Iza: The performative state is about how states engage in theatrical performance of good governance for its citizen audience. It’s well known that the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, derives its legitimacy from substantive performance, and especially economic growth over the past few decades. In this book, I’m arguing that when the state is shorthanded on some issues like environmental protection but faces really strong public pressure to do something, it can also use these words, gestures, and symbols of good governance to appease public outrage. Chris: Definitely a lot of symbolic action. I think maybe that we’re sort of still too historically close to everything that’s happened to have a good perspective on all of the different processes. One of the things that I was thinking about when reading your book, and some of the work that I’ve done in the past, and not just in China, but globally, has looked at social movements, protests, more active type of civil society. And obviously COVID is a little bit different of a situation. Around 2010 to 2015 or so, my impression was that there was a lot more activism around governance or if there’s some sort of plant was going to be built in some place that had some chemicals, there was a lot of citizen activism. But it seems that has slowed in recent times. Is that your sense or maybe just the news isn’t getting out? Then there is the second question, do people still remember such things, right? Public attention is really short-lived. If you do it periodically, I don’t know if there is this clear rational learning thing that people are doing. This morning, one of my grad students, Huseyin Zengin, just published this paper on politicians weeping, crying for a public audience, which I consider it’s performative. What he found is that the effect, it does improve your popularity, but the effect lasts for about two months. That was really interesting to research. I thought two months is not too short, and then you don’t cry every day anyways.

And I think, too, I do think that if someone’s going to be promoted to the Politburo, it probably, there’s sort of a leading indicator of future trends. And I think that, because China is really a country that potentially could have some serious negative impacts from climate change issues, that alone I think will hopefully spur attention. So, good. I think the environmental outlook for China actually is relatively a positive trend. Thank you so much, Iza, for joining us on China Corner Office. Why did they have to do that? They had to do that because you can actually get fired if you don’t appear responsive and devoted to the citizens. Occasionally, you do see people getting fired. And then I just saw this recent regulation in Beijing saying that if somebody gets two citizen complaints about them, usually it’s about their attitude, while interacting with the citizens, then your year-end bonus could be significantly cut. You can actually get punished for not being nice to the people. Chris: One of the things that I think was really interesting in your book is that it did have this core initial focus on environmental protection bureaus, but then you expand it and talk about Wuhan and COVID, and Flint, and also Vietnam, I think, as well. Can you say a little bit more about those cases and how they really show how this performative governance can break down a little beyond what you just described?What I’m guessing now, and this is purely just speculation on my part, is that we might see that the Chinese state will preempt the bad moods that will arise during future economic crises through the rhetoric of sustainable development and fighting climate change. Ironically, a slower economy makes it easier for China to achieve its carbon peak and carbon neutrality. And obviously, we can get into this debate about green growth and how likely that could happen. What I’m suggesting is that I think the economy has to be considered when we think about what China is going to do in the future in terms of the environment.

Iza: The beauty of writing a book like this is that if you’re wrong, that’s even better because if we see more substantive governance now, it’s good for the world, it’s good for China, and China has indeed done a lot over the past few years. Everybody’s noticed the improvement of air quality in Beijing since 2017, although I think last year, there was another airpocalypse that happened. And then, China has also been trying to wean itself off coal. And then I think these commitments are definitely not just symbolic. And there’s been a lot of substantive actions. As a social scientist, I’m more comfortable talking about those things in relative terms than in absolute terms, just that I think capacity is relative. We see this clear trajectory from performative governance towards substantive governance in recent years. But am I comfortable with saying everything’s substantive? I think it’s definitely not the case. HOLBIG, Heike, and Bruce GILLEY. 2010. “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China.ˮ Politics & Policy 38(3): 395‑422. One thing that was noted, and also, I mentioned in my book is that in the past, I think there are some really intriguing empirical studies showing that if you are a director of the environmental bureaucracy, it means the end of your career. One of my interviewees from the organization department, which is the CCP’s bureau office, said that being assigned, being promoted to become a director, EPB director, it means the end of somebody’s careers. And then there’s this really interesting paper in the Journal of Contemporary China finding that if you’re a local director of an Environmental Protection Bureau, your likelihood of being promoted to more powerful positions within the Party State is a lot lower than if you were directing the DRC or other more powerful bureaucracies. However, I also want to emphasize that there’s some differences between formalism and performative governance because performative governance is not just about filling out the forms, going through the motions and modeling through, and so on and so forth. It captures the formalist side of performative governance, but it’s not just that. It is also gestures of concern, gestures of submission, gestures of benevolence, and submission to the people. It is about being people’s punching bags. It is about serving people tea, it is about being nice to people, really showing that your sincerity, and then how much you care about them even though you cannot do anything about what they’re upset about. So, there is this more theatrical performative side to performative governance and there’s more this formalistic side of performative governance that is closer to this sociological concept of symbolic implementation, perhaps.One might argue that there’s a variation in time horizon for street-level bureaucrats and higher-level political leaders who actually are what we considered a part of the regime or regime insiders. For the street-level bureaucrats, it doesn’t matter if it works or not. That’s the best they could do. So, you do see sometimes performative governance breaking down, which is the penultimate chapter in my book. And you do see that breaking down, for instance, in Wuhan when whistleblowers released these destructive information about state performance. And another case study I feature is the Flint Water Crisis. And the same thing, for the longest time, there was inaction, but as soon as the whistleblower leaked the news to the news media and then you had the publication of this Virginia Tech report, and then you see performative governance, politicians getting on TV to drink water and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t work, right? Oftentimes, citizens don’t buy it. LIEBERTHAL, Kenneth G. 1992. “Introduction: The ‘Fragmented Authoritarianism’ Model and its Limitations.ˮ In Kenneth G. LIEBERTHAL, and David M. LAMPTON (eds.), Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press. However, it’s not to say that performative governance always works in China, it’s not the case. The second comparison I did was between Wuhan government’s response to the COVID virus and then the Flint Water Crisis. In this case, despite the fact that China and the United States had very different regimes, one is autocracy, the other is a democracy, but performative governance broke down in both cases because of whistleblowers releasing of distracting information to the public. The cookie is set to identify new vs returning users. The cookie is used in conjunction with _omappvs cookie to determine whether a user is new or returning. The model for the performative dimension of state-formation is relatively straightforward; the devil is in the details of interpretation. It is a model with three parts: Emergency, where problems emerge that urgently demand (or appear to), the demonstration of the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory by a would-be state; Acts of state, where in response to the emergency, acts are taken “in the name of the state” to kill, injure, coerce, threaten, or negotiate with named adversaries, and solutions to emergency problems are sought and acted out in public; and public interpretation, where via the media, these acts of state are made widely available for variable interpretation by elites and the populace. These interpretations help secure the principal-agent relationships that make up the state.