Political Scientist Iza Ding on Authoritarianism, Legitimacy, and "Resilience"
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2024
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Iza Ding, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, joins to share her ideas on how American academia has framed and problematized authoritarianism, especially when it comes to China. A deep and subtle thinker, she offers thought-provoking critiques of some of the assumptions that have become nearly axiomatic in political science and other social sciences in their approach to understanding politics in China.
3:13 – Iza Ding’s concept of “authoritarian teleology”
15:31 – The concept of authoritarian resilience
19:58 – The question of regime legitimacy
24:09 – The question of whether authoritarianism is an ideology
26:24 – The China model?
30:58 – Finding a balance between generalizability and the sui generis, and striving toward cognitive empathy and “Verstehen”
42:04 – The state of area studies and avoiding essentialism
49:32 – Iza Ding’s advice on how to become a better writer
Recommendations:
Iza: The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner — the story of Alison, the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
Kaiser: the guitarist Kent Nishimura, especially his recordings of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police, and “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. |
| 0:13.7 | In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends |
| 0:19.6 | that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's |
| 0:21.8 | happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for |
| 0:27.8 | in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about |
| 0:34.6 | China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from Chicago, Illinois. |
| 0:39.6 | Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin |
| 0:44.0 | Madison, a National Resource Center for the study of East Asia. The Cynica podcast will remain free, |
| 0:51.3 | but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the |
| 0:54.1 | podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at Cinecapod at gmail.com. |
| 1:02.1 | And listeners, please support my work on Substack at Cinnica.substack.com. There you will find, |
| 1:08.6 | in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, |
| 1:12.6 | a weekly essay from me, and now a wide range of offerings, James Carter's This Week in China's |
| 1:17.9 | history, Paul French's Ultimate China Bookshelf, Andrew Methamins Chinese phrase of the week, |
| 1:23.8 | the You Can Learn Chinese podcast from Jared Turner and John Pasden, and the outstanding |
| 1:29.3 | China Global South podcast, as well as weekly essays from our friends at the China Global South |
| 1:35.9 | Project. As I say each week in the intro, I am interested in how we think and talk about |
| 1:42.6 | China. Every once in a while, I encounter someone |
| 1:45.2 | with the same interest in examining our discourse on China, |
| 1:49.0 | whether academic, you know, within the social sciences and history, say, |
| 1:52.9 | or more broadly in media, in civil society, |
| 1:56.5 | or just out there in the social media platforms |
... |
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