Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Taisu Zhang.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
As some of our listeners know, we’ve been running the fantastic Strangers in China Podcast. It’s in its third season. It is richly reported. It’s a first-person account of the lockdown, as experienced by an American, our host, Clay Baldo, living in Shanghai. There is a ton in there necessarily about the 居委会 (jūwěihuì) or the Neighborhood Committee, and it’s a really good illustration of both the expanded powers and responsibilities of neighborhood committees during the lockdown and the unreasonable load that they seem to have been suddenly saddled with all out of proportion to their capacity, their training, their resources. They are not the villain of the story, although they’re often maddening and annoying, but they’re not the villain of Clay’s story.
Clay is really empathetic, and the picture that emerges is really a complex one. So, today on Sinica, we are going to talk about some of what Clay witnessed in Shanghai at the ground level in spring of 2022, but this time, from a more academic perspective. Looking at how, during the pandemic, we witnessed a massive expansion of the administrative state in China, an expansion downward toward the grassroots through the subdistrict and community levels of administration.
So, joining me to talk about this is Taisu Zhang, who’s professor of law at Yale Law School. He’s the author of couple books, of Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England. We’ll be talking about a paper that Taisu co-authored with Yutian An, a PhD candidate at Princeton called Pandemic State-building: Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era, as well as a really thought-provoking essay that he recently published in Foreign Affairs about China’s efforts to really shift the foundations of political legitimacy more toward legality as the tailwind of high GDP growth no longer really fills the sails of political legitimacy in the way that it has for several decades now.
As we will see, these two things, the paper and the foreign affairs essay are related. They really dovetail nicely. Anyway, a long overdue welcome to you, Taisu. So glad that I could finally get you on Sinica.
Taisu Zhang: Oh, glad to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
Kaiser: Oh, good. Well, let’s get started. Let’s talk about your essay first in Foreign Affairs, which was published on February 27th, and it was titled Xi’s Law-and-Order Strategy. The CCP’s Quest for a Fresh Source of Legitimacy. In it, you argue that the Party has traditionally relied on what we’ve come to call performance legitimacy, its ability to deliver social stability, and especially growth, economic wellbeing. Before we get into what it’s now banking on to bolster legitimacy, I want to talk about this intriguing, and, on reading it, I think, to me at least, a totally persuasive idea that nationalism, which people often talk about as like a separate pillar of political legitimacy, nationalism actually also rests on economic performance. Maybe before we jump in, maybe you could unpack that idea a little bit. In what way does nationalism rest ultimately on economic performance?
Taisu: Great. So, there are different kinds of nationalisms in the world. The kind that you see most often, perhaps elsewhere in the world, either in Japan, South Korea, India, frankly, even the United States, is rooted in the sense of what you might describe as like organically national values. Basically, these are nationalisms that are built upon some kind of cultural identity or some set of normative values. A proclamation that “we are this kind of people, we follow this kind of value.” Americans will say we love freedom and democracy. The Japanese will proclaim a certain kind of Shinto, religion oriented, religious worldview, and so on and so forth.
And Hindu nationalism has its own variety of these things tied with imagine pasts. Certainly, these are not perhaps concrete actual historical pasts, but they’re imagined pasts that have a certain kind of a deep normative content to it. Now, in contrast to that kind of nationalism, the current dominant kind of nationalism that I see in China these days is largely a materialistic one. You could press like your average nationalist Weibo commentator on the mainland, like, why is he… obviously these are all people who are often justifiably proud of their country for various kinds of accomplishments. If you press them, why are they proud to be Chinese? Or why do they think that being Chinese is so great? They’re usually not necessarily going to give you much of a normative answer.
They’re not going to say being Chinese means holding up certain kinds of values. And we do this in a certain kind of way that makes us proud. More often, they’re going to basically say, being Chinese is something worthy of pride because China’s been so successful over the past couple of decades in performing this economic miracle and lifting its people out of poverty and gaining status and might and power and influence across the globe. To a large extent, the sense of nationalistic pride you see in China these days is itself fundamentally performance-based kind of nationalism.
And whereas, to most Chinese, this is simply just intuitively how nationalism is supposed to work, if you contrast that with other kinds of nationalisms that are prevalent across Eurasia, you’d probably be blind to not notice that this is actually rather unique to the Chinese context. Most other nationalisms are less materialistic. They ground their sense of national identity and values whereas the Chinese kind of nationalism has perhaps gestured towards values here and there in the past. But fundamentally, the real source of coherence, of consolidation, of pride is China’s material performance.
Kaiser: It’s surprising only to me that I haven’t heard this idea articulated elsewhere before. I find that to be very, very persuasive. I think if I had just read that part of your essay already, I would’ve been retweeting it. It was great. Let’s just go on, though, because I think the thrust of your argument in the piece is that faced with the end of really fast growth and having seen quite a bit of dissatisfaction in the COVID lockdowns, and to some extent in the sudden about face that ended zero COVID, and saw the virus just basically get everybody, the Party is now placing renewed emphasis on law. But not on law necessarily as a tool of coercion or repression, you note. I think it’s important to add, nor on the idea of rule of law as we understand it in the West, but on law as a basis of legitimacy itself. As you put it, playing on the human tendency to accept law as reason.
So, this is a really big idea. Let’s pick this apart a bit and start by differentiating what you’re talking about when you say this is different from the idea of the rule of law.
Taisu: Right. Actually, before we get into that, let me just make one qualification. I would say like the Party still draws a huge amount of support from performance-based legitimacy. The economy is slowing. It’s not like they’re collapsing.
Kaiser: Sure.
Taisu: This particular year, I expect with the end of the lockdowns, growth is going to be relatively robust, and there might be a kind of a reprieve. That’s, yes, the long-term structural circumstances of the Chinese economy are concerning, especially the demographics and things like government debt. Yeah, like over the next five to 10 years, I think the state’s ability to draw social support simply based on economic performance alone is going to weaken, if not quite weaken too rapidly over time. Which means that yeah, they need something that’s not tied to that kind of economic performance to bolster their social support. And so, yeah, this is where law comes in.
Now, you asked what is the difference between rule of law and the kind of legality that I talk about? Well, so rule of law is not so much a legal concept as it is a political concept, right?
Kaiser: A normative concept, right.
Taisu: Normative political concept. It’s mainly about the idea that every regular actor in the state, every regular policy-maker, every local lawmaker should be subject to some kind of pretty significant legal constraints on that person’s power. No one should really be above the law, even if the law itself does not try to reach certain kinds of heights. So, from that perspective, China is obviously not a rule of law country by that definition because the Chinese law itself does not purport really to control the actions and the decisions, or to limit them of the Central Party Leadership. There’s a certain segment of the Chinese Party-state that, by the actual design of the law, is…
Kaiser: Above it.
Taisu: And it’s not illegal for them to be above it because the law simply says nothing about what they can or cannot do. The most any Chinese law ever says about this kind of stuff is the constitution that says the Chinese Communist Party leads China. There are no legal checks on the actual power of the Central Party Leadership. And again, that’s by design, which means China’s not really going to be a rule of law country as long as that holds. Now that said, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a law-oriented country in the sense that at least, insofar as the written laws would seem, based on their own textual meaning, to apply to certain kinds of state activities or private activities, those laws are enforced rigorously and professionally. That’s the main thing here. To perhaps really crudely capture this is it’s that for everyone except the Central Party Leadership, in this overall Party-state apparatus, and increasingly even Party organs, those who wield power are being directed by the Central Party Leadership to wield them according to legal doctrines and legal commandments.
And they’re increasingly being asked to do so in a more professionalized, top-down, and legalistic fashion than they were used to. My argument is that this, in and of itself, creates a certain kind of legitimacy as perceived by the public because as you were setting that quote, this is like a common quote that you find in like Weber and all kinds of early 20th century sociologists or political theorists — populations have a tendency to take laws, reason… Because in the end, most people on the ground don’t necessarily reason for first principles when they think about the legitimacy of a governmental action. They look for various kinds of proxies. And one of the most powerful proxies is law. Because law has a ritualistic formalistic element that gives it a veneer of authority. And when you can observe on a relatively reliable basis in your everyday life, that state actors and other private actors are largely acting in accordance to law, that force of habit, that force of authoritative habits tends to make you think that what they’re doing is legitimate.
They’re following rules, they’re not behaving arbitrarily. They’re obeying the general perceived rules of society as we’ve all kind of agreed upon them, issued by some kind of authoritative body.
Kaiser: And for you guys, this doesn’t come out of nowhere either. You explore this idea; you test this proposition in this paper that you co-wrote with Yiqin Fu and Yiqing Xu at Stanford. This is a paper called Does Legality Produce Legitimacy? Which is based on survey research with urban Chinese designed to test this idea that, even stripped of actual rule of law, as you’ve said, the idea of legality actually does reinforce political legitimacy. So, can you briefly summarize what those findings were? This is in the other paper that I wanted to talk about. I just want to use this in support of… Because your essay in Foreign Affairs is actually quite short and you don’t go into the empirical study that underpins this. So, I wanted to give you a chance to do that here.
Taisu: Yeah, great. Thanks for that opportunity. That’s actually quite important. So, there’s a common perception in Western political theory that law itself is usually not enough to produce social perceptions of legitimacy. The idea is that people value law not for law itself, but rather for the substantive moral content that the law embodies. This is an especially popular idea in the post-Cold War world where liberalism is dominant, and you think of law not as an isolated, skinny thing, but rather as a full set of ideological commitments towards liberalism, towards democracy, towards freedom, and so on and so forth. For most political theorists, I think in the Western world, they think that for the populations they observe, which are mainly Western ones, if law is being applied to normatively bad ends, the people aren’t going to respect law itself.
People are going to desire the ends to be fixed. And so hence, like my colleagues in the Yale Law School building or a lot of other political theorists would say, if law is being being used to serve liberal ends, no matter how legalistic it is, if it’s being used to not pursue a certain vision of justice, then it doesn’t really matter how legalistic or how formalistic or how professionalized your legal apparatus is. People aren’t going to think that a government action is legitimate just because it’s legal. And what I want to basically argue is that in some other contexts where the law has, over the past century or two, gained a more technocratic, and perhaps normatively neutral meaning, that law, just pure law itself, pure legality, can be a source of political legitimacy. And so we test this through a variety of survey experiments. If you want, we can go more deeply into how this-
Kaiser: I do. I want to hear the research design because it’s fascinating. I also want to ask whether you have any comparative data whether you looked at other societies where there have been comparable experiments set up where-
Taisu: Yeah. We have not. That will be the next stage of what we’re going to do in the future. But there has been a lot of research on this. Like Tom Tyler, my colleague here, has a series of like really authoritative articles on how police law enforcement action is perceived in the U.S. And what he finds, I think, which is perhaps the conventional wisdom in the West is that if police action doesn’t meet like a basic substantive amount of, what he calls procedural justice, in that it doesn’t seem fair enough, it doesn’t seem responsive enough, it doesn’t seem respectful enough — it doesn’t really matter whether the police enforcement action is technically following the letter of the law. It’s not going to be perceived as legitimate by the population.
Kaiser: Right.
Taisu: Whereas what we find is that even if you strip law of virtually all of its possible liberal connotations, you use law to control and constrain rather than to empower, you use law to enforce state commandments rather than to empower private liberties. Even if you use law in a way that doesn’t necessarily prove economically beneficial in the end, as long as your governmental actions are based on law as opposed to being based on some non-legal government fiat, the Chinese urban population that we surveyed seems to respond pretty positively towards just the sheer introduction of law itself. You don’t need liberal commitments, you don’t need rights, you don’t need freedoms. You don’t need the rule of law in the sense of checking or balancing governmental power. You don’t need even like the use of law to further economic goals.
You can throw away all those things in the survey experiments, and you’re just left with something that we call raw or pure legality. And they’re still going to respond positively towards that. Perhaps not quite as positively as they might respond to some of the substantive stuff, but still positively enough that it makes a real difference.
Kaiser: Interesting. How robust are those findings? I mean, how…
Taisu: The findings are pretty strong. So, the findings are consistent across a variety of factual patterns that we cooked up. We give surveys to respondents a number of factual patterns. One pattern is online censorship, or alternatively, fireworks controls during Spring festival. Content censorship in media like movies and TV series. Or just like government regulations of streetside vendors. A lot of different kinds of context scenes that trigger different kinds of social reactions. Regardless of the context, you find pretty consistently across all of these factual patterns that raw legality produces a sizable amount of perceived legitimacy by the respondents.
Kaiser: Kind of depressing, but also not so surprising.
Taisu: It’s a little bit depressing, but I’m not necessarily sure how depressing it actually is, because frankly, in a lot of ways, this is the kind of thing that makes the Chinese population more governable.
Kaiser: Sure. But yeah, I guess my question is, does this shift to an emphasis on legality? Does it at least offer a toe hold for people who are keen on promoting actual rule of law as we understand it? I mean, could we see more accountability to law from political elites who are not, as you know, subject to it right now? And because of this, this is like a first step.
Taisu: Right. I mean, people have made that argument quite a lot over the past 30 years. One very popular idea that was hugely popular in the ‘90s was that incremental movements towards legality, even if initially applied for non-liberal means, would eventually snowball towards a more liberal view of the rule of law. The idea being that once people get more and more accustomed to law, per se, as being the basis of political action, then any political action that does not seem to have a legal basis is going to be questioned, right? So, there’s going to be a demand… Getting accustomed to law as a major source of legitimacy will produce more demand socially for more law. And so law keeps expanding, it snowballs. There’s a certain kind of path dependency. And in, perhaps 20, 30 years, the end result is the government finds itself needing to bind itself by law everywhere for the public to actually accept its actions.
Kaiser: I sense that you don’t buy that.
Taisu: I can see a world in which that’s true. I can also see possible scenarios in which that does not materialize. It all depends on how much the government lets the language of the law run wild. If the government consistently maintains a very careful propaganda hold on how expansive law is… For example, in a society in which legality eventually becomes the only source of perceived legitimacy, then yeah, that kind of snowballing is almost always going to happen, because without the expansion of law, nothing is going to be justifiable to the public. But I think the Chinese government at this point is still pretty careful to not use law as its only source of legitimacy. It’s still searching for all kinds of other sources, and it’s not going to give up on economic performance anytime soon. So, as long as you have these other sources of legitimacy that balance law out, you can kind of constrain the natural creep of legality. And when you do that, it’s not necessarily true that there’s going to be this strong snowballing effect.
Kaiser: That’s fascinating. One question is, I mean, right now we are in the time of the two meetings as we record. I’m sure you’re watching it just like you know me and the rest of us, but what are you seeing coming out of the NPC, or maybe even out of the 20th Party Congress back in November or the second plenum last month that seems to bear out what you’re getting at in this essay? Are you seeing anything in this administrative restructuring?
Taisu: So, let me put this like, so the administrative restructuring that’s currently happened in the two meetings in the two conferences right now is it lends itself to two different kinds of interpretations, right? If you are a real diehard liberal China critic, you could probably say this is the further subsuming of the state within the Party, right? You’re imposing the Party as a kind of a superstructure and so on and so forth. Alternatively, you could also say, which is the angle that I prefer, which is like they’re actually making the Party a little bit more rules oriented. Yeah, the Party is gaining control over what used to be known as the state organs of government. But at the same time, while it’s doing that, the leadership seems intent on making the Party more state-like and how it subsequently functions. Right?
So, there’s a merging of the two. The state side of things is becoming more subsumed within the Party structure, but by doing that, the Party structure is also kind of almost being contaminated by the-
Kaiser: The direction of influence is not… It’s not a unidirectional influence.
Taisu: Yeah. The two sides really bleed into each other. My sense is the end product of all this is that the Party is going to get more rules oriented, even as the state side of things is under perhaps like more careful political control. And so that does not necessarily contradict this overall message of legality. Plus, on the rhetorical side, this is one thing that’s been really stark. Ever since 2014, the Party leadership from Xi himself all the way down has, as far as I can tell, never wavered from its rhetorical commitment to 依法治国 (yīfǎzhìguó), which means governing the country according to law. This has been one of its most consistent, most visible slogans. It was there last fall at the 20th Party Congress. It’s here again in the 两会 (liǎnghuì), this spring. It’s occupying an increasingly prominent position. When I was in Beijing last summer for family reasons, it seemed like every single time something went wrong in the localities, whether it was the Henan, like health code scandal…
Kaiser: The bank run thing.
Taisu: The bank bankruptcy that led to health code scandal, or the Shandong incidents where local officials were apparently propping up mafia that were behaving improperly. Every single time something went wrong on the ground, the reaction from the center would be to reiterate the importance of governing the country according to law and making sure that all local actors follow legal rules when they engaged with the public. At this point, the sheer amount of rhetorical commitment to this is so large that I think it’s not even functionally feasible for the Party leadership to come like change course away from legality anytime soon. And I think that’s probably pretty good because it’s getting close to the point where this is a fully credible commitment.
Kaiser: So, you think this accumulation of rhetorical commitments is the main evidence you see for this shift? I mean, have they made-
Taisu: No, no, no. It’s not.
Kaiser: You said since 2014, this has been going on now, right?
Taisu: Yes.
Kaiser: Right. I mean, yīfǎzhìguó is yeah, it’s been a talking point. I hear it constantly, but is there maybe more explicit pronouncement that this is…
Taisu: Oh yes.
Kaiser: Yeah. Okay. Let’s say what that is.
Taisu: The rhetoric has gone, I think, to a critical mass at this point. The actual measures on the ground I think are equal, or almost equally powerful, although the implementation is a bit more uneven, which is why amongst the academic community, this is still a matter of some controversy. I would point to things like, since 2014, there has been a complete revamping of the judiciary and its overall political status within the government. When I was kind of interning at these Supreme People’s court in 2009, you talked to judges, and everyone, judges back then, even Supreme Court judges didn’t necessarily have a very high opinion of themselves for the position of the overall judiciary within the Party-state. One conversation that I distinctly remember was a senior judge was telling me, “Everyone on the outside somehow rests their hopes of like Chinese rule of law on the judiciary. And that’s ridiculous because that’s like placing this gigantic normative hope on a really weak and feeble institution that’s not really geared up to actually carry the verdict.”
Kaiser: But they have more spine now. I mean, you think that they’ve been really…
Taisu: Yes. Yeah, the point is, I think the past eight years of reforms or nine years of reforms really has given them kind of a different view on life. Since 2014, the government’s made a concerted effort to raise their salaries, give them a certain measure of financial independence from parallel levels of governments. Previously it was the case that local courts and middle courts were subject to the direct budgetary controls of parallel levels of governments. And now all the budgetary control is being concentrated at the provincial and central levels. So, you’re taking any kind of fiscal control that mid- to lower-level governments had over the courts and giving the courts a certain kind of financial independence from these entities. At the same time, you’re trying to beef up the professionalism of the court.
You’re trying to insist on higher educational credentials. You’re trying to make sure that judges that are allowed to adjudicate are the ones with proper legal training. There’s a huge emphasis on trying to legally ban outside government executives from interfering with court decisions. Now, the controversy is that all of this beefing up of the judiciary, and what I would consider to even be beefing up the judiciary’s functional independence, lends itself to a certain kind of glass half full, glass half empty kind of debate. On the one hand, yeah, there are actually real changes being implemented on the ground. On the other hand, first of all, the starting point was pretty darn low, especially if you go all the way back to 1980. So, you can always, even in this day and age, point to various aspects in which the Chinese courts are not independent, where they’re subject to control from all kinds of governmental agencies externally.
And so the reforms are certainly incomplete, or they’re not meant to be fully complete. But compared, I think, with what things were like 10 years ago, I think the progress has been quite salient. Nearly every single lawyer that I talk to in China thinks that the courts run better, are more professional, more streamlined, more predictable, more legalistic than they used to be. Back in 2009, when I talked to a lawyer and I asked them, “if you were giving me advice on how to go into a civil case in the Beijing People’s Court, like, what’s the advice?” He’ll say like, “Well, of course, the first thing you got to do is bribe the judge.”
Kaiser: Exactly. I knew you were going to say that.
Taisu: Nowadays, if you talk to them, instead they’ll say, “actually that’s not only no longer necessary, it may not even be good because the judges will balk at that.” And instead, it’s much better to just get a good lawyer and get professional legal advice and actually try to apply the legal technicalities. The other aspect of this is that the courts have actually been given more substantive control or more substantive powers to play a check against local people’s governments. The most important thing is the government has dramatically expanded, since around 2015, the jurisdiction of the courts over administrative actions by parallel levels of governments. And the most important thing that they’ve explicitly given the courts is the ability to review land takings by local governments.
Now, land takings, as we all know, are pretty much the purse strings of local governments. It’s most of their income, or at least it used to be most of their income. Probably still is.
Kaiser: It still is. Yeah.
Taisu: It still is. By giving courts the ability to review land taking actions, you’re really giving courts the ability to check a very, very substantial portion of the fiscal power of local governments. And the end result of all this is the number of administrative litigation cases against governmental land takings has exploded from very low levels previously to now, like over in the span of five years, between 2014 and 2019, it doubled the overall number of administrative litigation cases in China, almost just on the basis of that one kind of case alone. And the win rates for that kind of case have also gone up, right? Like, you’re more likely to win now than you used to be. It used to be you probably won like 10%, 12% of the time.
Now you’re winning something like 20 something percent of the time. And while you still lose more than you win on average, I mean, that increase is not small. It means the courts are feeling somewhat emboldened to go against the interests of parallel governments. They’re actually acting as a certain kind of political check on their power. To me, this is all the glass half-full kind of thing. There’s been real progress. There’s been real, good progress on the ground in the Chinese court arena. And I would expect that to continue after COVID. Now, of course, if you take the glass half-empty point, you can always point to various imperfections, places where higher governmental authorities can still order the courts to pursue a certain kind of action and so on and so forth.
But the thing is, those things have always been there, right? So, they’re not a symptom of things getting worse. They’re just a symptom of something’s not changing much in the direction that some people would prefer. But overall, the overall status of the courts is getting higher, their overall performance is getting more professionalized. So, I’m really inclined on this point to take the glass half-full kind of view.
Kaiser: Well, great. I want to move on and talk about your other paper, but let me just remind everybody that this one is called Xi’s Law and Order Strategy: The CCP’s Quest for a Fresh Source of Legitimacy. It’s a very brief essay in Foreign Affairs, and it was published in February, so definitely check that out.
Taisu: I should add one thing, which is, As is often the case with these magazines, the title is not mine…
Kaiser: Yeah. I was going to… yeah, I’m sure-
Taisu: The title is my editor’s, and I think it may have actually gotten me into a bit of trouble in China, because the name Xi Jinping was in the title, which got picked up by various kinds of administrators who were fretting about whether the use of the name meant a certain kind of content. I think, if they ever read the actual piece, they’ll note that this is a relatively neutral piece.
Kaiser: Sure, sure. Before I go on and ask you about the other thing, I mean, I’ve also been thinking about the foundations of political legitimacy in China, and I’ve been thinking about how there might have been a shift. And I always enjoy my interactions with you because you are able to kind of step back and look at the kind of meta historical questions. There was this notion that I’ve had that for the last 180 years, the question that’s really been at the center of Chinese political intellectual life has been, how do we attain wealth and power in a way that’s consonant with our national identity or something like that? And so, it doesn’t surprise me at all that delivering those goods, wealth, power, basic national dignity, those would be the foundations of legitimacy.
That was the national quest, that was the foundational quest, and the central question for what we’ve called modern Chinese history. And so, with those things, it’s not actually attained, and at least in sight, there is a new question that’s really looming up and maybe a new set of questions. And with those perhaps a need for new foundations for political legitimacy, right? For postmodern Chinese history. So, this has been sort of the idea I’ve been playing with. I mean, I suspect that with the basic material needs met and sovereignty asserted and all that stuff, the Party-state really does kind of need to redefine its relationship with the people, and vice versa, right?
Taisu: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it doesn’t need to in the sense that like the people don’t want more economic growth. People do, it’s just going to get probably hard to actually deliver.
Kaiser: Well, they do, but it’s no longer just a developmental state, right?
Taisu: Yeah, that’s true.
Kaiser: A developmental state can… I mean, it can operate on the fuel of performance legitimacy, and that almost alone, right?
Taisu: Yeah.
Kaiser: But now, I mean, that’s not the case for a state that is now settled in among peers as sort of an established nation state, right?
Taisu: Yeah. I completely agree on that. I mean, I think the core thing here is that, again, it’s mainly that they’ve running a little bit, not quite fully. They still have more room to grow, but they can start to see the end game, where at some point, they’re going to get closer and closer to these developed countries, and then they’re going to recognize that as these developed countries all have had to deal with in the past, however many years, growth is not going to be the main theme of the society anymore. It’s just because of obvious material constraints and also because of population pressures that every single developed economy has faced. Yeah, they’re going to have to change the narrative somehow. I mean once growth slows down and you’re not growing the pie all the time, all kinds of pressures from inequality to quality of life to kind of like more bourgeois concerns with values and worldviews are going to get more salient because growth-
Kaiser: I think we already are. I think we’re already seeing that reflected in a lot of the rhetoric of common prosperity and…
Taisu: Yes, exactly.
Kaiser: It’s already very much there. Quality of growth is a very huge theme that’s going on.
Taisu: Yeah. Exactly. But then the question is how do you make that kind of thing actually resonate with the population? I think common prosperity is potentially very powerful.
Kaiser: Well, I’m going to have you back on to talk about somebody who always has really good, thoughtful perspectives on these big meta historical questions. I don’t want to get too far away from what we’re talking about here, but I’ll get you back on and we’ll talk about all this stuff after we’ve both had a chance to kind of chew on it and think about it. For now, though, let’s look at the other paper, the one that you’ve written with Yutian An, who is a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton, who also has a law degree from Yale. That paper, again, is called Pandemic State Building: Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era. First off, what stage is this paper, and where can people find it?
Taisu: Well, it’s a working paper. We threw it together over two months in the winter. Data collection took a little bit longer, but the writing took like a month and a half. So, it’s just in a working paper format. We’re starting to send a few of those out to possible publication venues, but it’ll take some time. For now, you can find it on SSRN. If you just go on SSRN and search either for the title of the paper or my name, or Yutian’s name, you can find paper under our profiles. Yeah, it’s rough. It has lots of room for revision, and any kind of comments or questions from anyone is welcome at the stage.
Kaiser: Oh, great. Hopefully, some of my questions will spark some thinking, but I think it’s a really ambitious paper. It definitely tries to fill what, I mean, as you point out, is a pretty big hole in the academic literature, whether in Chinese or in English. And I think it’s totally understandable that this is a very recent phenomenon, this expansion of controls during the pandemic. Of course, it hasn’t been studied that much, but there’s also evidently not been a whole lot written about local administration at the sub-district and community or neighborhood level, and the debates over the proper role of this lowest level during the recent years, during Xi Jinping’s years in power. So, I found it really fascinating. Let’s dive into this paper. You described the situation in which, even just a year before the outbreak of the pandemic, China’s leadership was still quite divided over whether, and to what extent the power of the government should reach down into the local level, down to sub-districts and to neighborhoods.
And there were debates that went on throughout the first seven years of the Xi administration, but as anyone who either lived through the lockdowns in Shanghai and many, many other Chinese cities can attest, some kind of a decision favoring expansion of local government was clearly made.
Taisu: Yeah, was clearly made. Yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah. So, we’re going to focus our discussion about the paper on the logic behind that decision, it’s implementation, and its consequences. First, I want to ask you about this — what were things like before this expansion? What were the powers of subdistrict governments and of neighborhood committees? We’re talking about 街道 (jiēdào) or streets, or 社区 (shèqū) communities or Juweihui, right? How were they funded? How were they supervised? What were they mainly tasked with doing? And maybe let’s start with sub-districts.
Taisu (38:48):
Right. There, I think, really are three phases to this entire story. One is pre-2012. And then there’s 2012 to 2019, where I think, yeah, like as you say, there was a certain amount of uncertainty as to whether the government was going to take the plunge, and how deeply was it going to take the plunge? And then post-2020, where everything was obviously forced and the government just took the plunge to almost the deepest extent possible right away. Prior to 2012, or perhaps some people would date it a little bit earlier, but around 2011 to 2012, there was a wave of governmental interest in thinking, “what exactly should we do with sub-districts?” Now sub-districts, up until this past year, frankly, even now, they’re not necessarily a legally mandated universal level of government.
They’re instead seen as a delegation like agency of district governments that are below district governments. And so essentially, district governments have a certain kind of like discretion as to whether to delegate power to sub-districts.
Kaiser: Yeah. That was something that was really surprising to me in your paper. There’s no formal definition of what their administrative role was. And there’s like 9,000 of them across China. It’s just nuts. They were created and I guess directed as needed by sort of an ad-hoc basis by city and district governments.
Taisu: Yeah. They were basically like when districts get too large for their own traditional methods of control and the administration, they create these new subdivisions to monitor at closer distance a certain patch of the district. So, like the place where I live in Beijing, Hainan District created a number of these, and in between the 1990s and 2010s, and the district that my PKU, Peking University falls under, which is where my family lives, has been subject to like a pretty consistent… Well, was subject to a pretty consistent, like redistricting and redrawing of boundaries during the early 2000s. These things lack definitive shape. They didn’t have much of like a statutory mandate as to how and to what extent they should behave, and do what. So, which meant that they were always kind of awkward, right?
They varied from place to place, depending on what their powers and functions would be. And like not everyone at the district level was not necessarily happy with the way they function. And so there was always a large amount of debate over whether these things should actually even exist at all. And if they do exist, what they actually should be doing. If you look at the debates around 2010, the surprising thing is like, and one of the papers that I read, which was really quite striking, like the guy was summarizing the literature on sub-districts and the economic urban management literature. It was like, actually, it now seems that the more popular view is that we should just get rid of these things altogether and re-concentrate formal power at the district level and just formalize that. That was kind of like the state of the field around 2010 to 2012; there was quite a bit of uncertainty permeating within the bureaucracy to outside of the bureaucracy over what to do with these things.
And then around 2012, once the new regime takes over, there’s clearly a signal sent that we want to make these sub-districts more functional. We want to give them more powers, more authority. We want to make them more formalized and permanent in how they function. So, there are discussions about like sub-districts provide various kinds of services to local communities. We should beef that service provision aspect up. And then alternatively, the more controversial thing is, well, what about the coercive side of government power, which is the law enforcement side. The administrative law enforcement side of things. And starting with 2012, there are various documents expressing a political inclination to have city and district level governments delegate more powers, more law enforcement powers to the sub-district.
Previously, the role that sub-districts played in the overall law enforcement apparatus was mainly that they were kind of like an informational agency. They kept an eye out for trouble on the ground. And they sent signals back up to the center or higher levels of government asking for law enforcement personnel to come down and deal with issues. They didn’t necessarily have any independent agency of their own that actually exercised.
Kaiser: And when they did, when they did try their hand at it, it was not exactly popular. I mean, listeners who might not have lived in Chinese cities maybe don’t know all about this, but there are these 城管 (chéngguǎn), right?
Taisu: Yeah.
Kaiser: Who are just loathed and despised, almost uniformly.
Taisu: Yeah. Although, so there’s a tech technical difference to be drawn, which is chéngguǎn is like a top-down agency that’s basically created at the city level and then imposed all the way down. The chéngguǎn that were operating at the sub-districts prior to around 2014, were really, they took their orders from officials at the district level, not from the sub-district governments per se, right? So, they operated at the subdistrict level, but they were really-
Kaiser: On orders from the-
Taisu: Yeah. They were part of a command chain that really had everything held at the district level or above.
Kaiser: Okay. Let me just cut you off here for a sec. So, your contention is that the center, even prior to the outbreak of COVID, was set on expanding administratively in this downward direction? It wanted to-
Taisu: Yeah, was at least seriously considering expanding.
Kaiser: Okay. So, let me put the counterfactual now. So, if there hadn’t been a pandemic, would we still be looking today at significant downward expansion of administrative capacity?
Taisu: Probably not.
Kaiser: Oh, okay. So, COVID did matter. Okay.
Taisu: The thesis of the paper, and this is perhaps the point of disagreement with some other people who study this, like some of my friends who study urban, local government law in China, would actually want to say that the commitment to expanding had been made before COVID. And I would say, perhaps at some abstract level, that’s correct. The central decision to pursue expansion down to the subdistrict level in terms of law enforcement was probably made before the pandemic. But in terms of actual implementation, the hesitation pre-2019 is just obvious. There wasn’t that much that changed on the ground in most major cities prior to 2019. There were experimental launches here and there. Usually, they were rolled back after a while.
A lot of this is simply because district-level governments are not that eager to delegate their own powers to these subordinate entities. They don’t want to dilute their own power, right?
Kaiser: Right.
Taisu: For example, Beijing is perhaps the most obvious example. Beijing experimented with this delegating effort starting from 2017 in Chaoyang District. As far as anyone can tell, they didn’t have a ton of impact. And then around 2019, they rolled up shop and declared victory by implementing this new system, which they called the whistleblowing system.
Kaiser: Right.
Taisu: That they said would actually realize the goals of the central government’s directive. But if you look at how the whistleblowing system actually functioned, it still was sub-districts would whistle blow whenever there was trouble. And then district-level law enforcement would send their personnel down to the subdistrict level to actually deal with the issues. So, it was not actually functionally different from what was going on before. Clearly, there was hesitation and pushback at some level, perhaps at the city and district level. It was against this new initiative. And implementation was slow with hesitance. The central government didn’t seem interested in enforcing things. It was like Beijing’s, frankly pretty half-assed experiment, met with quite effusive praise from the center saying that this is actually quite a good experiment. Others should follow its example.
Clearly, the, the overall attitude was just kind of fuzzy. And even if there had been some kind of general mood towards expansion, it didn’t have concrete shape, nor did it have any kind of concrete implementation in a widespread manner. You have COVID and everything changes. Within a year of COVID hitting, by like the spring and summer of 2021, delegation is just like all over the place. Every major city begins delegating huge amounts of actual law enforcement powers down to these sub-district level. They create these huge charts of what powers are actually being delegated down to the jiēdào level. And the charts are just quite something to look at. Like out of a total count of like 400 something total items of law enforcement authority held previously by the district, something like 270 were being sent down, like a full two thirds were being sent down to the sub-districts.
Things moved really fast and really concretely post COVID, whereas they certainly had not been doing this pre-COVID.
Kaiser: Right. I mean, in hindsight now, I mean, because we’ve, of course, seen the experiment of COVID, it’s hard to imagine that there could have ever been any debate whether it was really in doubt that the Party-state wanted to exert control all the way down. You talk about some of the misgivings. What were some of the reasons why people were hesitant? Principal-agent problem is one of the problems…
Taisu: Yeah, the principal-agent problem is the thing that everyone talks about. Whenever anyone talks about local government problems, everyone always talks about principal-agent problems. We’re no exception to that because it really is the main thing. I mean, the basic logic of this is that the larger the state, the more expansive it gets, the deeper it penetrates the society, the harder it is for a policymaker at the center to actually control the actions of their local agency. They’re more distant from you. They’re going to be operating out of your immediate line of sight. You have to set up various kinds of monitoring institutions to know what’s going on down there. And the thing is that kind of thing is not just a matter of you not having full control. If they mess up, it comes back to you in terms of social anger, anxiety, unrest, and so on and so forth.
Until you have full trust over local agents, you’re not always that eager to give them powers. Right? Giving them powers might make you more equipped to control society, but it also makes you a little bit less well equipped to actually deal with control within your own governmental bureaucracy.
Kaiser: Well, Taisu, you talk about how there needed to be a lot of groundwork laid for this kind of an administrative expansion and because of this concern about oversight, a concern that there would be bad actors among local government officials. Millions of them, though, were censured, millions were prosecuted in the course of the anti-corruption drive. How important was the anti-corruption drive in setting the stage for being able to then downward delegate like this?
Taisu: Okay. That’s a great question. That to me, I think is one of the lynchpins of this entire thing, right? Without the overall legality push that Xi has made over the past decade, I don’t think that this kind of expansion of governmental authority really could have been implemented.
Kaiser: See, and that’s where this dovetails with what your paper… I mean why this paper connects directly with what you wrote about in Foreign Affairs.
Taisu: Exactly. So, there’s a certain kind of internal design to my work that manifests itself pretty much everywhere I poke my head. Yeah, exactly, there’s a certain kind of functional reliance of governmental expansion on your ability to make sure that local bureaucrats are following the rules. And you make sure that local bureaucrats are following the rules by making things more legalistic within the bureaucracy, creating more clear rules, creating an expectation that they’re going to follow the rules, giving other agencies and courts the ability to kind of monitor them and make sure that they’re actually following the rules. Now, the downside of all this is that this may, in some ways, reduce corruption and abuse of power at the local level, but it’s also really costly.
Because what this means is that every expansion of local governmental authority at the sub-district or neighborhood organization level is really a double investment of cost. The first cost is just, you have to create new agencies and hire new bureaucrats and train them and give them powers and so on and so forth. The second cost is then you have to create a separate layer of monitoring that allows you to know what these guys are actually doing and allow you to actually exert some kind of top-down control over them. Overall, that kind of bureaucratic infrastructure is very expensive to build. So, you can imagine, China right now is not exactly in very happy fiscal circumstances. So, this kind of thing has put substantial burdens on the state.
Kaiser: Yeah, I can imagine. One more question before we get into the actual changes that took place during the pandemic, so have there been changes in the way that leaders of these local level organizations are chosen? And when did those changes take place? Because I know that when I lived in China, there was a rough and very clearly imperfect form of democracy where pretty much anyone technically could stand for election. There were even foreign residents that stood for election in their neighborhood committees. How democratic in practice did that ever get, and how things changed as far as you know?
Taisu: To answer that, we have to actually just draw the distinction between the sub-districts and neighborhood.
Kaiser: Yeah. We didn’t actually get to neighborhood committees.
Taisu: Yeah, we haven’t gone through that.
Kaiser: I think we could talk about them quite a bit during the post COVID or the pandemic era. But yeah, go ahead, please. Yeah, make that distinction.
Taisu: Right. The distinction is sub-districts are still governmental entities. They’re full-blown governmental entities.
Kaiser: Even if they’re not, they weren’t officially recognized until the organization law…
Taisu: Yeah, even if they had this nebulous legal status, they’re still delegation agencies basically sent out by the districts and they have full official bureaucratic rank and so on and so forth. So, leaders of sub-districts were always chosen in the usual top-down appointed manner through the 组织部 (zǔzhībù), and so on and so forth. Neighborhood organizations, prior to 2012, and even today, nominally speaking, they are self-governance entities of urban communities, right? They’re meant to be a way for urban neighborhoods to govern themselves, which meant that… This is the urban parallel to villages in the rural setting. Village officials are supposed to represent the interests of their village constituents. And so, they’re elected. And so, hence by the same logic, neighborhood organization chiefs, most urban neighborhoods in China have one of these things.
Actually, almost every single one has one of these things. There’s a neighborhood organization that frankly, prior to like 2015, I didn’t even know where my neighborhood organization actually was. I just never dealt with it. They were invisible completely. But there was always a neighborhood organization chair, and the chair was elected. As you say, any local resident had the ability to stand for election. There were pretty weak and vague criteria on who could actually be elected. And it was, while not fully democratic in process, it was pretty grassroots oriented. It was pretty organic. There were always some directives, even in the pre-2012 era, that the Party had to maintain a certain semblance of political standard, right? You couldn’t elect someone who’s openly hostile to the Party-state to that kind of position.
Although, frankly, even that apparently happened periodically when things got out of control. But the idea was that there would be some monitoring, but the monitoring would come with a pretty light touch. Post 2012, and especially post 2020, there have been distinctive moves towards imposing a pretty robust measure of top-down vetting over who can actually stand for election. And I think by now, like post-pandemic, given that these neighborhood organizations are now essentially just like… they still have a veneer of self-governance, but functionally speaking, they’re really just extensions of the administrative states at this point.
Like, who actually leads them is a matter of great significance to urban governance. At this point, certainly they’re not going to let any random Joe from the neighborhood stand for election and run the risk of this guy actually gets elected. Now, but pretty much general, as far as I can tell, higher authorities send down a list perhaps with consultation with local neighborhoods, people or organizations, they drop a list of approved candidates and send them down for election.
Kaiser: I’m not surprised.
Taisu: Yeah. So, you have choice, like sometimes you have some real choice, but it’s a choice between Party to prove candidates.
Kaiser: Yeah. So let’s get into the actual changes in local governance after the outbreak of COVID in February of 2020. I think a lot of us have kind of a short memory, and we forget that there was actually a lot of praise that was directed at China’s display of competent state capacity in the spring of 2020.
Taisu: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Kaiser: We actually can get that China faced the same situation that much of the rest of the world did, this really fast spreading virus. It was in every province, as you point out, but whatever may have happened later, at least in the early months, Chinese containment of the disease was remarkable. And it was a manifestation of this administrative expansion that you guys talk about. It seemed to be an early victory. Can we talk about the importance of some of the things like the health code system that China implemented? How critical was that to the success?
Taisu: I mean, that was the lynchpin eventually of the entire system, certainly by 2022, right? That was the core thing that made this entire thing run. I would say, I completely agree, even today, I’m not entirely sure we shouldn’t see Chinese pandemic control as, at least some kind of, perhaps now weakened, but still it’s a success story compared to some other comparison sets, right? It’s not quite the overwhelming success story that it seemed to be in 2021, but it’s still, on a per capita basis, even by the more hostile estimates, China probably has suffered a quarter of the deaths that the U.S. has, and so on and so forth. So, the legacy of this entire thing is complicated, but the thing that made the entire thing run, initially, it was basically, without the health code, they had to do it more by brute force.
So, they set checkpoints, they checked your documents, they looked at your tickets, figured out where you were, and then just tracked everything to your personal government identification number. And that was a slow and often bulky process. Starting from 2021, they designed various kinds of new health codes. These are apps. These are mini apps that are usually tied to the WeChat app on your phone if you’re in China. And everyone in China has a WeChat, right?
Kaiser: Yeah.
Taisu: It’s basically your entire life. What the mini app inside the WeChat app would give you is that you tie this to your personal information, your ID number, your facial recognition data, and then it links you to a health code. Now, the code is basically like a QR code that you scan wherever you go, right? And it comes with a couple colors — green means normal, yellow means that you’ve been exposed, red means you’ve been highly exposed. Usually anything that’s yellow or red means that your movement is restricted.
Kaiser: Because it has your geolocation data.
Taisu: Exactly right. So, the way that they would use this is that every word you went, into every building, pretty much every taxi you took, the subway, the bus, you always had to scan your health code first, so that the government pretty much always knew where exactly you were unless you were just wandering around on the street. And so, any indoor state, you would have to scan your health code. So, which meant that once there was any kind of outbreak, a couple of people here and there, they would know almost exactly who was in that locality at a certain time of day. And so, they could track you to within like an hour and a block of pretty much any activity of yours. And so then they would, depending on who you had been exposed to, how you had been exposed, issue various orders for various kinds of either testing or quarantine.
So, Yellow Health Code usually meant that you have to do a couple of tests every day for a couple of days. Red health code usually meant that you had to stay in your home for a couple days, and somebody would come and check on you every single day. So, the health code was essentially kind of like a marker on you that allowed the government to basically track you in time and space to always know exactly where you were pretty much.
Kaiser: I can’t even imagine how Americans would react to the imposition of such a system.
Taisu: Well, I mean, so there’s kind of like an anecdote that I have to tell about this, which is around 2020, in April of 2020, a couple of my colleagues here at the law school were working with the New Haven city government to implement some kind of smartphone-based location tracking for individuals. It would allow contact tracing in a less intrusive manner. Everyone would install kind of a New Haven tracking app on their phone, and the app would tell the government more or less where you were and allow the government to ask you to test or quarantine on a more targeted basis. Now, you can guess the reaction that this actually got in New Haven. And New Haven’s a very liberal place with relatively larger amounts of governmental intrusion into their lives. But this was still easily enough to make everyone hate my colleagues for helping with this. And the government got huge amounts of pushback on this. And by June of 2020, the entire idea was just scrapped. Yeah, it’s not something that would work in the U.S.
Kaiser: Taisu, for ordinary people living in China, the most visible evidence of this administrative expansion, besides the app on their phone, was the ubiquity of the 大白 (dàbái), these people with full-body PPE who seemed to be just absolutely everywhere. Where did they all come from? Who was putting on the suits? Who did they work directly for?
Taisu: Right. That’s complicated because people put on suits for all kinds of different reasons. There is the medical worker who usually, often is, at least in my experience, back from being in Beijing for a couple months that summer, those people are actually personnel taken away from local hospitals and asked to do testing in this part of the district on this day or that day. Then there are various kinds of security personnel, then there are the neighborhood organization personnel that maintain order at the testing sites and so on and so forth. They also dress in these big white puffy suits. So dabai, it’s not just the health workers, it’s also administrators, law enforcement personnel, police. One of the interesting things is by the end of 2022, but by the end of zero COVID, a lot of these neighborhood organizations had created their own kind of law enforcement teams.
Kaiser: Yeah, I was going to ask about that. I mean, because look, 2022, you’ve got the omicron variant beginning to spread all over China. You start to need more coercive tools, right?
Taisu: Yeah.
Kaiser: Where did the Juweihui go when it needed enforcement muscle? I mean, was it able to tap chéngguǎn or did it…
Taisu: Well, I mean, so yes, it tapped chéngguǎn, it tapped the police. In Shanghai, for example, in 2021, the city government created a system where every single neighborhood organization would have essentially like a police mini station assigned to it. But they would also have to, because that was not enough manpower, so they would also have to recruit volunteers. And these would usually be like the security guards for buildings, various kinds of 保安 (bǎoān) or in other, just simply volunteers that had a certain kind of social connection to neighborhood organizations. So, it was lots of recruitment from across society. Now that I think is not permanent. I think that was kind of a pandemic era thing. Most of these guys have now gone back to their usual jobs, if they’re still there.
So, it was a mixture of more permanent actual law, like law enforcement staff, like the chéngguǎn or the police paired with a perhaps even larger number of just like informal volunteers. Well, this depends on which city you’re talking about and which area of the city.
Kaiser: Yeah. Okay. Last set of questions have to do with technology for you. I mean, we already talked about the importance of the QR codes and everything like that, but what I want to understand is what role technology plays in the new post-pandemic power structure? I mean, because, on the one hand, I can see an argument that sub-districted neighborhood organizations are going to be able to use technologies, everything from like these QR codes to biometrics and surveillance cameras to do more with less in terms of the manpower they have. I mean, they will be able to fill in the gaps that they have of capacity, right? But on the other hand, you could also argue that with this technology at their disposal, the already powerful tiers above these organizations, the city level, they would be able to exert control over much larger populations without the lower layers like the jiēdào and the shèqū. Where do you come down on this?
Taisu: Well, so I come down on the side of… Well, some things are not permanent. The health codes are not permanent. Right now, I think no one scans codes, going into places in China anymore. I think the government wisely decided that, that became such a symbol of the control that one social anger had reached a certain kind of breaking point; at least you have to retreat on certain kinds of like, really salient aspects of control. That’s said, the expansion of authority of control over neighborhood organizations, the use of neighborhood organizations as administrative entities, the delegation of law enforcement power at the sub-districts, I’d say that’s all there to say. And that’s there to stay because the technologies give you a certain amount of monitoring capacity at the district level, but in terms of the day-to-day actual control and fast reaction, the ability to process the data you collect in real time and know what to make of it, that’s still pretty localized, right? A district in China is often like a million people or more.
Kaiser: Yeah.
Taisu: If you centralize all the data, the human processing of the data, the identification of who is who and what to do with who; how to assess any person’s risk level. I mean, we often think of like AI as possibly a tool. AI is not there yet, it’s still human for the most part. And because of that, given that you need local knowledge, who is the troublemaker in this locality and so on and so forth, you still need the local manpower that sub-districts and neighborhood organizations provide to you. That’s not going to change. And I would also say that because of their experience with the social unhappiness in November and December, they’re aware that lockdowns made a pretty large portion of the urban population pretty unhappy. And so, given that level of more, that kind of tense or social environment that they’re now operating in, I don’t think they’re going to feel free to loosen real ability to control at the local level anytime soon, right?
Kaiser: Right. I remember in the first week of December, right after they dropped zero COVID, there were a lot of people who were saying, “Hey, look, they actually are willing to give up social controls. They’re dismantled this health code system so quickly.” But you guys argue that it’s actually not just larger and more comprehensive and tighter, but it’s actually here to stay. It’s permanent, right?
Taisu: Yeah. Well, I mean, they are woven to dismantle certain kinds of social controls.
Kaiser: Right. That’s true.
Taisu: You can dismantle pandemic level movement controls without getting rid of your, like administrative infrastructure at the local level that gives you the fast response power.
Kaiser: You had a nice phrase that said… It said, let’s find this line, all right, “COVID prevention measures could not last forever, not even in China, but the expansion of local governmental authority was made of more durable institutional material.” That sounds about right to me. Pretty durable institutional material. Yeah, right.
Taisu: It is pretty durable. It’s also, it has to be because they’re dealing with a less happy population now. Like, it’ll take a couple years for the population to recover to its former level of happiness and trust or whatever in the government.
Kaiser: Don’t worry. Don’t worry because there’s legality now.
Taisu: Okay, in my defense, I also say that legality probably can’t plug the entire hole left.
Kaiser: I was just giving you a hard time.
Taisu: No, no. But it’s a fair question. I mean, given the fact that state-society relations are probably a bit more tense right now than they were, just like two years ago, especially at this point, in their minds, they probably can least afford to fully withdraw from the presence on the ground, right? You don’t loosen the floodgates right at the moment where you see the flood rising.
Kaiser: Very good. Taisu, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your really fascinating work. I want to move on to recommendations. But first, let’s remind our listeners that if you like the work that we do with the Sinica Podcast and you want to help out, a couple of ways to do that. But the most important, I mean; obviously we have this crowdfunding thing going on right now still where we are taking investors, and for a relatively small amount, you can buy a piece of the company, and you can find all the information about that on our website. But you could also just become an Access member. That really helps us out quite a bit. You get the great newsletter, you get access to all unlimited articles on the website, and, of course, you get the Sinica podcast delivered early on Monday rather than having to wait until Thursday. So, if you want to help us out, that’s the best way to do it. We’re still running this special — a dollar for your first month. Okay, let’s move on to recommendations. Taisu, what do you have for us?
Taisu: Well, okay, so admittedly I’m a nerd who doesn’t really have much of a life. You know this about me. My recommendations come mainly in the range of books to read.
Kaiser: That’s good. I like books.
Taisu: Things of this nature. So, depends on what your tastes are. Apologies for moving away from that for a second. The camera’s going to freeze, but I’m still here. Just pulling up this list that I drew up. So, it depends on what you guys want. If you want like reading material for either philosophy or politics or so on and so forth, there’s lots out there to recommend these days. What I’m reading right now is, for example, I’m reading quite a bit of the late David Graeber. I don’t know if-
Kaiser: Yeah. Sure. Yeah, David Graeber, of course.
Taisu: Yeah. Various books of his. I mean, the more popular ones are the one that he published last year about-
Kaiser: Right. Just before he died.
Taisu: Just before he died.
Kaiser: So, challenging all these ideas that early human anthropologists had about civilizations emergence. Yeah, that was interesting.
Taisu: Yeah, and I find that book good, but it’s not so terribly interesting to me.
Kaiser: So, what’s your favorite David Graeber book?
Taisu: I like The Utopia of Rules a little bit. It’s a pretty incisive creative way to look at, frankly, given the topic that we’re on, bureaucracies and technological bureaucracies, and how bureaucracies function using various kinds of technologies. And, of course, given Graeber, he can’t resist making fun of these kinds of things. So, the title is actually called The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Sounds quite appropriate, I think, given the topic. And in terms of China-related reading, I don’t know how much of a taste for history books you guys have.
Kaiser: I’ve got lots. Yeah.
Taisu: There’s a trio of history books that have recently come out on Chinese state building that actually speak pretty well to each other. And I would recommend two of those. The third I offered myself, so I will leave that to the side. But the two books that I would recommend, if you’re interested in reading about the history of the Chinese state and its relationship to the Chinese population is, one is Yuhua Wang book. Yuhua is a professor of local science.
Kaiser: Yeah, he’s great. He’s great.
Taisu: At Harvard, who’s most recent book is The Rise and Fall of Imperial China. It’s a possibly broad topic, but it’s really about the changing, the shifting power balance between state and society in the most recent 1000 years of the Chinese bureaucratic state. The other one is Maura Dykstra’s recent book. Maura is currently still a professor at Caltech, teaching history, but she’s moving to Yale in the fall, I think full-blown to start here in the history department. She is our new kind of China historian. So, she has a new book, it’s called Uncertainty in the Empire Routine, which is about basically, exactly, given that we’re talking about principal agent problems in the urban Chinese governance context, this book is about basically the construction of internal monitoring and internal bureaucratic control apparatus in the mid to late Qing.
I think it’s a fantastic book. Now, I have a book that came out recently myself, Kaiser mentioned this, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation, which is in conversation with both of these books on a lot of themes about state building and state capacity. So, those are some professional books that I recommend.
Kaiser: Excellent, excellent.
Taisu: Given that I want to seem a little bit more fun than just that, I also have some fiction recommendations for people. Depends on whether you read Chinese or not. If you don’t read Chinese, I imagine by this point almost everyone listening to your podcast probably has read The Three Body Problem or the English translation. If they haven’t, I’d still recommend that as like the best piece of fiction to come out of China — and probably the past two decades.
Kaiser: Have you seen the Tencent television show based on that?
Taisu: I have. I would recommend that too.
Kaiser: Yeah, it’s good.
Taisu: I think that that has an excellent recreation of the first book. It gets a little bit slow in the later episode, but it’s still-
Kaiser: It’s very slow. Yeah.
Taisu: Yeah, but it’s still quite like, it’s deep-
Kaiser: It’s faithful. It’s reasonably faithful. Yeah.
Taisu: Yeah. And it also captures the intellectual weight of the entire thing. It actually gets that kind of intellectual seriousness. Beyond that, for those who only read Chinese, there is a set of books called the 江南三部曲 (jiāngnánsānbùqǔ), so The Lower Yangzi Trilogy. It’s a Chinese novel written by this novelist called Ge Fei. It has three parts.
Kaiser: As a sānbùqǔ should. Yeah.
Taisu: Yeah. 《人面桃花》(rénmiàntáohuā),《山河入梦》(shānhérùmèng),《春尽江南》(chūnjǐnjiāngnán). This is honored with the 2015 Mao Dun Literature Prize, which is the highest prize for Chinese fiction. And it’s about kind of like the history of a family of a group of individuals from pretty much like the late Imperial times all the way up to the early PRC. It has a certain kind of feel that’s similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mm-Hmm. It has that kind of like mysticism attached to it, the constant moving between imaginary and real world, the mystical attitude. In that sense, you could think it’s a little bit like Mo Yan, but I find these books to be better than what Mo Yan has recently written in that they actually have a plot. They have a pretty gripping plot and well-defined characters, and not just the atmosphere and language that Mo Yan manages to create. So, I’d recommend that for anyone who cares about reading, kind of like a set of historical novels about China that particularly captures really well.
Kaiser: So, the 江南三部曲 by Ge Fei. Okay.
Taisu: Yes.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Great recommendations. All right. Let me just throw a couple of mine in really quickly. One is that I am right now reading Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, which is by Mike Chinoy, who is a very well-known correspondent for CNN, now based in Hong Kong. And Jeremy and I will be interviewing him for this show about the book. So, it’s part of the reason I’m reading it. I would read it anyway because it’s fascinating. It’s just put together basically chronological major events that touch on U.S.-China relations and some just on domestic Chinese politics. And it’s just a couple of paragraphs from all the different journalists who reported it. Their reminiscences about reporting that story. And it’s fascinating. It’s really, really interesting to read how it’s remembered and what people’s impressions were as they were on the ground, notebooks in hand, reporting these events.
So I, I recommend it, and it’d be great if you guys get a hold of it and read it before you listen to the interview because I’m sure you’ll get a lot more out of it when you hear. So, that’s my main recommendation. The other is, this is just sort of really off the wall, I bought myself a pound of beeswax not too long ago because I wanted to make some bow wax out of natural materials for bow strings. And I suddenly started, I was like, you know beeswax, it’s this lovely substance, it smells really nice. And I thought there’s all sorts of other uses for it, right? So, I just went down this rabbit hole of making various things for around the house, everything from furniture polish to foot cream and hand lotion out of things that I already had mostly around the house, mineral oil or turpentine or olive oil or avocado oil, or almond oil, just like essential oils and stuff. I’ve got nice soft hands now from all my lotioning from my own homemade beeswax based on-
Taisu: Okay.
Kaiser: Yeah. So, check it out. So, none of your beeswax. All of mine. All right.
Taisu: I actually have a considerable amount of beeswax at home. I’ve never known what to do with it, but…
Kaiser: Well, now you know.
Taisu: Now I know.
Kaiser: You know what do. If you have I some wooden furniture that needs polishing, if you have callused heels, I can set you up.
Taisu: Alright. Sounds awesome.
Kaiser: All right, Taisu. Thank you so much. I mean, once again, let me just remind everybody the papers. The article in Foreign Affairs is Xi’s Law-and-Order Strategy. The CCP’s Quest for a Fresh Source of Legitimacy. And the paper that was written, I actually mentioned two papers. One is one with Yiqin Fu and Yiqing Xu called Does Legality Produce Legitimacy? And the other, which is, of course, the main paper that we discussed during this is called Pandemic State Building: Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era. And you can get that on SSRN if you just look up Taisu Zhang or his co-author, Yutian An. All right, thank you so much.
Taisu: All right, thank you so much, Kaiser. Pleasure-
Kaiser: It’s a real pleasure talking to you.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproject, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
