving complaints in 2019, which means that inspections perhaps had not had a substantial impact on
Speaker 2enterprise behavior. And so this is a response that was utterly non-substantive. It did not do anything to solve the problem. But the point was to be seen trying to solve the problem. Yes. Because that's the best these bureaucrats could do.
Speaker 3Yes. And so one way we know that this bureaucracy, the EPB, is scrutinized is because they have this 24-hour hotline where citizens can call and complain. But you said another way, the public can scrutinize the bureaucracy is through the media. What is this agency's relationship with mainstream media and with social media?
Speaker 1This agency has a love-hate relationship with the media. So if nothing happens, it prefers to lay low and hide from the media. But the bureaucrats there, they also receive media training. So they are told to increase their contacts with the journalists, to proactively reach out to the journalists, and to accept more interviews. And also when facing the journalists, I'm just quoting from this media training guide the EPP uses, the bureaucrats are told to speak the truth, objectively explain the process, but avoid speaking about results. So what this tells me is that the agency's perfectly aware of its lack of ability to resolve citizens' environmental complaints, but it still sees the need to get in the news cycle and then to kind of be actively shaping the narrative about environmental governance in the locality so as to improve its public image.
Speaker 2So you establish that this phenomenon of performative governance is at work in the media, but it also has really rich evidence in the book that makes that very clear. And you also, as we just talked about, investigate the relationship between the EPP and the media, so how this performative governance is made visible to citizens. But then there's the question of whether that has any effect on citizens' beliefs or their attitudes toward the state. And so to get at that, you conducted two surveys. There was your urban media consumption survey that you conducted, and then there was your urban media consumption survey that you conducted. You conducted with 600 Lakeville residents. And then you fielded an urban environmental attitude survey with over 6,000 citizens in a much wider range of places. This is across 30 Chinese cities. Can you give us a sense of what you found? Did citizens correctly assess the quality of their environment, for instance? And perhaps more importantly, did assessments of the state improve in places where they were not?
Speaker 1Maybe I can start with your second question. So my survey analysis is not a causal analysis. I found that in places where there's more performative governance, citizen satisfaction is higher, everything else equal. So in the nationwide survey, I asked people a bunch of questions, including two questions gauging their satisfaction with localization. So the first one is, how satisfied are you with local environmental governance? And then I use that as my outcome variable. I then measure the level of performative governance in the 30 cities in which I conducted the survey. And obviously, it's really hard to measure performative governance because the idea of performative governance is to appear as substantive. So how do I do that? So I measure the frequency at which performative governance appears in the news, because I see that as the key channel through which this thing reaches the wider audience. And then with the help of three research assistants, I then counted the number of environmental reporting that's published in the daily newspapers in those cities that contain the key components of performative governance over the 12 months prior to the survey. And what I found, which is not causal, because that was one of the key components of one wave of survey. But what I found was that in cities where there is more performative governance in the news, there's also higher levels of citizen approval, controlling for everything else, including the level of air pollution, and including measures for GDP per capita and individual level controls such as gender, age, income and education. Now I said this is not causal finding from the data that I'm sharing with you today. I'm not saying that this is not causal. I'm just saying that this is not causal. But to the extent that performative governance is effective at improving citizen approval, I then conducted interviews with citizens in Lakefield and elsewhere to figure out, okay, to the extent that it works, what are the mechanisms through which it works. So I found two mechanisms from performative governance to approval. So first, performative governance made some citizens and especially those citizens living further away from the sources of pollution, believe that air quality is in the process of improving, because they're really further away from those polluting enterprises. And they're reading in the news about the government doing things. A lot of the things that I'll hear is that people would say, well, the government has done a lot over the past few years, and they've seen that in the media. And the second mechanism is that even for citizens, some citizens, they're well aware that the government hasn't done much, or they even themselves agree that the economy is really important. You can't really sacrifice the economy for the environment. Performative governance still makes people give the state credit for trying for displaying this good attitude. So the term good attitude is something I looked for in the first place. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing.
Speaker 2of really rapid economic growth that generated some really severe forms of environmental degradation. And I'm wondering if, to some degree, we can think of performative governance as having been a kind of developmental tool, developmental strategy for the Chinese state, insofar as it helped the Chinese state to sort of manage some of the contradictions of development. That is, it allowed them to pursue rapid economic development, while at the same time appearing to address some of its negative externalities, and thereby sort of helping to maintain citizen support for the broad approach. Do you think that's a helpful way of thinking about performative governance in a context like China in the 2010s?
Speaker 1I think that is certainly a way to interpret what I found, and especially given we're in the professional political space. And I think that's a helpful way of thinking about performative governance science. And if we wanted to come up with a functionalist theory for why we see performative governance, and I think you could certainly see it as a strategy to buy more time to manage public opinion as China transitions into a greener economy. But I want to add that in my observation from the perspective of the state, and especially from the perspective of state level bureaucrats, they simply do not think like political scientists. So they don't think about things in terms of kind of tools and strategies, or the autocratic playbook, if you will. So from their perspective, performative governance is not really a strategy, but more so a reaction to the crisis that is right in front of us. And I think it's a very human reaction to what's in front of these people. So if we think about what happens when individuals are in these situations, where they couldn't deliver, but they are being watched, and they're under strong public scrutiny. And I think a very natural reaction is to act as if they know what they're doing, they know what they're talking about. So I think performative governance is partly a tool, but also partly a very, I think, natural logical reaction to these two conditions of low capacity and high scrutiny.
Speaker 3So moving on to scope conditions and generalizability of your theory into other contexts, contexts like democracies. In the book, you do mention the case of Flint, Michigan in the United States. Since 2014, the city of Flint has not had clean tap water, leading to residents either having to buy bottled water for everything that they need or suffering from diseases brought on by using contaminated water. Can you tell us how what you found in China can teach us anything about what's going on in Flint? Sure. And the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that
Speaker 1and perhaps the way I think about is also, you know, what happened in Flint and perhaps combined with what happened in China can teach us about how these things tend to go, regardless of the regime. So the Flint case was paired with a case from China, actually, it was the Wuhan government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak. And I see this pair of cases as a most different design, because you have two very different regimes. One is autocracy, one is a democracy. But during this crisis, both the Flint government and the Wuhan government engaged in performative governance, and performative governance broke down in both cases. It was not able to convince the citizens of the state's virtue. And so in that chapter, I further examine why that is the case. And my argument is that in those two particular cases, it was what Goffman calls destructive information. And the state, when the state loses control over the information environment, and when those destructive information about state behavior reaches the public, in both cases through whistleblowers, that's when we see the breaking down of performative governance, and we see more public outrage as opposed to less. And then you see more substantive measures
Speaker 3following that. So we had mentioned the COVID situation in China a couple times throughout this conversation. And I'd like to ask you to comment on it directly. Most of my family still live in Shanghai, and it's an absolute mess. They've went through very oppressive lockdowns in which they couldn't leave their apartments for months, and they had to test every day, to suddenly now having no restrictions, no testing, they're sort of left to fend for themselves. I think they've all had COVID at this point. And that seems like a state failure to me. I think that's your assessment as well. Have you seen instances of performative governance? When it comes to the pandemic response? And has that worked at all?
Speaker 1Yes. So when it comes to pandemic response, we do see a lot of performative measures. So for instance, people dressed up in these hazmat suits and spraying disinfectants on the street, although it might not work at preventing or stopping the virus. So you see a lot of those performative measures. And I think it's in general state reaction and not just the Chinese state, but also the Chinese state. So I think it's a lot of performative measures. And I think it's a lot of governments around the world, their reaction, especially their initial reaction to the virus was quite performative. And we can get into many examples of such. So I have some people from Indonesia and Turkey and other places kind of telling me, yeah, this is how our government has dealt with the pandemic. But then later on, I think, especially recently, if we're talking about the Shanghai lockdown, in my view, that's quintessential paternalism. And I think that's governance because they didn't ask people if they wanted to be locked down. They didn't ask people if that's what they want. It's not that people demanded to be locked up in their apartments. And in fact, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the lockdown. So I think in that very case, what we see is paternalistic governance, if not predatory or repressive governance.
Speaker 2We know that the Chinese state is increasingly getting better at monitoring and observing its citizens. And I think that's a lot of dissatisfaction with the lockdown. And I think that's a lot of dissatisfaction with the lockdown. And I think that's a lot of dissatisfaction with the lockdown. For example, David Yang's work on China's surveillance state shows that local police agencies are collaborating with cutting edge corporate AI. And this has made them able to identify individuals just walking down the street, doing their grocery shopping, standing at a protest. I'm wondering whether the flip side is also true. We've been talking about public scrutiny. And of course, the technology available to citizens is also advancing. So do we see Chinese citizens getting, savvier and accessing better technology to scrutinize the state even more intensively?
Speaker 1That is a great question. And it's a really hard question, a question actually in the China field, those doing research on information on censorship, and in general have been talking about and debating about and maybe I can just make a plug for my colleague, Martin Dimitrov's book on dictatorship and information. So that's he talked about, this question in his book, I would agree with you that Chinese citizens are accessing a better technology to scrutinize the state. And that's just because technology is improving in general. And I would say that even if the technology is not improving, we still see through the recent protests, that it's really hard to control public opinion, just through surveillance and just through repression or censorship. People are very ingenious, they can control public opinion, they can always come up with different ways and sometimes using high technology and sometimes just using the traditional technology of walking onto the street. So I think public opinion is really hard to control even with the most advanced surveillance and censorship tools. And like Deng Xiaoping said, the revolutionary party is most afraid of not heeding the opinion of the people. And just like Napoleon said that people, you know, public opinion is a really scary power, but people are right, most of the time. So it is right than wrong most of the time. So even people like that acknowledge it. And I think that is very much the case with Chinese public opinion, is that at the end of the day, public opinion is able to figure out what you're doing. And it's able to side with the right over the wrong.
Speaker 3Wow, with that, let's just say thank you so much. We've learned so much from this
Speaker 2conversation. Thanks so much for joining us, Isa.
Speaker 3Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2That's our episode for today. Our content editors are Sampada KC and Unshil Choi, and our sound editor is Scott Duke-Giles.
Speaker 3Our theme music is by the Great North Sound Society. Thanks to UBC's Department of Political Science and the American Political Science Association's Centennial Center for supporting
Speaker 2this podcast. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you.
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