Speaker: Iza Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Pittsburgh Then in social science terms, they can be either developmental or predatory. And then, indeed, in our literature you see both terms — developmental and predatory — have been used to describe powerful agencies within China, like the National Development Reform Council Commission and the state-owned enterprises. 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, 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. One thing that was noted, and also, I mentioned in my book is that in the past, I think there are some really intriguing empirical studies showing that if you are a director of the environmental bureaucracy, it means the end of your career. One of my interviewees from the organization department, which is the CCP’s bureau office, said that being assigned, being promoted to become a director, EPB director, it means the end of somebody’s careers. And then there’s this really interesting paper in the Journal of Contemporary China finding that if you’re a local director of an Environmental Protection Bureau, your likelihood of being promoted to more powerful positions within the Party State is a lot lower than if you were directing the DRC or other more powerful bureaucracies.

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. This article is based on the paper, “ Performative State-formation in the Early American Republic ” in the American Sociological Review. 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.And I see this a lot at the local level. And I say the same thing will probably go for Xi and Chen Jining. So, it remains to be seen. When their job are generalists, you have to give people employment, you have to deliver economic growth, and while protecting the environment, it’s really hard to do going forward. So that’s one of my observations. 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.

Chris: That’s really surprising, what a tough position all those bureaucrats are in. I never would’ve guessed that. It maps really nicely to the two by two that you have in your development of this performative state discussion and theory. One dimension is capacity. So, you described how this is a situation of low capacity, but also this idea that people can get their bonus reduced or fired, so the bar on scrutiny is very, very high. And I know that’s the cell where low capacity, high scrutiny is where performative governance is dominant. Can you say a little bit more about this two by two you developed and how it helps us understand governance, both performative and substantive more generally? 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. 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.And then, finally in recent years, the EPB has gradually acquired more capacity, especially since the 2018 Super Ministries reform, and it seems like it started to tend toward more substantive modes of governance. But this is still few and far between and still sporadic, at least based on my recent interviews. And this interesting thing I notice is that when I go to China and talk to folks in the government, and when I talk about the EPA or the EPB nowadays, I’ll say, “It’s a weak bureaucracy, right?” And they say, “Oh no, now it’s a strong bureaucracy.” But they say it with this grin on their face. It’s like somebody talking about their little cousin that’s grown up to be this gangly teenager. Stronger, but it’s still kind of considered as one of the weaker bureaucracies. Since the 20th Party Congress, since the elevation of people like Chén Jíníng 陈吉宁 into the Politburo, there is one more elevation of the environmental bureaucracy, or at least environmental governance on the government’s agenda. In this case, it seems like recently, people have been more optimistic about environmental governance in China in the future, but that’s kind of a basic trajectory of the environmental governance 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. Iza: Yeah, and they do have a point, right? We’ve talked about environmental justice. So, people in developing countries, they do have a point in that, maybe not China, China’s contributed historically, what? 18%? It’s lower than the United States and Western Europe, right? To think about historical responsibility and the idea that, to what extent can developed countries tell developing countries to stop emitting, and then to not live the kind of life that people in the West can live? I think that’s a normative question that we really need to talk about while we were thinking about these empirical questions about governance and so forth. And I think, too, I do think that if someone’s going to be promoted to the Politburo, it probably, there’s sort of a leading indicator of future trends. And I think that, because China is really a country that potentially could have some serious negative impacts from climate change issues, that alone I think will hopefully spur attention. So, good. I think the environmental outlook for China actually is relatively a positive trend. Thank you so much, Iza, for joining us on China Corner Office. 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.

And also, enterprises calling the hotline to complain about environmental violations, regulatory violations by this enterprise, this paper plant, and then you realize the caller is another paper plant that’s right next to this paper plant that’s being complained about. So, there’s a lot of those things. And then, oftentimes, the conversations, it turned out, had nothing to do with the environment and somebody caught in and complained about air pollution from his neighbor’s cooking. And then you listen to them, you realize there’s some ancient hatred between this person and the neighbor.

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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.