 Good afternoon and welcome to the second UNU wider research webinar on how COVID is changing development. My name is Rachel Gisselquist. I'm a senior research fellow here at UNU wider and I'm very pleased to chair this session this afternoon here in Helsinki. I can see that there are a number of you online and I think that some of you are new to UNU wider so just a little bit about about us. We are the United Nations University, a world institute for development economics research and we've been here in Helsinki for over 40 years 30 years now. We are the first research center of the United Nations University which is the academic arm of the UN system and we work on issues of international development, issues affecting the living conditions of the world's poorest people. I am very pleased today to welcome Dr. Yuan Yuan Yang. She is a political scientist, an expert on China and emerging economies and she is currently associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Among a number of honors she was awarded in 2018 in Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. As an expert on China she studies both China's political economy and its rising global role. She is the author of two books. Her first book is the award-winning book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap and her second book which was published just this last month I think from Cambridge University Press is entitled China's Gilded Age, The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. In addition to conducting field work in China of course she has also done field research in Cambodia, India, Malaysia and Nigeria. So the topics that Dr. Yang studies inclusive growth, poverty reduction and state capability in particular are close to our hearts here at wider and figure quite prominently in our current work program including some of my own projects. So in our current work on state capability we focus broadly in two areas. The first is state effectiveness and institutional strengthening including how more effective, capable, legitimate, authoritative states develop. And the second broad area of focus is how states and democratic governments function including the pervasiveness and experience of clientelistic politics in the global south and the broader systemic consequences of clientelism for democracy and development. And as we think here about the impact of the current pandemic we at UNU Wider have been thinking quite a lot about the relationship between COVID-19 and the state and we were then delighted to see Dr. Yang's recent article in Nature Human Behavior entitled When COVID-19 Meet Centralized Personalized Power and this is the topic of her presentation today. In a moment I will turn the microphone over to her but first just a brief note before we start on how the seminar will work today. So I think all of your microphones as you should be able to tell have been muted. However we will take questions at the end and there will be a nice amount of time for discussion today so please I would encourage you to send some questions through the the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. If time permits I will let a couple of you ask your questions directly otherwise I will read some of these questions for Dr. Yang to address. So without further ado let me turn over to our speaker please. Thank you Rachel, thank you very much for your kind introduction and to UN Wider for having me in your timely series. In the last webinar by Andy Sumner he talked about the effects of COVID-19 on poverty reduction from an economic perspective and today my role as a political scientist I hope to share with you some light on the role of politics in shaping the Chinese government's response to the to the pandemic. So the question of whether China has failed or succeeded in handling the COVID-19 pandemic is a hotly debated topic and before I share my view we'll love to hear yours. So please take a few seconds to participate in a poll that Ruby will be posting now and your response will be anonymous and collected shortly. Terrific and then as we are working on this poll let me move on to a second question right this is the first poll. Now underlying the earlier question is a second question which is a bigger and broader question that should interest anyone who studies the political economy of development. Are democracies all autocracies better at handling pandemics? And again we'll love to hear your responses in a second poll. Do you think it's A democracies, B autocracies or C neither? So while we are waiting to collect your responses and we'll talk about them shortly let me review the state of polarized discourse as I'm sure you know views on China's response to the pandemic are deeply divided. On one end of the spectrum you have the state media in China which claims that China has done right, succeeded under strong leadership and scored a total victory. Then on the other side of the spectrum the US under the Trump administration is determined to blame China for the pandemic or not mentioning any of its own failures. This blaming is fast-gaining currency and influence in American society and some have even demanded that China compensate the world for its purported failures. So this is the deeply divided context in which we are having today's discussion. With that in mind now let's look at the poll results which I am very excited to see. Let me okay let me read out the results for viewers on video. The first poll is has China failed or succeeded in handling the COVID-19 pandemic? 12 percent said failed, 31 percent said succeeded and 57 percent said both. Rachel this is surprise you is it was it what you had expect you might have expected from this audience? Well yeah I suppose with the group of academics we might expect a lot of academics to come out in the middle. So that one wasn't surprising I thought the second poll was maybe a bit more surprising. What do you think? Since you mentioned the second poll which let's look at the second poll. So the second poll is are democracies or autocracies better at handling pandemics? The votes are close 28 percent say democracies 24 percent say autocracies and 48 percent neither. I think that I think on the whole it seems that about half of our audiences in the middle and I wish that this is a representative sample of global public opinion I wish. It will be really interesting to compare the opinion of this group with the general population but I but I did find the close tie between democracy and autocracy very interesting they have about the same number of votes. So with that having seen your opinion on this question now let me share my take on this question so we are going to move on from the poll. My take on this question which I think half of you already agreed already agree with me so I'm preaching to the converted it's both. Although both is a very simple answer it is often missing and existing discourses and that's because we are in the midst of a US-China Cold War. The term Cold War is an imperfect analogy for the situation we are facing because after all China is not a close Soviet regime rather it is tightly integrated into the global economy but only using the term Cold War as a shorthand for rising US-China competition across all arenas except military conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the arenas of competition and it is against this backdrop that global public opinion is becoming deeply polarized and politicized and we are all affected by this reality. In this environment it is all the more important that we in the international development community maintain a commitment to balance and facts. The truth always has both sides it's rarely only one or the other and whether we are a speaker or a listener I believe we each have a role to play in resisting polarization. So my presentation today will be based on this article in Nature titled when COVID-19 needs centralized personalized power it is available open access on the journal's website. The objective of this article is very simple it is to tell both sides of the story to explain in what way China failed but also in what way it succeeded in responding to the outbreak and how this mixed response stands from its political system. The material that I draw upon are all facts that are already presented in the existing literature or in public domain there is no exclusive scoop but we do not need scoop we just need someone to put two sides of the story together. So let me begin by previewing my argument. China's strong authoritarian regime has both strengths and weaknesses in dealing with an outbreak and normally we hear only one or the other so we need to keep both in mind in terms of its strength a strong authoritarian regime excels at mass mobilization and carrying out a determined national response once a decision is made at the top. Conversely its weaknesses lie in the lack of transparency a weak civil society to monitor problems and on top of that another problem I would highlight is that outcomes in the nation become entirely hinged upon the top leader's personality and decision. Under President Xi Jinping who practices a centralized and personalized style of governance compared to his predecessors both of these strengths and weaknesses become amplified and in the rest of my presentation let me unpack these arguments in four parts. Many people think of China as a monolith they think of China the whole political system as one opaque block they also think of its political system as static and unchanging over time because the PROC has always been a single party dictatorship but this is incorrect the first thing that you must know is that there isn't just one China but at least three different China's since 1949 China under Mao China under Deng and China under Xi are three very different China's. Under Mao China was a personalist dictatorship power was concentrated entirely in Mao's hands anyone who challenged his power was eventually tortured or killed he built a personality cult creating for himself a godlike status then entered Deng Xiaoping who took over the reins of power after Mao died in 1976 Deng launched a second revolution China's market reform he dissolved Mao's personality cult and established a party-based dictatorship operating on the norms of collective leadership decentralization and pragmatism these norms which I call democratic characteristics which is not the same as democracy as a regime type forms the political foundation of China's economic rise it was not a topacy that made China great again then you have Xi who took over as the party's and nation's top leader in 2012 his administration marks a sharp break from Deng era's traditions as is well documented by many China scholars upon taking office Xi's sideline of the top leaders crowned himself as the core leader enshrined Xi Jinping thought into the constitution and abolish term limits within two years his consolidation of power was so complete that professor Graham Allison at Harvard described him as the chairman of everything as the chairman of everything Xi's regime tightened political control in the decade before Xi China actually saw an encouraging expansion of political freedoms including mark raking journalism transparency and public deliberation initiatives but starting in 2012 Xi clamped down on these liberalizing reforms and this has impacted the ability of Chinese civil society to detect and sound the alarm on problems in addition China's vast bureaucratic apparatus also experienced tighter controls in 2012 Xi launched the most aggressive crackdown on corruption in his party's history rather than rely on transparency and disclosure of assets he employed the strong arm of the state apparatus sending out an army of disciplinary inspectors to investigate and arrest those who are corrupt this campaign has disciplined more than 1.5 million officials to date now to his credit president Xi took on a brewing crisis of corruption that other leaders have swept under the rug this is a very difficult job that he's doing the problem however is that his campaign has extended beyond police and graph to ensuring correct political thinking and conformity to Xi's orders under this climate Chinese officials became afraid to take initiative or risk this soon crystallized into an institutional problem of bureaucratic paralysis and inaction also known in Chinese as lazy governance so in this comic you see this official who has his head down on the desk refusing to look up and the words in the bubble says I would rather do nothing or to do less this problem of lazy governance grew serious enough that the state council warned against it by publicly shaming offenders for their election duty delaying decisions and leaving funds unused so now with this backdrop in mind about the basics of Chinese politics we can better appreciate the turn of events within the Chinese government leading up to a pandemic part three the price of absolute power now to be sure governmental inaction denial and deception in the face of novel viruses is a persistent feature of Chinese governance these problems earlier manifested during SARS outbreak in 2003 but I would like to point out that there are some striking differences in the political and bureaucratic dynamics between the two crises during SARS delays and inaction resulted from a fragmented bureaucracy and an oligarchic political structure as public health expert Wang Yanzhong tells us it took five months and multiple lines of reporting before the crisis seized the attention of the Politburo Standing Committee which is China's highest ruling body by contrast during covid the timeline of communication appears more compressed and news went straight to the top the first case of covid was detected in Wuhan on December 21st by January 7th presidency new of the outbreak we know this as a fact because he self reported his actions in the party magazine Qiu Shi his actions from January 7th to January 22nd the day before Wuhan's lockdown now most observers may think that it's it's no big deal for a precedent to account for his actions this is routinely done in democracies but in China's context this self report by Xi is a rare disclosure to quote the South China Morning Post Chinese leaders from Mao have never had to explain their actions in a detailed timeline such a rare disclosure is likely to have been made under heavy domestic and international pressure this report indicates that on January 22nd Xi gave the green light to the party he told the Politburo I explicitly ordered Hubei province to stop the flow of people outward adhering to the president's order Wuhan announced a lockdown the next day on January 23rd and that was when the world officially knew that China's outbreak was severe the concentration of power under Xi meant that the paramount leader played the role of a giant on off switch in the political system without authorization from the very top local authorities did not dare to talk about or publicize the outbreak we know this from an interesting incident involving Wuhan's mayor Zhou Xianwang who gave a live interview on CCTV in which he said as the head of a local government I can only release information after I'm authorized in fact Zhou implied that it was the high arts who did not authorize informing the public before the lockdown on January 23rd that this interview was live streamed meant that his words could not be erased why it is not uncommon for the Chinese central government to blame local authorities for delays and cover-ups this is probably the first time that the local official passed the buck to the top on live television between January 7 and 23rd some five million residents had already traveled from Wuhan to other parts of China and the world by this time the virus had gone global but as soon as President Xi gave a clear edict to act on January 22nd no effort was spared within China to contain the outbreak the entire bureaucracy suddenly jolted into action erecting new hospitals within days and keeping hundreds of millions of people penned indoors making this the largest quarantine in human history fortunately this determined response quickly brought down infection rates in China which reported no new cases for the first time since the outbreak on March 19 China's success in crushing the curve stood in marked contrast to the United States which has already passed the tragic threshold of 100,000 deaths and it is still rising and finally we conclude in conclusion China has both failed and succeeded at handling the COVID-19 pandemic it's not one or the other it failed to stamp the outbreak before it went global Mr. Blowers was silent local officials did not dare to speak there were no incentives to tell the truth the whole nation awaited the top leader's edict but once an edict was announced China very effectively curbed infections within the country meanwhile some governments are keen to blame China entirely for the pandemic but for rational viewers out there we all know that this is to deflect attention from their own failures in the case of the US the failures of the Trump administration are abundantly reported in the press and obvious to all but the most blinkered partisans as the Washington Post writes Trump can't blame China for his own failures China did a lot of wrong but it's not China's fault that Trump didn't listen to the warnings of the US intelligence community starting in early January and then on this question about the effects of regime types on the efficacy in handling the pandemics this is a false debate it is a misguided debate the market contrast in outcomes between China and the US has led many to believe that democracies fail at controlling outbreaks while autocracies under strong leadership succeed this is over simplistic and misleading in fact both democracies and autocracies have distinct strengths and weaknesses at handling pandemics yes strong authoritarian regimes excel at mass mobilization but to prevent epidemics from arising in the first place the government requires democratic characteristics a climate that empowers not only civil society but also local officials to speak candidly about problems without fear of reprisals a government no matter how strong cannot detect and preempt problems all the time conversely having a democracy is by itself no guarantee of efficacy it must also be combined with other qualities sound leadership respect for science bureaucratic autonomy state capacity healthcare coverage and social safety nets things that we have been advocating for the developing world for decades that are now lacking in parts of the first world the tragic situation in the u.s. today does not mean that all democracies are discredited rather it means that the american democracy needs to be fixed finally i'd like to end by reflecting on the theme of the series how is covid-19 changing development first the pandemic has intensified u.s. china bribery which means that everything will become politicized and everyone is expected to choose sides this will impact international agencies profoundly as we have seen in the case of the who second in this context we need balance and facts more than ever and in third i believe development professionals must be informed about chinese domestic politics and u.s. china relations but in my work i move between the international development and u.s. china audiences and in my experiences the two groups do not interact they exist on different planes they have different priorities and they speak different languages in international development we operate on the assumption that development should be above politics we should focus on economic and technical tasks but as the end but as the pandemic has shown us we cannot wish politics away even public health management which is as technical as it can get has become deeply politicized we also learn from the pandemic that what happens in china doesn't stay in china it has global consequences today the development community knows a great deal about how democracies work we all know how elections function but by contrast much much less is known about how chinese politics work at the most basic level how are leaders selected how are policies made and implemented how do central local relations work and how do domestic politics affect china's global policies and vice versa the post-pandemic world will be a world divided between two superpowers china and the u.s. this is something that we have never experienced before in the past century thus for the development community to adapt to this new world it must take chinese domestic politics and u.s. china relations seriously and invest in learning about these issues well i hope that today's presentation has begun this journey of learning about these issues and it's a real privilege to share some of my thoughts with you i look forward to your questions and comments during the q&a thank you very much thank you um to and this is a really terrific and and thought-provoking presentation and i know i'm sure that you've sparked a number of questions and thoughts from our audience and just a reminder to them that they should be sure to enter their questions into the q&a box here at the bottom of their zoom screen but before i turn to questions from the audience i wanted to pose uh one question of my own or actually a two-part question um to kick off the discussion so i think that you make a really convincing argument that the right question to be asking is not whether autocracies or democracies are better at fighting epidemics um and the big question isn't about regime type but it's about other qualities of the state and governance um so i'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the other qualities uh so for instance if we think that you know one way to think about the state or state society relations is in terms of three different dimensions of the state so authority to control violence capacity to provide services such as sanitation schooling healthcare and state legitimacy in terms of enforcing rules vis-a-vis society right so within this approach you know of course there are a number of different approaches but just within this simple framework the question then of whether autocracies or democracies are better at fighting epidemics as i understand it relates to state legitimacy um and if we think about legitimacy then is one dimension of the state uh that might affect its ability to respond to the pandemic i wonder how do we think about legitimacy in situations when leaders are not not elected so in autocracies and specifically how does this work in china in terms of the the covid policy response and the second part of my question what then about the relative importance of other dimensions so state capacity which you've touched on a bit in the presentation and state authority i'm sorry could you repeat the last question again so then the second part of the question is about the relative importance of other dimensions so for instance state capacity um and state authority great well thank you rachel for kicking off with a big question and one can write several books to answer you these are truly big questions and i know that you and wider and you yourself have been working uh intensively on on thinking about these questions i'll share a few reactions just off the top of my head um i think the first comment um to make is that i think for a long time we have conflated democracy with effective governance right that's sort of like implicit in the background when we think about what is an effective government we immediately think it has to be a democracy and we sort of conflated these these two things and and so i think it's important conceptually and also in terms of policy making to realize that the regime type whether you are democracy or not a democracy and the effectiveness of the state are actually two separate things you can have a democracy that is effective and not effective conversely you can have no democracy that's effective and not effective so i think it's important to make that distinction and then i think you raised a very important and big point about state capacity right and and i think what we have seen in um in the experience of many countries including even in the united states is that you do have a democracy but it lacks the state capacity to prepare test kits right to um to prepare a pandemic response team um to execute the policies that were already made and so forth so we can see obviously that state capacity and the capability of implementing policies is a very important dimension of efficacy but i think i would like to take the opportunity to highlight a different kind of capacity related to what i think is distinct from state capacity and i would call that adaptive capacity and that is an element of governance that has been very central in my work and i've been thinking for many years about what exactly is adaptive capacity and how is it different from state capacity the way i think about it is that state capacity is focused on implementation with the assumption that good policy is already made right well i think when we think about adaptive capacity it is as it is it is um especially important in contexts like COVID-19 where the environment is uncertain there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of chaos and so in it so in addition to implementing you actually need a different set of qualities to help you cope with that uncertainty and what are some of these qualities i think i'll highlight a few examples um i think the first is the ability to anticipate and recognize that there is a problem um and i think the u.s is a good negative example in which we have we saw the outbreak on the other side for months and nothing was done there was no anticipation or preparation but if you look at the countries that did well Vietnam Taiwan South Korea they were vigilant and as soon as they saw that there was this outbreak in China they were prepared well in advance right so there's this um i think anticipation recognition of problems is very important um you also see the effective states being able to promote um bottom up responses and collective learning so i think the taiwan example has been discussed quite a lot about how they were able to use technology to crowdsource um inputs about where you can buy mask and so forth um and so these are i think sporadic examples in which it's more about the capacity to anticipate and adapt over and above implementing policies so i think these two should be considered together and then you have a second question about legitimacy and that is really um a big question i've been really highly contested um in democracies legitimacy comes from elections the fact that the leaders are chosen by the people and how accountable and i think for a long time in china the argument was made by the ruling party that our legitimacy well what they didn't directly make that argument i have to clarify but it's sort of implied that legitimacy comes from the ability from economic growth first of all and the ability to deliver results so schools you know health care high you know increasing standards of living which we do see in china in in general um which then raises a very difficult question in current circumstances after covid 19 we know that china's economy will not be booming and it's already not booming like it used to be like there's an economic slowdown in fact it is likely to see a recession like in the us so economic growth can no longer provide that legitimacy so it has to look for new sources of legitimacy and i think this search for legitimacy is precisely what is driving this all-out effort from china to say that we have succeeded in the in the response right that they're trying to establish a new form of legitimacy in which we had an exogenous shock therefore we can no longer produce rapid growth but hey we fight the pandemic better than everyone else right although the other side of the story is omitted in this account which is what i've tried to fill in which is the fact that the political climate is not effective at pre-empting epidemics from arising in the first place yes wonderful thank you thank you um i could keep asking questions but i want to let our audience have a have a chance i um actually want to give um our director a chance he was one of the first in the list here with the question uh kunal sen i'm going to try to unmute his microphone and hopefully he can answer he can ask his question himself so thanks ranger i think i'm unmuted now good yes we can hear you so you know and i had a question for you which is to think about something that happened in china many many years back the great famine in 1959-1961 at that time ma responded to the famine and of course this has been an area of research that we have seen why they're taking part on uh with john rest right so how would you see that episode of the way ma addressed that particular famine which gives as we know many many many millions of people versus what we saw see now what are the similarities and what can we learn from these two episodes would you like to answer now or would you like me to collect a couple of questions we might be able to do that ma i think it'll be easier for me to answer each one question at a time please everyone since everyone is asking book length questions but it's very stimulating thank you kunal thank you kunal about this question on the great leap forward um i'm really glad that you asked it because in my classes on both chinese politics and governance i always dedicate one session to talk about it because it has it's a tragic event it has a lot of lessons uh you asked about what are the similarities um well i think it's it's well maybe we should first talk about the differences i think the big difference that jumps out to me is that the great leap forward is a tragedy that was self made it was it was man made it was made by maus uh flawed policies his crazy vision that china is going to catch up with the west in 10 years um and and all of the things that follow from it right he he um punish anyone who that could challenge his ideas um and he made the whole nation feel that they have to go along right with his vision which eventually then led to this disaster where i was in covid 19 this disaster is an exogenous shock right it rose from a virus that um until this day the cause is not known and it's not created by by any one person so i think in the beginning this is uh this is a big difference between the two but um there are some similarities in the sense that um you have you have um you have problems that initially um perhaps were not so severe that in the end became a massive tragedy and if you look at the reasons for why that happened um one of the reasons is that people are afraid to speak up right and so in the great leap forward um some of maus uh comrades had tried to openly uh tell him that these policies are flawed you know we have to change course and he reacted by silencing them um in a violent way and then afterward nobody got to tell the truth anymore everybody knew that their incentive is to shut up and say you know whatever the leader wants to hear and that set up the stage for the disasters that followed because there was there was then falsification uh exaggerated targets and cover ups and if you look at the covid 19 pandemic one of the persistent problems that we continue to see is this climate where people are not afraid to speak the truth or that they don't see incentives to do so so there's a quite good article that i would recommend it's in the south china morning post and it talks about china's uh investment in a multi-million early warning system china had actually invested a lot of money in creating such a system so all of the institutions the apparatus was in place but disappointingly it did not work in stopping the covid 19 and why is that because individuals feel that there are no incentives for me to report the truth about infectious disease right when i when i try to do so and we know that there are doctors who try to do so uh they were immediately sanctioned for doing so and so even though you have this hundred of you have this expensive state of the art early warning system if individuals are not incentivized to use it and to speak the truth then it is not going to work and then you're going to have a situation where the problem is out of control and now the leader knows about it and now he's going to take action but in the case of viruses it's too late because the nature of viruses is that once you pass a critical you know window in the first few days of that outbreak that virus has already spread throughout the country or even throughout the world so that is the one of the key similarities i see so the lesson here if i either take one away is that we need to create an environment where people in society or in the government feel comfortable and i'm powered to speak a truth that is actually really necessary for good governance and especially for combating outbreaks thank you human that's very good thank you um so we've got a number of open questions here but I think one that follows quite nicely on Kunal's question is posed by Tony Addison he asks many epidemiologists take the view that the pandemic has more waves to come maybe small maybe big if the second wave in China is a big one what do you think the implications the political implications will be mmm that's a very it's also a very big question and i have to think about it i i it's i hesitate because you know it's it's almost too scary to imagine more waves to come um and i'm not an epidemiologist obviously so i i do not know what is the likelihood of that but i think all things equal at this point china has shown that it has effectively controlled infections compared to countries like the us so i think even if more waves were to come china is taking it very seriously and will likely keep it under control so we do see reports coming out every day you know if whenever there is a new case uh this is immediately reported and strong actions are taken to a lockdown and so forth um so that's not so much what i'm worried about i think what i'm more worried about is that china is facing other challenges number one the economic recession um it is likely to see a massive wave of unemployment although we do not know the true extent of this problem we do know that it is a serious problem because in the in the two sessions meeting that was just held last week GDP targets were abandoned and the one thing that was put on the table is unemployment right so i think that is a much more concerning issue to me the other very concerning issue is china's relations with the us if china wants to rebuild its economy it needs to have good relations with the us right it needs to reopen up trade it needs to have friendly relations with all other countries in the global capitalist world um this is the second biggest challenge facing china so it's i think in a sense squeezed by both domestic economic challenges as well as by foreign policy challenges and these we must keep in mind is not just a china problem it is a problem for the whole world because the china and the us combined already accounts for more than half of the world's gdp um just uh maybe switching gears a little bit we have um one question here that might be interesting to turn to relates to some of your final points in your in your presentation the last slide this is from jing fei ma she says thanks professor ang for the thought-provoking presentation i agree with you with your idea that development scholars and professionals need to take us china relations seriously in the current context what would be your suggestions to bring the two fields together to speak to each other especially for international organizations that are mandated development tasks um it seems difficult for them to be free from and to deal with domestic politics and the influence of geopolitics what are your suggestions to them thank you jing fei for this question you know in fact as i was typing this final point my powerpoint i was like what can be done about this and i think that i hope that as a first step just by raising this point we can begin to have a conversation that um the global geopolitical environment has been disrupted and i think we need to recognize that international development as a field as a practice arose in a particular historical context right after world war two where the basically the western free world has worn and and and that environment that liberal global order as as it is called provided 70 years of long peace and stability founded on values of liberalism right and so international development operates on that assumption and therefore we we do not need to talk about politics because implicitly we already accepted all of those norms and we focus on economics economic development and public services delivery and so forth um and i think as a first step the whole community has to come together and recognize that that global context that undergirded our field is already gone it's already been blown up uh and we see that happened with WHO right i i myself would have thought that public health is a really technical subject like you have to be an epidemiologist to talk about viruses i wouldn't i wouldn't you know hazard to uh speculate on these issues but even the WHO was caught up with all of these politics and we saw the leader of the WHO plead to the WHO you know please do not politicize the pandemic but as i said you cannot wish the politics away so i think first of all it would be really great to have uh perhaps an internal dialogue within the international development community to talk about this disrupted geopolitical environment and what does it mean for the work of international development going forward you know how do we deal with the big issues which is the cold war the the possible expectation that you have to choose sides the polarization the politicization how would that affect the policy making and the public communication of international development right the way you speak the way you deliver or even your in your best efforts to deliver balance accounts that's very difficult in practice so i think all of these we need to talk about it internally first and then the second step i would suggest is then for this international development community to have a conversation with the us china community and in my experience as i said these are very different audiences because the us china community takes as its starting point that national borders are the most important thing it's all about national politics and who's winning in international development we have a global mindset right we work for the global good so we're not thinking about who's going to win you know in the pandemic but but these communities are asking such different questions and have such different assumptions and i think we do need to sit down and then have a talk about how can we have a common conversation and how can we continue to do our work in international development and serve the global public in a way that doesn't get disrupted or politicized by you know the geopolitical audiences i think these are the two essential steps and then the third i would suggest is it is always very difficult to talk about politics in the development community but i think it should be built into the curriculum and the training or development professionals at least some element of it i think it's it would be really inadequate to work in international development today without having you know at least an average grasp of how chinese politics work it being now the second largest economy in the world so i think there's also a need to change the way we train professionals in international development which for many many years was grounded in a western liberal context yeah i love to hear suggestions from others too so these are my modest uh suggestions but i'm sure that audiences on the other side of the screen would have far better ideas than me i'm actually really interested to hear from you on how to take this forward thanks yeah it's a it's a strange format for discussion as compared to a normal seminar with with everybody in the same room um but following up on that i want to ask a bit more about aid and china's role um say china in africa and and so on there's a question here that asks more specifically this is rana itjaz ali khan the um the question is when we talk about polarization which may affect international development then what will be the scope uh for countries like pakistan connected with belt and road but more broadly what what do you think about the implications um for china's china's role and china's um experience in africa in particular and in in other global south in other parts of the global south so i have had the privilege to work with different parts of the un on not not on um international growth issues but specifically on china's development model and bri um and so from that experience i have um i have learned a lot um about sort of the the underlying challenges of dealing with a with a polarized geopolitical environment and and and country officers in fact have a lot of implicit political knowledge but but all of this is not recorded you just kind of learn it right you learn it by practice and it's sort of not recorded and and i think in my own experience of of um advising and working on these issues one i have a few takeaways to share um i think the first thing we need to bear in mind when we look at china's global role including its foreign aid and bounding road is that china's not a monolith and and you need to start by figuring out who are the actors who's doing what and once you are able to have a grasp of who's doing what you'd be very surprised that it is not as coordinated or coherent as you think it is china's politics has always been described as fragmented authoritarianism there are a lot of paradoxes because yes on the one hand i've just told you that the supreme leader you know centralizes power but at the implementation level it is at the same time so fragmented so bounding road is Xi Jinping's uh signature foreign policy so and you can see again the power of his vision as the supreme leader but when you look at the actual implementation you'll be stunned at just how fragmented that process is so i think when we look at china's global role first we need to understand the nature of the actors involved and the second thing i would point out is change over time uh it's unclear at this point how china's global policies will change in the post-pandemic world even before COVID-19 i think it was already facing many challenges and headwinds it was getting a lot of pushback from the united states and and other western countries that were worried about its apparent ambitions and after COVID-19 i think it remains to be seen how those global policies will change but those are the two things that i would sort of keep in mind when we look at when we look at china's global role a third thing i would point out just a final comment is that one of the challenges of operating in a polarized world is at least on my part i've always tried to stand in the middle and give a balance account i find that when you stand in the middle and give a balance account in a sense that is the worst position to take because people on both sides of the extreme will be mad at you you know if you say china fail the pro-china's will be how dare you say china fail right and if you say china succeeded the anti-china's will be how dare you say china succeeded um so i i think we need to be prepared as a community that we must commit to a balanced position but when you do so the consequence of that is that you get criticisms from both sides and and we need to and we need to build a community of norms where being balanced is a good thing we need to we need to put that value on the table i would call that intellectual herd immunity yeah we need herd immunity against COVID-19 we also need intellectual herd immunity in the phase of polarization and politicization we need to build values that yes we value balance yes we value we value facts and we will provide a safe space for people to give balance accounts and tell both sides of the story without which individuals are afraid to speak up thank you i think this is um unfortunately we're at the end of our time but i think this is a really nice place to close the conversation and you've given us a lot of food for thought in terms of thinking about COVID response the state um helping us to have a more balanced and fact-based view of the role of china and the future of the the international development landscape so on behalf of all of us thank you very much we would normally give you a round of applause thank you very much thank you it's been very stimulating for myself and i i am eager to learn from colleagues on the other side of the screen thank you very much to you and wider for having me in this stimulating conversation thank you bye bye