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The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China

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GILLEY, Bruce. 2009. The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy. New York: Columbia University Press. Then there is the second question, do people still remember such things, right? Public attention is really short-lived. If you do it periodically, I don’t know if there is this clear rational learning thing that people are doing. This morning, one of my grad students, Huseyin Zengin, just published this paper on politicians weeping, crying for a public audience, which I consider it’s performative. What he found is that the effect, it does improve your popularity, but the effect lasts for about two months. That was really interesting to research. I thought two months is not too short, and then you don’t cry every day anyways. I think like Chen Jining, as a counterexample to that theory, so maybe we’re going to start seeing people in the environmental bureaucracy being promoted. And obviously, this has not happened at a systematic level yet. But I think, once, if that happens more, then I think that’s also another good signal for the environment.

Iza: That is definitely my sense that around about the trade war, and I think my observation is that Chinese citizens, just like the voters in democracies, that they’re also a single issue, not voters, but single issue people, right? Like we’re all single issue people, maybe like two or three, but not more than that. I think the attention of public opinion really changes. Obviously, when Chái Jìng’s 柴静 documentary, Under the Dome, was first released, it was viewed so many times, and everybody was supporting it on social media. But if you think about how people talk about this today, many people believe it’s some kind of American conspiracy because it received funding from American foundations, and it’s a documentary to sabotage China’s economic growth. And then Chai Jing is also perceived as not a good figure. And then some might even call her a traitor. Extreme levels of pollution in China have led to an increasing outcry from its citizens for clean air and water. How does the environmental bureaucracy respond to this challenge? According to Ding, it depends on the level of state capacity and public scrutiny. In her typology, low state capacity and high public scrutiny produces “performative governance,” or the “the state’s deployment of visual, verbal and gestural symbols of good governance for the audience of citizens.” This form is in comparison to the ideal of “substantive” governance, when the state can respond to the issues at hand, predicted by high capacity and scrutiny. The book explores the dynamics of performative governance by the local environmental bureau in China from the bureaucrat and citizen perspective.So then, what did they do? They did performative governance. So, they would be extremely nice to citizens who come to the office to complain. They would serve them tea; they would play therapists to citizens on the phone. And then some of my favorite stories were from just bureaucrats answering calls, these petition hotlines, and then they would be talking to the people on these petition hotlines. 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? 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

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And today, we are joined by Iza Ding, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Iza is a scholar of comparative political development and has published a number of important papers on environmental policy making, implementation, bureaucratic organizations, and more. Our podcast today focuses on her recently published book, The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China. Iza first explains what she means by a performative state with helpful comparisons between performative and substantive governance, and she also provides useful examples of performative governance that she gathered through her on the ground field work in an environmental protection bureau in China. One might argue that there’s a variation in time horizon for street-level bureaucrats and higher-level political leaders who actually are what we considered a part of the regime or regime insiders. For the street-level bureaucrats, it doesn’t matter if it works or not. That’s the best they could do. So, you do see sometimes performative governance breaking down, which is the penultimate chapter in my book. And you do see that breaking down, for instance, in Wuhan when whistleblowers released these destructive information about state performance. And another case study I feature is the Flint Water Crisis. And the same thing, for the longest time, there was inaction, but as soon as the whistleblower leaked the news to the news media and then you had the publication of this Virginia Tech report, and then you see performative governance, politicians getting on TV to drink water and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t work, right? Oftentimes, citizens don’t buy it. 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. But then, when I got to Lakeville, which was supposed to be my good case, and what I realized gradually is that there was very little substantive environmental governance to speak of. And what I saw was performative governance instead. And what I saw, the first thing is that the bureaucracy actually had very, very little capacity. The capacity is not really obvious because when you see them, they hire extremely qualified bureaucrats. All these bureaucrats, they have masters or PhD degrees in environmental sciences, engineering, and law. And then the bureaucracy also had some super fancy technology. Everybody had this law enforcement iPad they carried around with them, where they could enter data, and the data will be synced with the EPB central database, and so on and so forth. 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.

Iza: Yeah. Exactly. It’s an Erdogan crying, and apparently public approval improves for about two months. Iza: The performative state is about how states engage in theatrical performance of good governance for its citizen audience. It’s well known that the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, derives its legitimacy from substantive performance, and especially economic growth over the past few decades. In this book, I’m arguing that when the state is shorthanded on some issues like environmental protection but faces really strong public pressure to do something, it can also use these words, gestures, and symbols of good governance to appease public outrage. MERTHA, Andrew. 2009. “‘Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0’: Political Pluralization in the Chinese Policy Process.ˮ China Quarterly 200: 995‑1012.

So, it’s not obviously weak, but then you gradually realize that actually they couldn’t do anything to enforce regulations. So, I saw some of the egregious practices by the factories and it was very clear they were not abiding by regulation, but then you also saw that EPB was really weak in front of the businesses. They didn’t even have the legal authority to close down factories or to issue large fines. And the authority was actually in the hands of the municipal government or higher-level governments. So, then the people I’m observing, these street-level bureaucrats, they’re held responsible, right? Citizens think they’re responsible for improving air quality, but then they actually couldn’t do anything. Overall, Ding succeeds perfectly in showing the importance of distinguishing “‘government performance’ and the government’s theatrical representation of its performance” (p. 154). If the rich, exhaustive, and varied theoretical discussions in the opening chapters may discourage some readers, this book makes interesting reading for anyone interested in the history, development, and context of China’s environmental policies over the past two decades. At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to make room for dissenting voices, Ding’s analyses make a significant contribution to ongoing debates about what sustains an authoritarian state in an Anthropocene era. 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.

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