Thammasat University students interested in ecology, political science, law, sociology, China studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 12 April Zoom webinar on The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China.

The event, on Wednesday, 12 April 2023 at 7pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Faculty of Law and Centre for Chinese Law, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about environmental issues in China.

The event announcement states:

This book 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. It unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China and demonstrates how China’s environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment.

The speaker will be Assistant Professor Iza Ding, who teaches political science at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the United States of America.

The publisher’s description of Assistant Professor Ding’s book follows:

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.

Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how China’s environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement environmental policies. Instead of achieving “performance legitimacy” by delivering material improvements, the state can shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill and sincere effort.

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..

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=85568

For any questions or further information, please write to

shelbyc@hku.hk

In a podcast last year, Assistant Professor Ding explained:

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. […] The main evidence in this book is from five months of ethnography, participant observation at a municipal environmental protection bureau. And then during these five months, I went to the office every day, I participated in their daily operations, I follow the bureaucrats around, and I climb smokestacks with them, and then sometimes descend into sewage ditches. So, I was observing them.

One review of Assistant Professor Ding’s book noted:

Iza Ding’s The Performative State is essential reading for those wanting to learn more about the less visible reality of the daily challenges faced by street-level environmental bureaucrats in China. It lends flesh and blood to a phrase I encountered repeatedly in China in the mid-2010s when interviewing environmental activists: “Well, there is the law, but then there is the application of the law in dealing with pollution cases.” Ding’s rich and in-depth observations transport readers back to the “airpocalypse” hailstorm and anti-corruption episodes of 2013, when she began her field research in Lakeville, a bustling and developed city on China’s central coast. Given the developed context of Lakeville, Ding anticipated that bureaucratic behaviour would be all the more apt to achieve substantive governance, a “governance that is geared towards delivering the fruits of effective rule that people demand and deserve” (p. 7). In fact, it is recognised that authoritarian regimes like China often rely on performance legitimacy (Gilley 2009; Holbig and Gilley 2010; Zhu 2011). If they cannot meet people’s demands such as economic growth or a healthy environment, the regime could be undermined by popular dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, Ding didn’t find that. What Ding found instead, and this is the book’s central claim, is that high levels of “external scrutiny” by the public, coupled with the bureaucracy’s low logistical and/or political capacity, led bureaucrats not to deploy substantive governance, but to resort to performative governance, a “deployment of visual, verbal, and gestural symbols of good governance for the audience of citizens” (p. 7).

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. […]

Ding particularly addresses the cynicism of the audience and the consequences of “performance disruptions” when the state fails to control information. Through several case studies that go beyond the environmental and Chinese realms (Vietnam, United States), Ding sheds light on the power of whistleblowers to spread destructive information, such as Dr Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of Covid-19.

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.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)