How the Chinese Communist Party controls data

Below is the complete transcript with the China Corner Office with Jeremy Wallace.

Chris: Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on China Corner Office, a podcast powered by the China Project, the New York-based news and information platform that helps the West read China between the lines.

I’m Chris Marquis, a professor at the Cambridge Judge Business School. And today, we are joined by Jeremy Wallace, who is an associate professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Jeremy’s research focuses on Chinese and authoritarian politics — and he has worked on environmental, economic, and social issues connected to urbanization in China.

And today, we’re discussing his new book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Ideology, Information, and Authoritarianism in China. Jeremy started this project with an overarching question in mind — How did a Communist Party come to justify itself through GDP statistics? And why have they then shifted away from this focus recently? With analyses of GDP, PM2.5, and cadre evaluation score sheets as indicators of performance, Jeremy argues that numbers have defined Chinese politics, yet they have failed to count what really matters, and frequently what they count does not measure up.

We discussed how researchers, including Jeremy himself, have studied falsification of data in China, such as when and how cadres are most likely to manipulate data and the impacts of the falsified measures on economic growth, environmental protection, and cadre promotion. We connected the current manipulation of data in the economy, politics, and COVID with a massive over-reporting of crop yields in the Great Leap Forward, which was from 1958 to 1962, to highlight how falsification of data has been bound in recent years.

We also discuss the neo-political turn argued by Jeremy in his book as a fix to both address the problems of the previous limited quantified vision he discusses as well as be a hedge against the end of China’s rapid economic development. Jeremy explained that this can be seen in the centralization and personalization of power by Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 in a shift in the rhetoric returning to politics rather than focusing on technocracy. We also touched upon China’s COVID protest and discussed how some of the slogans were directly targeting Xi as compared to prior protests like the Democracy Wall Movement in Tiananmen where complaints were generally more about social issues. We concluded the podcast with Jeremy giving some thoughts on the future based on his observations, arguments, and signals from the 20th Party Congress.

Thanks so much for listening, and enjoy the show.

Chris: Jeremy, welcome to China Corner Office.

Jeremy: Thanks so much for having me.

Chris: You have a new book out. I love the title, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Ideology, Information, and Authoritarianism in China. Congratulations. And I’d love to just hear a little bit about that title — Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts.

Jeremy: The title is a play on a classical Chinese expression — seek truth from facts. It’s a phrase that Máo [Zédōng 毛泽东] had used but that much more famously, Deng, Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, the leader that came after Mao Zedong, then took to use Mao to fight against Maoism. Rather than communist utopianism, Deng preferred allowing concrete facts to guide policy. So, that’s the seeking truth part. The hiding facts is perhaps more obvious; that in pursuit of rapid development, there was a lot of facts that were hidden in the Chinese economic story.

Chris: The subtitle, I think, really captured some important aspects as well or on information which I’m really looking forward to getting more into — that is, how information flows, and maybe appropriately so, but then also in ways that distort things. And I’m sure we’ll be picking up on that, but first can you just give the general argument of the book?

Jeremy: Maybe the best way to start is to think about — what are the questions that the book is trying to answer? I came at this thinking like, how did a revolutionary Communist Party come to justify itself through GDP statistics? And why is it shifting away from doing so? Those are the big overarching questions that the book is trying to answer. And the one sentence version of that answer is that a few numbers came to define Chinese politics until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Let me break that down a little bit.

Chris: Please do.

Jeremy: The center transformed an ideological movement into a pragmatic growth promoting machine by limiting its vision of localities into local governments to just a few numbers — what I end up calling the limited quantified vision. And that this produced excellent performance on these measures, but especially over time, negative externalities outside, in particular pollution, corruption, debt; over time, that those became what mattered. That it doesn’t matter if GDP is growing up; if you can’t go outside and breathe because the pollution is so bad, and that they became too important to ignore or paper over.

What was counted didn’t measure up, I mean, in two different ways: One, which is how I got into the project was about falsification of Chinese statistics and GDP in particular; faking data so it doesn’t measure up. But also that the numbers were not moving in the way… They were moving in the wrong direction. Growth was slowing. So, if the overarching argument of the regime was, we are justified in our governance because of the strong economic performance as measured by GDP growth, if that number is slowing, not measuring up to what it had used to do, then all of a sudden that becomes a problem.

Chris: Yeah, I could definitely see that. I mean, you mentioned some of your earlier work on falsification of data. I teach a class under this on business in China. I give talks on doing business in China to general interest audiences. And one of the first slides I have is actually 1978 to actually, usually 2019 national GDP. It’s almost 10% a year for that whole duration, which is just absolutely credible. What’s your sense on actually how accurate that is, and if not accurate, what a better rate would be?

Jeremy: To be clear, I think that graphic that you share that a lot of us share, and has become just common well-known in the China community, is important in and of itself; that the development is fundamentally real. That these numbers, even if on an annual basis, things kind of maybe are adjusted or smoothed at different points in time, the overall trajectory is quite clear — China in 1978 is a very different place than China in 2008 or 2018 or 2022. This is a story; it goes back and forth. I do want to emphasize that this real development did happen and that there was a lot of success under the system. That being said, people are always more interested in the falsification and the secret hidden things, right? As I said, the first paper that I wrote that ends up as part of the book project was about GDP falsification, and particularly at the provincial level trying to identify in patterns of falsification.

And the problem, when you’re studying falsification, is that, well, what do you use to verify or to audit? And so, there’s this very nice quote that Lǐ Kèqiáng 李克强, comes out of the WikiLeaks reports, and it’s from a U.S. State Department official sending a cable back, and Li Keqiang says the GDP numbers are manmade or for reference only. And at the end of this, he said smiling. And I feel like that smiling is really so important to get the idea that they understand that this is a problem, but they also understand that they can’t really address the problem. That quote is at the top of that paper. And what the paper finds following Li Keqiang advice is that I use electricity data which is very tightly correlated with GDP data but not as politically sensitive. There’s not a lot of headlines about electricity usage unless there’s blackouts or something.

And so, the correlation, that’s one thing, that there is this highly correlated data that I also have. But then you can also think about there’s just a difference between those two patterns than those two series. Then what are you going to do? The idea is that there might be moments of a time, of political time that matter more than others. And so, what I tried to do is to show that at moments of political turnover, when a leader is about to leave and then leaving, that’s moments when the GDP number looks particularly strong compared to the electricity number; suggestive of boosting the number as you’re heading out. And so, that’s the original way that I got there. Then in terms of estimates, how big, we’re talking about 10%. So, instead of reporting 10% growth, reporting 11% growth in your province in a given year.

Again, remember this is not approved. Even if Li Keqiang knows that it’s happening, he smiles about it, he’s not happy about it. You don’t want to report 300% growth in a given year because everyone knows that’s lying and you can’t do that. So, it’s a subtle game, right? So, you want to just inch ahead of everybody else.

Chris: I don’t know if this is a good analogy, but companies are frequently, in some ways, managing their numbers like maybe, okay, let’s hold back something for next year if our growth this year is particularly good or push some things forward, and so it’s manipulated in some way. Although, there is over time, maybe a correlation with reality a bit. And I mean, like you’re saying, you go to China, and it’s clear that China’s been growing very rapidly for a long time.

Jeremy: It’s not just GDP which does have this advantage. If you’re manipulating or managing a number, GDP is hard to see. You don’t see GDP when you look out your window in a way that you can see the amount of rail cars or empty containers at a port or something like that. GDP is invisible, but this happens in lots of different domains where there’ll be some target that the Chinese government or the central government puts down on local officials. They have to hit that target. And so, things like industrial accidents is an example I use in the book. And it’s this bell-shaped curve, and there was a particular line that provincial leaders were not supposed to exceed that so many industrial accidents in a given year. The bell curve really drops off right at that line. Just nobody goes right over the line. There’s lots of cases right below the line. Above is just almost zero. And so, clear evidence of falsification, but to be clear, putting in that target really did reduce the overall number of industrial accidents. Again, it’s a similar story to the GDP limited vision. Putting in a particular target and really emphasizing it produced good outcomes in general but also did produce falsification.

Chris: You mentioned actually different soft targets, hard targets, priority targets with veto power. Can you say a little bit about those and maybe some examples?

Jeremy: The core institution of limited quantified vision is the cadre evaluation system. We refer to local government officials in China as cadres. I don’t know its precise origin. Presumably, this is a communist lingo or just like annual reports for companies or officials in lots of different domains. In China, cadres, local officials are evaluated on an annual basis, and they have different types of targets or KPIs, and some of them are veto targets. A veto target is something, examples would be social instability, or at various points in time, population growth under the one-child policy was a really important idea. And there, it wouldn’t matter, even if all the rest of your performance was stellar, that would be vetoed. Your promotion would be vetoed if you failed on social stability. Hard targets are usually economic; the main economic development income, industrial production, tax revenue, these types of issues.

And then soft targets were usually the more ancillary ideas like environmental protection or party building or these types of things, which ideally we would also be there, but if you would imagine there was a trade-off between what was a hard target, relatively heavily weighted target in these annual evaluations, and a soft target, you would overlook the soft target in order to create the hard target. And these forms, which I have some of in the book, really are like a grade sheet, and it gives the weighting there. So, 15 points out of a hundred for economic development, 10 points for tax revenues, three points for environmental protection. And so, it really does just make very clear that if you see a trade-off between these two, which one you’re going to choose.

Chris: The book overall was really fascinating and I enjoyed reading it. But actually seeing those cadre evaluation forms, which you have, at least one you have within the text, the GDP KPI is really well known, and I was surprised of actually the complexity of the number of items which actually were on that. how did you get those forms?

Jeremy: In general, these are not publicly available. There’s not a big database about these forms. This is not a transparent… The Chinese Communist Party is many things but transparent is not high at the list. That being said, there are document repositories and these annual yearbooks and various other things that sometimes documents that look like these leak out or just get accidentally published. And so, I, along with the team of research assistants, trawled as many of these databases in yearbooks as we could in order to find these forms. I think the number is something like 35 or so that I was able to compile and have. They’re not scintillating reading, but they do have some patterns that I think are really interesting. Earlier forms are more limited; shorter, mostly more material economic that over time the number of issues expands. So, environmental issues come into the scene later than the economic ones. But in particular, they really expand under the Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 — Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝 administration before Xi Jinping , and then even a little bit more under Xi Jinping himself and with a weighting more towards the party building and other kinds of ideas under Xi.

Chris: Can you say a little bit more about maybe some other types of information? So, you mentioned that things like GDP is hard to actually see, but you can see air pollution. And so, how that as an indicator, PM2.5 came to become very important. For a while, the embassy in Beijing which started measuring it, but then the Chinese government actually embraced it as a measure as well, and it was one of the examples in your book, so I would love to hear about that.

Jeremy: Air pollution is the easiest example to think about one of these negative externalities because you can literally see it. Debt numbers are just numbers in a newspaper or on a spreadsheet. Corruption is something that you hear about but not something that you can observe. But air pollution, you can literally see when you can’t see the building across the street. And that was definitely an experience that I had in Beijing at various points in time or other Chinese cities. And it’s in fact something that, looking back, Chinese cities have had air pollution problems for a long period of time. This is not something that is brand new in the 2000s or something like that.

I remember the first time I went to China; I went to Beijing University and would run around campus. I was a very ambitious person, I guess. I would run around campus before my Chinese classes and the whole class, I would be coughing up black, coal smoke, these types of things, right? Anyway, sorry this is a long time ago. Apologies. A trigger warning for anyone who has coal smoke issues. But PM2.5 was just a number that was able to really quantify and was very clear about something very smoky. It was easy to digest; it correlated with what people saw outside their windows. It was a number, as you said, came out first from the U.S. embassy in Beijing. And there’s funny stories there about the system was not prepared for the extremely high levels of pollution. And so, at one point in time, they tweeted out that the air in Beijing was crazy bad, and so that was a diplomatic incident and so forth. But it really did become this number that was a clear representation of a particular problem that people faced and that seemed able to capture their real experience.

And so, particularly after one of these airpocalypses in 2012, I think Wen Jiabao stands up and says that we are going to monitor this much more directly and we are going to fight air pollution. And in fact, in 2018, 2019, air quality is much better. I have a picture of the Great Wall that I don’t think I would’ve been able to take or it would’ve been a very gray misty picture that now is like a beautiful clear day. And so, I think that they put in a real emphasis on it. There’re also stories about falsification of blue sky days and these types of things that also happened that is a real problem, but they also did make real concerted efforts. Again, it’s another example of this campaign targeting a particular quantified figure and producing real results on it.

Chris: What’s your sense of how technology has advanced this and now we have AI, you have social credit scores? I’m curious how that is part of the story and how you see that aspect moving forward. Through advanced technology, will there become more correspondence with truth or maybe it could be used to make the gap even bigger?

Jeremy: It’s complicated. I don’t think I have an easy answer or a clear direction. Let me give you two examples. One is kind of satellite imagery. So, we can see, again, the example of containers at a port or the nighttime lights, or number of cars at a mall, or these types of things that’s probably more of an American example than a Chinese one since people don’t all drive to malls in the way that we do now, and now everything’s delivery. But these types of technologies that allow insight into the economic activities, crop productivity; we can literally watch the crops grow from satellite imagery, and that even need people to do it. We can train the computers to do those types of things. And so, that prevents real lying or it creates doubt in the extent to which you can falsify data because we do have some outside objective measures that can corroborate or not the official releases.

On the other hand, what we’re seeing, especially under Xi Jinping, is a lot of information control. And even if the outside world has a sense that they shouldn’t trust the figures coming out of China or a particular moment that these numbers are not really there, there is real clampdown on media freedom, on press relations, on even individual citizens hosting their views or perspectives on particular issues. And so, technology has helped clamp down on some of those as well. And so, I think there, you can kind of see the technology going both ways and I don’t know which is the dominant and which is the minor factor.

Chris: As we’re recording this, China’s made some changes to its COVID policies, including I think abandoning the app that would monitor people, which I think many people were afraid was going to actually live beyond COVID. And so, that’s positive development as far as information control in China under Xi Jinping. What’s your sense about the COVID data? Over the last number of days, I’ve been seeing things that perhaps underreported. You’re an expert on this so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jeremy: So, this is time delimited. I think today is the 13th of December, so we’ll see. Maybe this won’t have that much of a shelf life — this view. I think just a few weeks ago, the zero and zero-COVID is another one of these quantified targets that was very successful but did produce negative externalities. So, the people being shut in their houses, the lockdowns; people being fed up leading to protests. All of these issues. Now what we’re seeing is a real dramatically fast, faster than anyone predicted, switch, opening up, or at least that’s every indication is that. But the COVID, the official number of infected cases is way down, in part because testing is way down, but also because people are not necessarily going to go and get tested if they’re ill.

And I think the concern is that this is a beginning of a story or a narrative about denial. Denying the almost inevitable wave. When South Korea opened up after kind of similar types of policies or Taiwan or Hong Kong, they all had huge waves in the wake of this opening up, and it’s hard to imagine that China will not, and that this was not just in infection waves, but you did really see real huge numbers of deaths coming out in the months afterwards. I worry that this is going to happen in China but that it’s going to be attempted to be falsified or denied. I don’t know what that will look like or how that will really happen because it’s in the end, all the people that I talked to that have friends or family in Beijing, they’re all just got sick or getting sick or staying at home because they’re worried about being sick. And so, it’s very disconcerting that the numbers are not trying to be a little bit more subtle; that this is one of these cases where, just like you don’t report 300% growth, it seems like they, the attempt is to just deny, deny, deny in a way that doesn’t seem plausible. I think that doesn’t indicate taking this as seriously as I think it deserves.

Chris: There’s no real presence of western media anymore really in China or other free media. So, it’s really hard to think about how to get that information. Here in New York City where I am right now, I was here during COVID, the big wave initially, and I lived not that far from a hospital. And they kept adding refrigerated trucks, sadly, outside the hospital. So, this is a way to possibly estimate, but I guess in China we’ll never know because there’s no independent media.

Jeremy: I don’t know. I think there are too many people with too many cell phones and too many social media outlets. I think that if it does come to that, if we are talking about literally lines outside of hospitals and then bodies outside of hospitals, later on, I think we will see strong evidence of that. If, now will we ever get a real sense about what this is and this, the scale of death? Probably not. I didn’t think that this was a falsification story that I would also tell. I really did think that things that they would take this more seriously but that they’re flipping the switch and moving onto a story of denial seems more-

Chris: You actually discussed a little bit, and we were talking about everyone having cell phones, and even though social media is constrained, there are ways to get things out, so I appreciate that point. You talk in one of the chapters about, in some ways, mass politics and mobilization and the context of Democracy Wall, Tiananmen 1989. And now we have COVID, we had the protests not that long ago. Can you maybe reflect a bit about, there was a sentence in there, it says, “The seeds of the grudges largely grew out of top-down decisions that went against popular sentiments,” and maybe talk about these different, in some ways, movements or mobilizations and maybe some of the similarities and differences and what we can glean as far as how the central government or even more local governments relate to the people?

Jeremy: The book really does try to have this long span from the ‘70s to today and using this lens of quantified politics to think about reframe our understanding of China under what we used to call the reform era, or maybe we still do. One of the main things that political scientists know about authoritarian regimes is that their leaders lose power, not based on the popular idea of protests, for the most part, but it’s usually more elite movements like coups. And that’s a really important insight that I think is accurate in the data. But because of that, the scholarship has kind of gone in that direction and stared at coups and tried to think about how regimes worry about coups. And I think it has relatively underplayed the extent to which mass politics shapes that elite politics. So, people in the states protesting still makes it more likely that someone will think like, “It seems like the people aren’t unhappy with the leader, maybe I could be the leader.”

And so that there is this extent to which mass politics shapes elite politics. At different moments in China’s story from kind of ‘76 or ‘78 to 1989, or I guess last week. It kind of doesn’t feel like today anymore. It already feels like we’ve moved on from these protest movements, but it did feel like a real movement. These are moments that I think really do matter. I think 1989 was absolutely could have led to a fracturing of the leadership, and in many ways did, but did not actually end up undermining the regime as… It didn’t end the regime, that’s for sure. But it did involve real danger to the regime because there were orders for the military to go and disband the protestors. And the first time that they sent those orders, the tanks didn’t make it into the Square. They were not able to do so. They were stopped by the people. And there was an unwillingness to shoot.

And that’s the kind of thing that can quickly unravel a political hierarchy, right? If you give an order to do something and that that order is not relayed or not followed, the guns can quickly turn around. And so, this is one of the ways in which mass protests can be very dangerous, even if it ends up being an elite coup or something like that, it can still spark something very dangerous. That’s kind of where I would lead it. There are lots of moments. One of the interesting things about these recent protests are the extent to which they really were about Xi Jinping. I think a lot of people didn’t actually want to oust Xi Jinping or end the CCP, but some people did, and those statements were out there. I think that’s in part because of all of the changes that Xi has put forward.

All these problems of that system of limited quantified vision that I talked about, the corruption in particular, really Xi’s response has been to personalize politics and to control what’s happening a lot more. But when you do that as a leader, and Chinese citizens have been hearing about Xi’s zero-COVID policies and its successes for three years now, it’s really hard to blame the local person who’s requiring you to get tested before you go into a restaurant. It really does feel like this is Xi and Xi’s responsibility. And so, if your complaints are with the policy, they should be with Xi’s, and Xi’s policy, then it’s a complaints about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. And so, in that way, it’s a little bit different than the Democracy Wall or Tiananmen where those were more general complaints in the language of democracy was used, but it was not so directly anti-leader in the way that at least some of these recent protests were.

Chris: Yeah, no thank you. That’s a really interesting contextualization with the political science literature and connecting what happens on the streets with what happens in the Zhōngnánhǎi 中南海. It will be interesting to see how the COVID situation plays out. I mean, I can imagine if there are these huge amounts of deaths and there’s denial, this could spark another wave of mass discontent.

Jeremy: I was finishing the book when COVID broke out. And if you’re writing a book about politics and numbers in China, like I was, it’s hard not to glam onto that. And the COVID narrative was absolutely that. It was a, remember it’s SARS-COV-2, right? It’s literally the same family of viruses, and this was a problem that China had before, and they created a system to try to increase reporting and improve information flow on exactly these types of public health issues. And yet, the Wuhan local governments absolutely stymied information flow up to the center because they wanted to protect their local party congresses and everything else that was happening. And so, this type of information politics, even when they know the problem, and this type of problem, they’ve tried to deal with it before, it’s still, it’s really hard, it’s really sticky, and so it’s a conundrum.

Chris: Could you say a little bit more? I mean, the point you brought up I think is a really important one about how much of this, the data manipulation is a result of local-central management in some ways. I mean, the local always wanting to look better or not look bad. Are there places where that works better? I mean, I can see that as almost being, you’re managing up in a company, it seems almost a natural occurrence. Is there any other systems or even places in China where such information flow works better?

Jeremy: One of the exciting pieces in the book, I think, is this comparison or thinking about falsification as well as thinking about informal information networks in China. So, factions of political leaders in particular. Here, what I argue is that you might expect, if you, as a local leader, you have this incentive to perform strongly on growth numbers, and so you might want to falsify your statistics, but if you are already tied to the leader above you, your superior, you might not be so interested, because in engaging in this relatively risky activity after all, it’s still fundamentally lying and against the rules, so you might not falsify as much if you think you have a pretty good chance to get promoted anyway. And so, one of the things that I find, and this is in a paper that’s jointly with Jiang Junyan, who’s at Columbia now, we find that leaders with informal networks falsified less than those without; controlling for all kinds of factors.

To me, it shows that this is just one of the… That this information channel, the GDP information channel and the incentives and everything else are just part of the story. That it’s not the whole of the story, but there are these other pieces of authoritarian politics that we need to consider, and that they go back and forth. That obviously you don’t want a pure factional model where there’s no objective numbers involved and KPIs, right? Not a lot of people run their businesses with pure fiefdoms, and whatever you get, your network gets their promotions and they rival networks and so forth. That’s an unstable situation. But that you don’t also can’t rely purely on a system of KPIs without any kind of auditing or any kind of informality too. That also might run aground.

Chris: I mean, it’s so interesting to me that this didn’t have some almost like self-escalating dynamic involved because you think that senior leaders know whats going on. Li Keqiang smile when he makes the statement. You know that things are inflated, so in some ways, that would be discounted. And counterexample that actually in the Great Leap Forward, there was a lot of falsification of crop production data. And this took on… In the recent book that I have, we have a chapter in the Great Leap Forward, and talked a little bit about tracking this through newspapers at the time. This province reports an amount and then two weeks later some other province reports a higher amount and then higher until it got to some 10,000 times what is actually possible. But it seems that this actually stayed within a reasonable bounds, which then I wonder, is it just like the Tour de France when everyone was taking drugs and everyone has to do it about the same level or does it make a difference for some folks careers? Why didn’t this end up going through the roof?

Jeremy: The Great Leap Forward example is a really important one, and I think it shapes the leadership and subsequent population’s view of the limits of falsification, the limits of numbers, right? That’s an epic disaster. Those falsified statistics lead to the center procuring, taking all the grain from localities because they thought that they were leaving enough for the people, in fact stealing everything, and so that leading to mass starvation on the order of 30 to 40 million people. There’s that, I think scars, certainly Deng and the leadership, and generations, I think even after him, there is this recognition that we can’t go that far. We can’t falsify so far, which is again, one of the reasons why I’m a little bit surprised by the denialism of the COVID wave that I think is happening now because it’s not going to be an escalating problem along the lines of what the Great Leap Forward was, where everyone’s going to report bigger and bigger numbers that’s not… and that that will lead to disaster. But just the real break from reality that I think there is a boundedness on falsification or the gamesmanship that one can engage in that I think comes out of the Great Leap Forward in particular. I worry a little bit that while Xi is not Mao and Xi is not, even if he has some tendencies along this direction that the willingness to believe that one can shape reality to such an extent, I worry that there’s a little bit more of that belief in Xi than I had thought previously.

Chris: The last topic from your book I’d love to chat a little bit about is the neopolitical turn, which you talk about. Can you say a little bit more about that and what sort of actions or moves it consists of?

Jeremy: The system of limited quantified vision that I talk about that was so successful and then produced all these failures that became more and more difficult. There was a real agreement that this needed reforming, but the extent to which problems were the important problems and which solutions were the right solutions were really debated around the time of Xi coming into power. So, one of the things I try to do in this chapter seven of the book — The Neopolitical Turn — is really trying to suggest that the path in 2022, it’s very hard not to view Xi Jinping as always this way, as the way we see him now, and read history back in that way. But I do think that there are a lot of moves in earlier times that he made. There are a lot of debates that were happening that suggested that lots of different possibilities that maybe we could have seen a real move about inequality from the beginning and something like the common prosperity agenda on steroids in 2013, 2014.

I try to show that there was real debate. Some things, though, were clear from the beginning. There was real political centralization from the beginning. Even the leading Politburo Standing Committee goes down to seven people instead of nine. The anti-corruption campaign that really dramatically increases the center’s view into what’s happening in localities. And so, some of the, what I call this neo-political turn is really trying to gather political power in the center and in the person of Xi Jinping in order to remake the political economy.

I think you can think about it in two ways as both an attempt to fix that problems of the prior system as well as a hedge about the inability to do so. So, it’s a fix in that if you think the problem is, if growth is slowing because of corruption, and there’s just too many corrupt officials grabbing too much and there were billions of dollars disappearing in different pots, that’s reasonable to think that that could actually be a real grow headwinds. That maybe anti-corruption could open those and you could get some more growth out of the system. On the other hand, as we were saying, you don’t want to be in the business of being justified by growth if growth is not going to be what it’s been. And as you said, for decades, growth has been at such a high level that expectations had been set about that as the standard. And so, instead of 8% growth, 5% growth or 4% growth, this year we’re probably around 3% growth in China. It doesn’t feel like growth at all at some point. You’re used to such rapid pace. And so, the idea of neo-political turn as both an attempt to fix and hedge, I’m sure all the listeners to this podcast are very aware of what’s happening in China broadly and Xi’s political power, and increasing, but I do think that that’s… I talk about it in this way because it also feels very different from politics before.

I begin the book actually with this, Wen Jiabao last government work report, and it’s just a classic Chinese speech about, as boring as possible, statistics after statistic — we built so many renovated houses, and blah blah blah, blah, blah. It’s so dry. There’s a reason why people always fall asleep during those speeches. But then, six months later, Xi is inspecting Húběi 湖北 and go, kind of it’s self-criticisms and it’s people crying on camera. And the leader, the Party Secretary has to go, and in his self-criticism, he says, “Hey, I cared too much about economic volumes and development speed.” And that, to me, just… how could a Chinese leader care too much about GDP growth? It really is a real difference. That we’re going to talk about conflict; there are good people and bad people. I feel like I had gotten used to this idea that authoritarian politics was just going to be technocracy was just going to be depoliticized. People don’t care about politics. We’re just going to be in charge, but you live your lives, it’ll be fine. And that’s not what’s happening. It’s really a return to politics, really getting in people’s faces. The Party sell in companies, everything. It’s there, it’s present. And I think that that’s my sense about the neo-political turns.

Chris: I mean this came out after your book came out was the 20th Party Congress, which I think to many people, the extent to which the Standing Committee was filled with loyalists, suggests this has even gone further than you were talking about in your book. And moving forward, the last question I have for you really is, how does what you’ve written in the context of these recent events give us a lens into coming years in China? Is this something where it’s almost like a curvilinear type process where it’s gone too far and then it’s going to lead to a bunch of negative issues? Or maybe haven’t we gotten to that point yet? I’d love to hear your perspective on what’s coming next.

Jeremy: I’ve said a couple of times now already that I’m surprised by the denialism or what seems to me like the denialism of the COVID wave. That’s one way that maybe there’s just going to an attempt… That information control is so total or so strong that there’s an attempt and a belief that they can control the narrative in any way that they want. Let me suggest that there’s an alternative reading of what’s happened recently that I think is a little bit more consistent with prior world, and maybe shows the extent to which it’s really hard to break away from GDP. Although the protests, I’m sure, were part of the calculus of leaders when they were making the moves away from zero-COVID, I think one of the other pressures, especially coming out of the 20th Party of Congress, you have a real market downturn when they see the extent of Xi’s personalization.

There’s all these stories, the FT is talking about how everyone’s going to Singapore and setting up their family offices. And it just suggests to me like the rich are leaving, capital flight, the whole thing’s going to come crashing down. Then you see initial movements responding like, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re going to be okay. We’re going to prop up the property sector, we’re going to help developers, and we’re going to… beginning to move on zero-COVID. And then you’ve had back and forth in both of those policy domains. But I think that while we’ve talked all about the zero-COVID story, I think the real estate sector and the overall economy has been this real concern. And the extent to which concerns about the economic development of the society and beliefs that zero-COVID was getting in the way of that, maybe this was actually all about GDP.

Even zero-COVID is actually all about GDP. And that seeing, they already knew they were going to fail to hit this year’s target because they set it preposterously high, but maybe this is about getting through this wave, getting through it early, and then moving on economically in this domain. I do think that it’s hard to move away from a developmentalist story, even if clean governance and strength is really important. China remains an impoverished country with hundreds of millions of people who are desperately poor. How can China be strong with so many impoverished people without real development and growth? I think that there is still a need to connect to growth. And so, I think that in that sense, the numbers still play an important piece in this system.

Chris: And also, in some ways, the legitimacy of the CCP is so built around delivering economic growth. Well, I really enjoyed the discussion, Jeremy. Your book Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts is fantastic read. I’m going to see if I can actually link to one of those cadre evaluations score sheets as part of the show notes because those people find those pretty interesting. So, thank you very much.

Jeremy: Great. Thank you so much for having me. What a great conversation.