While all chapters have their qualities, I was especially intrigued by Ding’s rich and detailed ethnographic analysis in Chapter Three, as one delves into the day-to-day struggles and endeavours of Max, the nearly forty-year-old Chinese bureaucrat who works at the Lakeville environmental protection bureau (EPB). Based on a five-month ethnographic case study at Lakeville’s EPB, the reader is brought into the less visible reality of their organisational life. A series of detailed examples, from night-time inspections, to the long overtime hours and pressures bureaucrats face to respond to the deluge of citizen grievances, to the attention they give to the way they dress and what they eat in public for fear of being exposed on social media and accused of corruption, allow the reader to truly grasp the intricacies and complexities that bureaucrats must face. Ding focuses on “the little things,” on attitudes, gestures, or intentions (p. 76). In performing performative governance, Max and his colleagues must appear responsive to public opinion, demonstrate the benevolence of the state’s intentions, and make these efforts publicly visible . Chris: One thing that also jumped out, I mean, you do discuss it in later chapters, is COVID, and this is something where it seems that there was a lot of substantive implementation. Can you say a little bit about how China’s COVID policies and responses fit with theory that you’re developing?

Iza: Sure. So, that chapter is about the breaking down of performative governance, and basically, when shall we see, and clearly, it’s something that doesn’t always work. This is something that breaks down very often. LIEBERTHAL, Kenneth G. 1992. “Introduction: The ‘Fragmented Authoritarianism’ Model and its Limitations.ˮ In Kenneth G. LIEBERTHAL, and David M. LAMPTON (eds.), Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press. But in this case, that adds to the equation scrutiny from wider society. And then, just one more note on capacity, which I define as the state’s logistical ability and political authority to perform its function. So, when we think about how to measure capacity, it’s both the amount of money, personnel, equipment, and expertise, the state bureaucracy, the single bureaucracy has, but is also — to borrow this Marxist term — It’s the super structural power of the state. When the east coast militias—christened a “Federal” army—arrived in Pittsburgh, the whiskey rebels melted away before any significant fighting could take place. But the army nonetheless arrested rebel leaders in a widely reported “dreadful night.” A short while after, white male heads of household in western Pennsylvania came out en masse to sign a public oath of allegiance to the republic. This too made the rounds of the early US’ press network, whose practices were an eighteenth-century version of retweeting. Editors clipped stories from other newspapers and reprinted them in their own—what we call plagiarism, they called spreading the news. So, when Anthony Wayne and others described his troops’ victory as a gloriously violent destruction of “savages,” the public that made up the American electorate heard about it, and the new American elite took notice. A consensus that may have saved the new republic Chris: Definitely a lot of symbolic action. I think maybe that we’re sort of still too historically close to everything that’s happened to have a good perspective on all of the different processes. One of the things that I was thinking about when reading your book, and some of the work that I’ve done in the past, and not just in China, but globally, has looked at social movements, protests, more active type of civil society. And obviously COVID is a little bit different of a situation. Around 2010 to 2015 or so, my impression was that there was a lot more activism around governance or if there’s some sort of plant was going to be built in some place that had some chemicals, there was a lot of citizen activism. But it seems that has slowed in recent times. Is that your sense or maybe just the news isn’t getting out?

The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance. So, I have four cases. The first two cases I compare two water crises in China and Vietnam. And then, typically, China and Vietnam are considered as “most similar cases” because they’re both authoritarian regimes getting similar scores from the Freedom House. But then, after these water crises and officials in both countries went swimming into the river, and then their swimming was also captured in the news media. Iza: One of the things that I’ve noticed, and I think many have, is that Chen Jining, who’s the former minister of environmental protections, now in the Politburo, I think he was formerly the Minister of Environmental Protection between 2015 and ‘17. These developments are all in light of other initiatives that China has taken recently. Chris: I always like ending on a good note. And so, both of these things that you mentioned, the one history that Xi Jinping has in promoting environmental topics, which I was not aware of, does sort of bode well for at least, potentially indicate some of his underlying interests, which is so hard to tell nowadays.

So, I argue that when both are low, state behavior is inert. So, the state, in this case, is incapable of delivering its promises and solving the problem in question, but it’s under no public pressure to do so. And then, when capacity is high and scrutiny is low, state behavior is what I call paternalistic. In this case, the state is like the parent of a small child with lots of power over there unscrutinizing offspring. And then just like a parent, the paternalistic state can use their power to do either good or bad things. Iza: I’ve got an answer that’s kind of two parts. The first part is from the perspective of the state or these street-level state agents, it’s less of a concern how long lasting the effect is or even whether it works, because from their perspective, they’re dealing with day-to-day crises, and they’re trying to prevent crises from getting bigger. And then they’re trying to protect their own rice bowl, no longer iron rice bowl, trying to keep their jobs and keep their bonuses. So, doing performative governance is really not some kind of Machiavellian master plan to improve regime support in three months, six months, a year, right? Those are the questions that we political scientists think about, but those are not the questions that the actual street-level bureaucrats think about. Then lastly, when capacity and scrutiny are both high, the state behavior is the most substantive. So, this is what I call substantive governance. In this case, the state has the ability to deliver its promises and public opinion will hold it accountable if it does not. That is my two by two in a nutshell. Iza Ding, The Performative State, Cornell University Press, 2022 Chris: In political science is it like responsive authoritarianism? Where you know the state attempts to make it seem like it’s being responsive to citizens’ demands. So, I think this is part of it. But I think that many people think that authoritarian governments are all so powerful and they can just control everything. Why are doing these gestures and symbols important for the legitimacy of the regime? And part of that, can you say what some of the actual examples of some of those are that you studied?

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What I want to emphasize here is that a reduction of emission does not only come from intentional government efforts. Many factors come into here. On the intentional effort side, you have the development of renewable energy, the deployment of renewables, which is just being very significant, and I think very impressive what China has done. And I think those are the areas that we can be very happy about and optimistic about. And then there are other factors that are not directly related to government efforts. For instance, natural gas has become cheaper for China due to the Russian-Ukraine conflict. So, then burning gas instead of coal can be one temporary source of emission reduction. And Europe instead has become more coal-friendly recently. Speaker: Iza Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Pittsburgh

HOLBIG, Heike, and Bruce GILLEY. 2010. “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China.ˮ Politics & Policy 38(3): 395‑422. Iza: Yeah. Exactly. It’s an Erdogan crying, and apparently public approval improves for about two months.

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So, it’s the amount of authority cloud and influence this bureaucracy wields. And what this means is that capacity has to be understood in relative terms. And the example I like to give is the, I don’t know if it’s a good example, you can tell me, it’s the Russian-Ukraine conflict. So, we thought Russia had a strong army, but what does it mean for us to say Russia has a strong state, strong army when it cannot achieve its purposes of occupying the territory? And so, in this case, the Chinese EPA or the Chinese EPB, the Chinese Environmental Protection Bureau, even though it hired really good, well-qualified bureaucrats, but if it cannot actually enforce regulations, at least not at the time during this study, then I call it weak. So, then those are the definitions of capacity and scrutiny. So, I think this shows, not only has the public paid less attention to pollution in recent years, and also, I think there’s no doubt that air quality, at least in Beijing, has improved since 2017. And I think I haven’t seen the latest data because we also know that in the past two years, some of those coal plants that the government stopped building, they restarted construction for these coal plants. We don’t know what’s happening right now, but I think part of that perhaps also comes from improving air quality. But I think a lot of that also is related to public attention shifting toward things like U.S.-China relations or rivalry with the United States, and also economic problems. So, the economic downturn problems with employment for graduates, and I think those are the bigger issues people are paying attention to, and obviously COVID.