Sinica Podcast - Yuen Yuen Ang on Xi Jinping, the Party bureaucracy, and authoritarian resilience

Yuen Yuen Ang on Xi Jinping, the Party bureaucracy, and authoritarian resilience

09/08/22 • 73 min

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy titled "How Resilient is the CCP?" The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule.

3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field

8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and contextualizing it to China

13:39 – Explaining Xi’s bureaucratic objectives: maintaining competence but limiting autonomy

18:57 – Remaining areas of autonomy for China’s state bureaucracy

22:11 – Key areas where Xi weakened bureaucracy

26:08 – Institutionalization prior to the Xi era

29:00 – Main sources of resilience and threat under Xi’s new model for authoritarianism

31:45 – Fundamental difference between Mao and Xi

34:52 – The revival of state bureaucracy and technocrats after Mao’s death

40:13 – How do we understand the tension between expertise and ideology in Xi’s governance agenda?

46:15 – Historical roots of technocracy in the Chinese government

49:09 – The CCP’s technocratic bureaucracy as an integral source of resilience

A complete transcript of this podcast is available on TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Yuen Yuen: Chinese drama series Zǒuxiàng gònghé 走向共和 (Towards the Republic); and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Kaiser: Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — a historical fantasy novel trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field

8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and contextualizing it to China

13:39 – Explaining Xi’s bureaucratic objectives: maintaining competence but limiting autonomy

18:57 – Remaining areas of autonomy for China’s state bureaucracy

22:11 – Key areas where Xi weakened bureaucracy

26:08 – Institutionalization prior to the Xi era

29:00 – Main sources of resilience and threat under Xi’s new model for authoritarianism

31:45 – Fundamental difference between Mao and Xi

34:52 – The revival of state bureaucracy and technocrats after Mao’s death

40:13 – How do we understand the tension between expertise and ideology in Xi’s governance agenda?

46:15 – Historical roots of technocracy in the Chinese government

49:09 – The CCP’s technocratic bureaucracy as an integral source of resilience

A complete transcript of this podcast is available on TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Yuen Yuen: Chinese drama series Zǒuxiàng gònghé 走向共和 (Towards the Republic); and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Kaiser: Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — a historical fantasy novel trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Previous Episode

Avoiding the China Trap, with Jessica Chen Weiss

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back the Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss, who is back in Ithaca after a year spent as a CFR International Affairs Fellow working in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. She talks about an important essay published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, titled "The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” which calls on the U.S. to formulate an affirmative vision for the relationship with China instead of pursuing an ad-hoc policy predicated simply on countering what China does.

7:17 – Moving away from the current zero-sum framing of U.S.-China competition and adopting an “affirmative vision”

12:29 – Shortcomings of the U.S. response to China’s strategy in the developing world

15:11 – How competition with China framing has adverse consequences for domestic American politics

18:37 – Can the U.S. benefit from adopting certain aspects of the Chinese approach?

20:49 – The steps needed to return to normalized U.S.-China diplomacy

25:00 – How can the US properly calibrate its China threat assessment?

34:05 – The relationship between China’s domestic challenges and its foreign policy

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jessica: Stephen Walt and Dani Rodrik’s essay on a establishing a new global order in Foreign Affairs [forthcoming]; and After Engagement: Dilemmas in U.S.-China Security Relations by Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein

Kaiser: The Lord of the Rings trilogy audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Next Episode

Surveillance State: Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin on their new book on China's tech-enhanced social controls

This week on Sinica, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's help, to many countries of the developing world. But it also examines the role that U.S. tech companies played in giving rise to it.

6:05 – The story of Tahir Hamut: a Uyghur poet living under Xinjiang’s surveillance state

12:50 – Will the Xinjiang model for surveillance be expanded to other parts of China?

16:37 – Is China actively pushing other countries to adopt its surveillance state practices?

23:26 – The case of Hangzhou: the benefits of the “smart city” model

27:17 – Is there a fundamental difference between the concept of “privacy” in China and the West?

30:55 – How Xu Bing’s film uses surveillance footage

35:39 – What accounts for Chinese society’s changing views on privacy?

40:12 – China’s tendency to apply an “engineering” mindset to fixing social problems

47:57 – Assessing US companies’ role in enabling Chinese surveillance

52:27 – Devising a policy that effectively bans hardware used for Xinjiang surveillance

1:01:03 – China’s new laws on digital data protection

1:05:05 – What the social credit system’s popular narrative gets wrong

1:10:40 – An example of Chinese propaganda fabricating the surveillance system’s success

1:14:29 – The future of privacy protection in China and the West

A full transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Liza: The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy

Josh: The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun (translated by Darren Byler), a short novel about life for Uyghurs in modern China; The Wok: Recipes and Techniques: by Kenji Lopez

Kaiser: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It by Will Bunch

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.