But the story obviously is not simple when you’re managing so many different priorities that potentially come into tension. When your job is generalist as opposed to being working for the environmental protection bureaucracy, then you have to balance so many competing priorities. This is something that the people I know used to work for the EPB, and now work for other bureaucracies, have told me is that your personal passion over the environment, sometimes your power can come into tension. 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. Iza: I’ve got an answer that’s kind of two parts. The first part is from the perspective of the state or these street-level state agents, it’s less of a concern how long lasting the effect is or even whether it works, because from their perspective, they’re dealing with day-to-day crises, and they’re trying to prevent crises from getting bigger. And then they’re trying to protect their own rice bowl, no longer iron rice bowl, trying to keep their jobs and keep their bonuses. So, doing performative governance is really not some kind of Machiavellian master plan to improve regime support in three months, six months, a year, right? Those are the questions that we political scientists think about, but those are not the questions that the actual street-level bureaucrats think about. MERTHA, Andrew. 2009. “‘Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0’: Political Pluralization in the Chinese Policy Process.ˮ China Quarterly 200: 995‑1012. While all chapters have their qualities, I was especially intrigued by Ding’s rich and detailed ethnographic analysis in Chapter Three, as one delves into the day-to-day struggles and endeavours of Max, the nearly forty-year-old Chinese bureaucrat who works at the Lakeville environmental protection bureau (EPB). Based on a five-month ethnographic case study at Lakeville’s EPB, the reader is brought into the less visible reality of their organisational life. A series of detailed examples, from night-time inspections, to the long overtime hours and pressures bureaucrats face to respond to the deluge of citizen grievances, to the attention they give to the way they dress and what they eat in public for fear of being exposed on social media and accused of corruption, allow the reader to truly grasp the intricacies and complexities that bureaucrats must face. Ding focuses on “the little things,” on attitudes, gestures, or intentions (p. 76). In performing performative governance, Max and his colleagues must appear responsive to public opinion, demonstrate the benevolence of the state’s intentions, and make these efforts publicly visible .

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. The book illuminates the theatrical side of environmental governance in everyday Chinese politics. The author bases her definition of performativity on Merriam-Webster’s definition of performative as a means of image cultivation or the conveying of positive impressions, but also on Judith Butler’s understanding of performativity as language, gesture, and all sorts of symbolic social signs (p. 8). On a theoretical level, Ding develops a subtle exploration of the intricacies between Goffman’s and Butler’s understanding of performativity to arrive at a nuanced but clear definition of performative governance, which she uses throughout the book to examine how state behaviour is and is not performative. Ding’s deep insight into the everyday life of bureaucrats helps to analyse a certain type of performativity, namely as a symbolic achievement of good governance, which she defines as a broad national and societal consensus on how a given government should behave, and, ultimately on its sources, characteristics, alternatives, and consequences. If much of the book focuses on theories of performativity in the Chinese context, it also offers new opportunities to reflect on the longevity of “performance legitimacy” despite ineffective policies and all the challenges to state capacity that have been extensively explored in the “fragmented authoritarian” literature (Lieberthal 1992; Mertha 2009) . 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. Finally, fourth, attention to performative power would require us to reimagine existing behemoths like the American government as fragmented, overlapping audiences for public action by politicians inside and outside the state. What plays—that is, what makes for a convincing and compelling performance—in Congress may not play in the halls of the Department of Defense, and vice versa. That is to say that, whether through newspaper reprinting in 1794 or retweeting in 2019, political theater’s effectiveness in a complex society with a multi-part state depends upon the outcome of conflicts of interpretation. Once we understand this, we can start to examine how the trajectory of the American government in the post-Obama era depends, to some degree, on the variable reception of how it performs its power. So then, what did they do? They did performative governance. So, they would be extremely nice to citizens who come to the office to complain. They would serve them tea; they would play therapists to citizens on the phone. And then some of my favorite stories were from just bureaucrats answering calls, these petition hotlines, and then they would be talking to the people on these petition hotlines.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.

This article is based on the paper, “ Performative State-formation in the Early American Republic ” in the American Sociological Review. All states—states in formation, and states that are engaged in the routine maintenance of their power—have a performative dimension to what they do. However, the early American republic is probably an extreme case, in which the life or death of the state project depended very much upon emergency responses and their public interpretation. Times have changed, and the argument about the 1790s is not seamlessly generalizable to today. Nonetheless, particularly because the present moment in American politics is frequently described as a “crisis,” some key implications can be drawn from my model of performative power in the 1790s, to help us think more carefully about the present state of American politics. Maintaining state power through performance Chris: That’s really surprising, what a tough position all those bureaucrats are in. I never would’ve guessed that. It maps really nicely to the two by two that you have in your development of this performative state discussion and theory. One dimension is capacity. So, you described how this is a situation of low capacity, but also this idea that people can get their bonus reduced or fired, so the bar on scrutiny is very, very high. And I know that’s the cell where low capacity, high scrutiny is where performative governance is dominant. Can you say a little bit more about this two by two you developed and how it helps us understand governance, both performative and substantive more generally? 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.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. And then, oftentimes, the conversations, it turned out, had nothing to do with the environment and somebody caught in and complained about air pollution from his neighbor’s cooking. And then you listen to them, you realize there’s some ancient hatred between this person and the neighbor. So, I think this shows, not only has the public paid less attention to pollution in recent years, and also, I think there’s no doubt that air quality, at least in Beijing, has improved since 2017. And I think I haven’t seen the latest data because we also know that in the past two years, some of those coal plants that the government stopped building, they restarted construction for these coal plants. We don’t know what’s happening right now, but I think part of that perhaps also comes from improving air quality. But I think a lot of that also is related to public attention shifting toward things like U.S.-China relations or rivalry with the United States, and also economic problems. So, the economic downturn problems with employment for graduates, and I think those are the bigger issues people are paying attention to, and obviously COVID.

So, I argue that when both are low, state behavior is inert. So, the state, in this case, is incapable of delivering its promises and solving the problem in question, but it’s under no public pressure to do so. And then, when capacity is high and scrutiny is low, state behavior is what I call paternalistic. In this case, the state is like the parent of a small child with lots of power over there unscrutinizing offspring. And then just like a parent, the paternalistic state can use their power to do either good or bad things. 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?

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Iza: So, the two by two has two dimensions. The first dimension is state capacity and the second dimension is scrutiny. In this very case, I’m looking at public scrutiny, because in the literature on bureaucracy, we typically focus on scrutiny from principals to their agents, so the classic principal agent problem. 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. 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. 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. GILLEY, Bruce. 2009. The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chris: I’m curious as well, thinking more about the current day, and we started talking about this a bit before, right now as we’re recording this, still the COP27 in Egypt is going on. Central government of China has made a number of important commitments to the general global climate change efforts of, I think, peak carbon by 2030, and then carbon neutrality by 2060. Curious to hear what your assessment is of the current state of environmental governance in China, both related to the international community, and then also coming out of the 20th Party Congress, where in Xi Jinping’s speech, environment was mentioned a number of times. 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. Iza: That is definitely my sense that around about the trade war, and I think my observation is that Chinese citizens, just like the voters in democracies, that they’re also a single issue, not voters, but single issue people, right? Like we’re all single issue people, maybe like two or three, but not more than that. I think the attention of public opinion really changes. Obviously, when Chái Jìng’s 柴静 documentary, Under the Dome, was first released, it was viewed so many times, and everybody was supporting it on social media. But if you think about how people talk about this today, many people believe it’s some kind of American conspiracy because it received funding from American foundations, and it’s a documentary to sabotage China’s economic growth. And then Chai Jing is also perceived as not a good figure. And then some might even call her a traitor. 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? The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.

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What I want to emphasize here is that a reduction of emission does not only come from intentional government efforts. Many factors come into here. On the intentional effort side, you have the development of renewable energy, the deployment of renewables, which is just being very significant, and I think very impressive what China has done. And I think those are the areas that we can be very happy about and optimistic about. And then there are other factors that are not directly related to government efforts. For instance, natural gas has become cheaper for China due to the Russian-Ukraine conflict. So, then burning gas instead of coal can be one temporary source of emission reduction. And Europe instead has become more coal-friendly recently. 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.