Yuen Yuen Ang on Xi Jinping, the Party bureaucracy, and authoritarian resilience

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

🗓️ 8 September 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy titled "How Resilient is the CCP?" The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule.

3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field

8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and contextualizing it to China

13:39 – Explaining Xi’s bureaucratic objectives: maintaining competence but limiting autonomy

18:57 – Remaining areas of autonomy for China’s state bureaucracy

22:11 – Key areas where Xi weakened bureaucracy

26:08 – Institutionalization prior to the Xi era

29:00 – Main sources of resilience and threat under Xi’s new model for authoritarianism

31:45 – Fundamental difference between Mao and Xi

34:52 – The revival of state bureaucracy and technocrats after Mao’s death

40:13 – How do we understand the tension between expertise and ideology in Xi’s governance agenda?

46:15 – Historical roots of technocracy in the Chinese government

49:09 – The CCP’s technocratic bureaucracy as an integral source of resilience

A complete transcript of this podcast is available on TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Yuen Yuen: Chinese drama series Zǒuxiàng gònghé 走向共和 (Towards the Republic); and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Kaiser: Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — a historical fantasy novel trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with the China Project.
0:15.6	Subscribe to access from the China Project to get, well, access, access to not only our great daily newsletter,
0:22.3	but all the original writing on our website at theChinaproject.com.
0:26.8	We've got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, and trackers,
0:31.4	regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts.
0:35.7	We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs,
0:40.4	from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region,
0:45.2	to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing.
0:52.4	It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news
0:55.2	about a nation that is reshaping the world.
0:58.3	We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
1:01.5	I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1:06.0	This week on Cineka, I am delighted to welcome back to the show,
1:08.9	Yuan Yuan Yuan-Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
1:13.7	Yuan Yuan Yuan is the inaugural recipient of the Theta Scotch Pole Prize for Emerging Scholars, which is awarded by the American Political Science Association for impactful, empirical, theoretical, and or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.
1:28.7	She is the author of How China Escape the Poverty Trap and China's Guilded Age, a book that we
1:34.0	talked about the last time she was on the show and about which she was interviewed on the
1:38.1	fantastic Freakonomics podcast to boot. She has an essay out recently in the Journal of Democracy
1:43.9	called How Resilient is the CCP?
1:47.4	And it's that essay among other things that we will be talking about today. Yuan Yuan, welcome back
1:51.4	to Seneca. Great to see it. It is great to be back. Thank you so much for having me, Kaiser.
1:57.4	My pleasure, entirely my pleasure. Yuan Yuan, your essay for the Journal of Democracy
	...

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