But then, when I got to Lakeville, which was supposed to be my good case, and what I realized gradually is that there was very little substantive environmental governance to speak of. And what I saw was performative governance instead. And what I saw, the first thing is that the bureaucracy actually had very, very little capacity. The capacity is not really obvious because when you see them, they hire extremely qualified bureaucrats. All these bureaucrats, they have masters or PhD degrees in environmental sciences, engineering, and law. And then the bureaucracy also had some super fancy technology. Everybody had this law enforcement iPad they carried around with them, where they could enter data, and the data will be synced with the EPB central database, and so on and so forth.

Extreme levels of pollution in China have led to an increasing outcry from its citizens for clean air and water. How does the environmental bureaucracy respond to this challenge? According to Ding, it depends on the level of state capacity and public scrutiny. In her typology, low state capacity and high public scrutiny produces “performative governance,” or the “the state’s deployment of visual, verbal and gestural symbols of good governance for the audience of citizens.” This form is in comparison to the ideal of “substantive” governance, when the state can respond to the issues at hand, predicted by high capacity and scrutiny. The book explores the dynamics of performative governance by the local environmental bureau in China from the bureaucrat and citizen perspective. So, I have four cases. The first two cases I compare two water crises in China and Vietnam. And then, typically, China and Vietnam are considered as “most similar cases” because they’re both authoritarian regimes getting similar scores from the Freedom House. But then, after these water crises and officials in both countries went swimming into the river, and then their swimming was also captured in the news media. 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. Then in social science terms, they can be either developmental or predatory. And then, indeed, in our literature you see both terms — developmental and predatory — have been used to describe powerful agencies within China, like the National Development Reform Council Commission and the state-owned enterprises. When the east coast militias—christened a “Federal” army—arrived in Pittsburgh, the whiskey rebels melted away before any significant fighting could take place. But the army nonetheless arrested rebel leaders in a widely reported “dreadful night.” A short while after, white male heads of household in western Pennsylvania came out en masse to sign a public oath of allegiance to the republic. This too made the rounds of the early US’ press network, whose practices were an eighteenth-century version of retweeting. Editors clipped stories from other newspapers and reprinted them in their own—what we call plagiarism, they called spreading the news. So, when Anthony Wayne and others described his troops’ victory as a gloriously violent destruction of “savages,” the public that made up the American electorate heard about it, and the new American elite took notice. A consensus that may have saved the new republicAnd then, finally in recent years, the EPB has gradually acquired more capacity, especially since the 2018 Super Ministries reform, and it seems like it started to tend toward more substantive modes of governance. But this is still few and far between and still sporadic, at least based on my recent interviews. And this interesting thing I notice is that when I go to China and talk to folks in the government, and when I talk about the EPA or the EPB nowadays, I’ll say, “It’s a weak bureaucracy, right?” And they say, “Oh no, now it’s a strong bureaucracy.” But they say it with this grin on their face. It’s like somebody talking about their little cousin that’s grown up to be this gangly teenager. Stronger, but it’s still kind of considered as one of the weaker bureaucracies. Since the 20th Party Congress, since the elevation of people like Chén Jíníng 陈吉宁 into the Politburo, there is one more elevation of the environmental bureaucracy, or at least environmental governance on the government’s agenda. In this case, it seems like recently, people have been more optimistic about environmental governance in China in the future, but that’s kind of a basic trajectory of the environmental governance in China. What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Then lastly, when capacity and scrutiny are both high, the state behavior is the most substantive. So, this is what I call substantive governance. In this case, the state has the ability to deliver its promises and public opinion will hold it accountable if it does not. That is my two by two in a nutshell. Iza Ding, The Performative State, Cornell University Press, 2022 Iza: Sure. So, that chapter is about the breaking down of performative governance, and basically, when shall we see, and clearly, it’s something that doesn’t always work. This is something that breaks down very often.

Overall, Ding succeeds perfectly in showing the importance of distinguishing “‘government performance’ and the government’s theatrical representation of its performance” (p. 154). If the rich, exhaustive, and varied theoretical discussions in the opening chapters may discourage some readers, this book makes interesting reading for anyone interested in the history, development, and context of China’s environmental policies over the past two decades. At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to make room for dissenting voices, Ding’s analyses make a significant contribution to ongoing debates about what sustains an authoritarian state in an Anthropocene era. 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 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?And also, enterprises calling the hotline to complain about environmental violations, regulatory violations by this enterprise, this paper plant, and then you realize the caller is another paper plant that’s right next to this paper plant that’s being complained about. So, there’s a lot of those things. Iza: One of the things that I’ve noticed, and I think many have, is that Chen Jining, who’s the former minister of environmental protections, now in the Politburo, I think he was formerly the Minister of Environmental Protection between 2015 and ‘17. These developments are all in light of other initiatives that China has taken recently.

Chris: Yeah, that’ll be really interesting to observe. I hadn’t really thought of that sort of intriguing puzzle that you described. Economically, China has grown at almost 10% between 1978 and 2019. I mean, that’s just unheard of historically. And so, of course, there’s going to probably have a slowdown and justify that post hoc type of way with, “Oh, we want to do this because it’s actually about better livelihood for all of you and better environment,” is really an interest development. And then to see if the population actually buys it is a whole other question, which I think people would prioritize their economic wellbeing over their commitment to a long-term healthy society. But we’ll see what happens. That’ll be interesting to observe. And today, we are joined by Iza Ding, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Iza is a scholar of comparative political development and has published a number of important papers on environmental policy making, implementation, bureaucratic organizations, and more. Our podcast today focuses on her recently published book, The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China. Iza first explains what she means by a performative state with helpful comparisons between performative and substantive governance, and she also provides useful examples of performative governance that she gathered through her on the ground field work in an environmental protection bureau in China. Chris: In political science is it like responsive authoritarianism? Where you know the state attempts to make it seem like it’s being responsive to citizens’ demands. So, I think this is part of it. But I think that many people think that authoritarian governments are all so powerful and they can just control everything. Why are doing these gestures and symbols important for the legitimacy of the regime? And part of that, can you say what some of the actual examples of some of those are that you studied?Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.