Making the world safe for autocracy: Jessica Chen Weiss on what Beijing wants

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jessica Chen Weiss is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and a prolific writer on Chinese nationalism and China's international relations. Kaiser sat down with her recently to hear her ideas on how we should understand what it is that Beijing ultimately wants, on how to right-size the challenges that China poses to the liberal world order, and about the CCP's relationship with its own nationalistic populace.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

10:44: Has China played a role in the global retreat from democracy? Jessica provides some insight: “I think there’s a greater risk of exaggerating China’s role and not recognizing the domestic factors, and other international factors that are leading to democratic backsliding around the world. China has done some things, first, to demonstrate that autocracy can work, sort of leading by example. It’s also made cheap financing available to governments that wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. It has exported some technologies that governments can use to surveil their populations. But I don’t think that it has by and large been the main force driving democratic backsliding and erosion.”

27:56: Jessica describes the tightrope Beijing must walk when navigating an increasingly hawkish Chinese public, referencing an article she wrote in May of this year: “I think surveys can help establish the baseline public opinion the Chinese government faces as it tries to navigate international disputes...the government has a lot of leeway to maneuver vis-à-vis public opinion. Rhetoric can obviously shape public opinion, and it’s important to document that. But, they still face costs for doing so. And the more hawkish the public is, the more the Chinese government has to dial back that appetite for conflict when trying to finesse a particular diplomatic situation in which maybe the online public is calling for war. There’s not a winning scenario there.”

Recommendations:

Jessica: Always Be My Maybe, with Ali Wong and Randall Park, and Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah.

Kaiser: The award-winning TV series, Breaking Bad.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the cynical podcast.
0:10.8	The discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina.
0:14.5	SubChina is simply the best way there is to keep on top of all the important news coming out of China.
0:18.9	Our indispensable daily newsletter features a roundup with news from hundreds of sources,
0:22.9	plus links to our own original pieces on the website.
0:26.6	So signing up for Sub-China Access, yet all of that, way more.
0:29.9	Stories on everything from the Belt and Road to Local Entrepreneurship and Innovation in China,
0:33.9	from the travails of ethnically Chinese researchers in the U.S. in this age of creeping
0:37.9	McCarthyism to China's ongoing extra-legal internment of hundreds of thousands or by some estimates
0:43.2	well over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China's Xinjiang region. We are sure you'll agree
0:48.2	that it's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world.
0:53.8	I'm Kaiser Guo. I'm coming
0:55.0	here today from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, not too far from where I spent the first
0:59.4	12 years of my life, just about an hour south of here. Unfortunately, Jeremy, the pulker-tudinous
1:05.3	policy pundit that we know as Jeremy Pretty Boy Goldcorn, he unfortunately had a scheduling snafu and he was supposed
1:12.4	to be in New York today, but had to fly out a little bit earlier. So he says hi. One of the most
1:19.0	important things to get right these days, and I think this is true for many countries around the
1:23.3	world trying to come to grips with China's rise and trying to formulate a sensible policy toward
1:28.0	that nation. The thing that's important to get right is what is Beijing actually after? What is it
1:34.9	that Beijing wants? What are its national capabilities? What will its capabilities allow it to
1:40.8	do? We want to overstate neither China's ability to be a disruptive actor nor its
1:46.5	intention to disrupt. And at the same time, we don't want to understate these things either.
	...

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