 We've had quite a few. All right, well, welcome everybody to this book launch of Fractured China with one of the authors, Professor Lee Jones. It's co-authored with also Professor Shaha Hermari. Thank you everybody for joining us either live or later in the recorded version. Some of you may actually physically be in the building too. And if you are watching this on a projector, welcome. It's a real pleasure for me to host this book launch with Professor Lee Jones. I'll tell you a little bit about him in a minute and a little bit about the book. The way we're going to do it today is we're going to have about 30 minutes of a discussion around the book that Lee, of course, will lead. And then we'll have a Q&A session. I would encourage everybody to type in their questions if they're online, if they're joining online. And then I'll come to those questions at the end. If you're not online and you're remote, I would then suggest there is Lauren is in the room and you raise your hand and ask Lauren so that you can ask a question. And I'll sort of put you on the list at the end of the talk. So as I say, it's really a personal pleasure for me. We're not physically together in the room, but it's still a pleasure nonetheless to introduce Lee. He's a professor of political economy and international relations at Queen Mary University of London. He's a leading expert on political economy, social conflicts, state transformation in East Asia and Southeast Asia. He's written a number of books now on these topics, including The Fantastic, I'm going to get my copy, Fractured China, that's just recently come out. As Lee knows, I'm a huge intellectual fan of his work, which is why it's such a pleasure for me to introduce you today. And I think a lot of your work, Lee, not just the core of the pieces, but a lot of your work on sanctions, even earlier work on ASEAN or recent work on rising powers, the Belt and Road Initiative. A constant theoretical thread in that work is around the idea of state transformation. And I think this book is probably the most comprehensive theoretical and empirical discussion of state transformation applied to China. So I'm not going to say much more now, because I obviously want you to talk about your book. And I will hand the floor over to Lee, but just to say a big thank you and a big welcome today at War Studies. So over to you, Lee. Thanks so much, Nicola, especially for such a kind and warm introduction. And I'm glad that you can see the coherence in my work. I'm not sure anybody looking at my CV would necessarily understand that. It might seem a bit kind of erratic for the people. But yes, especially in my work with Shahar, we've been developing this idea of state transformation and the consequences that that has for international relations. And we've developed that framework to look at China. So I'm going to talk for about 30 minutes, so I'll give a brief kind of overview of the book, the way we approach the topic, what the book's really about, and then a little bit of one of the case studies of the book. So I start with a vignette, which is about the record that China has on nonproliferation and not a North Korea. So on the one hand, the official Chinese policy is actually very close to that at the West. So they're very concerned about nonproliferation. They're very concerned about North Korea's behavior and they have supported the United Nations sanctions on North Korea. And they've also supported bilateral measures that have isolated North Korea. So for example, it has not been able to join the Belt and Road Initiative or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank either. So on the one hand, China is committed to global norms and nonproliferation, the global regime around that. By the other hand, Chinese investment in North Korea has risen quite considerably during this period when intensifying sanctions have been applied. And bilateral trade and investment has also increased considerably, particularly apparel exports from North Korea, as you can see in the figures there. And from time to time, you see local authorities along the border with North Korea periodically releasing easing restrictions on tourism and trade across the border. And so a lot of observers have said, well, China's cheating. And President Trump tweeted that China has been caught red-handed undermining UN sanctions. So you have apparently contradictory behavior in the part of the party state. On the one hand, China seems to support global counter-proliferation efforts. On the other hand, it seems to be undermining them. So how do we make sense of an event like this? It's difficult for international relations, mainstream international relations theory to make sense of this consistently inconsistent international behavior. Because what we argue is this is not a unique example, but there are many, many examples that we cover in the book, some of them in great detail. The reason why international relations can't make much sense of these kinds of contradictory behaviors is that at least in the rising powers debate in international relations, China is treated as a unitary actor. The long-standing tendency in IR theory to view states essentially as unitary actors. That assumption has been relaxed in some areas, but particularly in the debate around rising powers, what they want, what they're gonna do, what their impact is going to be on the global order. That assumption still holds. And so what that leads to is depending on your theoretical proclivities, the evidence that doesn't quite fit with your theory tends to get downplayed or ignored or the evidence is twisted or shoehorn into a particular picture. So realists look at what China's doing on North Korea and saying, well, obviously China's grand strategy is really to keep propping up North Korea. And so it only gives lip service, the global non-properation really is kind of propping up of the regime. On the other hand, the liberals would be more likely to play up the cooperation that's happening. And they want to say that China is working with the international institutions and so on and so forth. And what that means is the debate on rising powers, which is primarily really a debate about China is very inconclusive. So on the one hand, you get people that say, China is a revisionist power, it's committed to overthrowing the United States and wants to transform the international order. And then you get people that say, well, China is really a status quo power or it's just seeking slight amendments to the international order. And because that debate is not resolvable, we can't quite work out what China wants because it seems to want different things. Then the debate becomes more and more speculative. Okay, what is China gonna do in the future? So this is why the debate on rising powers is really an impasse today. There seems to be no way to decisively resolve this debate between the revisionist and the status quo camps because there's actually evidence on both sides and the evidence is being shoehorn cherry picked selectively taken up. Let's take a deeper dive into this little thing yet. Why is it that there is apparent non-compliance with UN sanctions to which Beijing is apparently committed? That non-compliance is driven by companies, for example, textile companies and provincial governments that are bordering North Korea or close to North Korea. So the companies engaged in tourism or trade or they want to offshore textile production to a lower wage economy. They're the ones that are engaged in essentially violating the sanctions regime and defying effectively Chinese official foreign policy. And Beijing is largely reactive to these events. Beijing does not necessarily even know that these things are happening and is caught off guard when some problem is discovered. So this is about local actors within the party state doing things that have significant international repercussions that may diverge from commitments that Chinese diplomats have given in other contexts. So our argument in this book is relatively straightforward really, which is that Chinese international engagements often exhibit inconsistent or even contradictory behavior today because China isn't a unitary international actor. Decades of state transformation involving the fragmentation, decentralization and internationalization of party state apparatus mean that many Chinese actors with often differing interests and agendas now operate internationally with considerable autonomy and limited coordination and oversight. This produces outcomes that don't necessarily reflect top these agendas which made themselves beyond clear. So this is the fundamental argument of fractured China. Now, what I've just said will appear to many China experts as blatantly obvious that China is not this monolithic entity where one person is in control of everything and everything that China does is strategically coherent. And this reflects a really significant gap between the literature in psychology or China study. The study of particularly China's internal politics and international relations. So on the left you have a couple of seminal texts from the late 1980s and the early 90s which reflect the emergence of what is, to a large extent, a consensus in China's studies which is the idea of China as so-called fragmented authoritarian state that no longer has this top-down commanding control structure where a few people in the middle make all the big decisions but has become much more fragmented over time. And some early studies this book in China deconstructs was in 1994. We're starting to think about the implications of that for China's foreign relations. So that's phynology on the one hand but as you can see on the other side you have books in international relations tend to be constantly thinking about what is China's strategy? What is China want? What is China doing? So there's this tendency when it comes to China's international engagement to still think about China as a unit. And that implies a certain set of capabilities and capacities within the Chinese party state to develop a grand strategy and to coordinate and prioritize and allocate resources according to, in some cases, some very long-range plans. So these are some typical titles. There's this idea that China is such a powerful authoritarian regime and such a coherent entity that it can play the long game. Not like Western states that are constantly blown off course by democratic politics and are floundering around in the Middle East but they have this long-term strategic vision even over a hundred years to gradually displace the United States. So there are just two very different understandings of what China is. At root, this is an ontological division over the way to understand what China is. And I suppose what fractured China is really trying to do is to bridge this gap because there is a disconnect and we have to understand why this is the case. For Scientologists, it is because China is such a big country and there's such a large community of scholars writing on China that it is possible to write only for other Scientologists. So they operate within a silo that is not really engaging, I think, in many cases, with the wider literature on political science and international relations more generally. And that allows them to treat the reform and opening up process in China as a sweet-generous development. So we don't need to understand this as part of a generalized tendency that's happening elsewhere and think about how what's going in China might be an expression of more general tendencies. There's a singular focus on one state and how this works. And this is a curse, I think, of big country area studies. So it tends to be an absence of theoretical development and a lack of application of theory or comparative analysis. I'm generalizing, but I think this is broadly true. Another problem is that IR theory has not provided them with good theoretical models that help them to communicate their findings about fragmented authoritarianism to the IR discipline itself. So they're forced to use quite weak frameworks, like, for example, the bureaucratic politics model from foreign policy analysis, which really don't quite capture what's going on in the Chinese case. For IR itself, that is because there are still strong units reactor assumptions that are mentioned in the rising power debate. So these struggle to make sense of what is going on when there is a fragmented actor that is not part of the ontological baggage of IR theory. And theory that ties the domestic to the international, like two level games or foreign policy analysis, for example, is weakly developed to take account of fragmentation. It's only very recently, for example, in foreign policy analysis, that people have started to take the idea seriously that the state might not be the same as it used to be in the classical era of 1950s bureaucratic politics. That actually maybe the state has undergone some changes due to globalization. And in the book, we discuss this and show how they haven't really, although even the people that have acknowledged it has not really developed any frameworks capable of making sense of what's really going on. So we have, in fact, China, we have developed the state transformation approach, which as Nicola mentioned is an approach that we've been using in our work for some time. The foundation of this is to understand the state from a Gramscian approach, where the state is not an actor, but is a institutional ensemble that reflects ongoing sociopolitical conflicts in an evolving political economy context. And from this perspective, we can see what's happening in China, not as something unique to China, but as part of a general phenomenon, reflecting really big shifts in the global and local political economy. Now, the general tendencies always have localized expressions because states reflect the, reflects proximate sociopolitical conflict. But we would argue that what's happening in China is not entirely unique and can be used, that can be understood using these general theoretical frameworks. So in China itself, this state transformation is underpinned by the shift from Maoism to capitalism, which has led to a shift in the party state's class basis to networks of cater capitalists, the political business networks that constitute state power in China. And the associated changes in the way the party state is organized. And we identify three different dynamics here. One is fragmentation. This means the dispersion of power, authority and resources across agencies at different levels. So for example, you might have 11 different agencies engaged in maritime affairs, for example. As you'll see later, 41 agencies involved in drugs policy, for example. So a lot of coherence in policymaking and the frequent overlapping of authority. Decentralization is the second dynamic, which means the devolution of power control over resources to sub-national governments. Particularly important are provincial governments because they have responsibility now for China, for the foreign economic relations of their provinces. So all the way down to the most local government, there are kind of foreign departments. And then finally, the internationalization of state apparatus. This means institutions that were initially developed purely for domestic purposes now acquire an international role. So state and enterprises are the most obvious one. These have become major international players and actors whose conducts often seem to reflect directly on what the Chinese government wants. But in reality, these are now operating at arm's length and are mostly kind of quasi-autonomous profit-motivated actors. But many different parts of the party state now also have an international role. The Ministry of Public Security, for example, as we'll see later, has acquired an international role in counter-narcotics, counter-piracy, and so on. And there are many other examples. So in the context of this fragmentation, decentralization, internationalization then, the question then is, well, how does policy-making implementation work in China now? What we try to do in the book is avoid the debate that you find in a lot of signology about whether the center has lost power or whether it's still powerful. That's not the question of, is it more or less powerful? But more, how is power exercised? How does politics work now within this transformed state? And what we argue is that there has been a shift from a command and control system where decisions are made at the center and the responsibility of different agencies is to simply implement the will of the center. So what we call a Chinese-star regulatory state. In a regulatory state, the center has withdrawn from directly making detailed decisions and controlling the output of the party state directly to a much looser style of coordination where the center sets out broad parameters, broad regulations, broad objectives, but it is left to a whole host of other actors within the party state to develop more detailed plans and to translate these very broad guidelines into reality. So the center has various regulatory mechanisms that influence and steer how these different actors are to behave. These include party ideology or campaigns. The statements or slogans issued by senior leaders, so important speeches or catchphrases like for the moment the catchphrase du jour is the common prosperity. They use coordinating committees or bodies to try to pull together the different agencies working within particular issue areas. The leading small groups of the State Council, the Politburo Central Committee and various party state commissions to try to coordinate policymaking in a particular area. They of course have discretionary control over laws, regulations and funding which other actors within the party state might well need. And the most important of all are the Communist Party's own powers of appointment, appraisal and discipline over Communist Party members. All of these things orient other actors towards the center and constrain these actors to at least present their behavior as compatible with the kind of things that the center wants them to do. But it does not equate to monolithic control of all the different actors within the party state. Others can engage in what we call the three eyes, influencing. They can influence all of the things I've just talked about in a variety of ways. They might be part of these leading small groups, for example, they might lobby for legal changes, funding disbursements. These things often bubble up from below. They can interpret these broad guidelines. When statements, for example, are made by top leaders, it's not an incredibly vague and loose and require careful interpretation to flesh them out into more detailed policy directors. And at a pinch, they may ignore what the center has told them to do, they may ignore laws and regulations. So the behaviors that Chinese Party State acts in engaging reflect ongoing contestation within this Chinese style regulatory state. And in my view, we could discuss this more in Q&A if necessary. This means that it's actually very difficult for the Chinese Party State to engage in the development of a grand strategy. Because the Party State simply does not have the kind of coherence and tight central control that will be required to enact grand strategy. Now, the final plank of the state transformation approach is that if we're not just interested in explaining the Party State's behavior, but we're interested in explaining the outcomes of that behavior internationally, then we have to understand how these dynamics on the Chinese side intersect with those in target states. So we have to look at the key actors, interests and agendas that are operating from China and how these intersect with local interests, actors and agendas in states that are targeted by Chinese initiatives. And these are often contested within recipient societies because they have uneven distribution of political consequences. And the case studies that we consider in the book are the South China Sea, non-traditional security with particular reference to counter-narcotics and riverine banditry. And finally, international development financing focusing on hydropower damage in the Mekong subregion. And the case that I would like to briefly run through is non-traditional security focusing on counter-narcotics, just to show how this framework operates. So the conventional narrative that you would find on counter-narcotics is that increasingly drug flows from the Golden Triangle into China have been securitized as a threat to China and that led to the declaration of a People's War on Drugs declared by President Hu in 2000. And that has led, among other things, to a rollout of open substitution projects in drug-producing neighboring states. And we've seen China actively participate in the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, Memorandum of Understanding on Drug Control which is the regional framework for cooperation on counter-narcotics in the Mekong area. And that has led to the incorporation of various progressive UN principles on alternative development, which is another word for apium substitution. And the existing literature on this is quite scant but it tends to praise this as a massive success. And it's possible to pass this from a realist or liberal perspective. So the realist would say, this is about China kind of mobilizing to tackle an international threat and acting in its own self-interest. Liberals would emphasize the way that China is being incorporated into UN-led institutions in the region. From a state transformation perspective, the story is very different. So opium substitution projects did not begin at the top. They reflected bottom-up influencing, reflecting decentralization. So opium substitution projects actually began. They were pioneered by a county-level government neighboring Myanmar in the early 1990s. It was then scaled up to a provincial-level policy by Yunnan in the mid-1990s. And they lobbied the central government to adopt this as a national policy to get more funding and policy support from Beijing. So rather than being a national strategy, this is something that emerged bottom-up. National drug policy-making has become very fragmented in China. There are 41 different agencies involved in the National Narcotic Control Council. The Ministry of Public Security is a lead agency domestically and it tries to coordinate these bodies within this council. And it's also leading China's representation in regional new end processes. So the NPS has internationalized to lead on this issue in the region. And that has produced this regulatory framework that, as I say, incorporates many progressive principles on, for example, consulting local communities, being very inclusive, environmental sustainability and so on in opium substitution. Interestingly, and this is a sign of further fragmentation, when it came to the opium substitution program, 21 different agencies came together and they were assembled into the one-to-two work group, which was led not by the Ministry of Public Security, but by the Ministry of Commerce. And they set up the regulatory mechanism for opium substitution. Now, reflecting the shift to the Chinese style regulatory state, that led to just broad targets for the acreage of plantations and that the main instruments that would be used tax breaks on imports and so on. So it's a very business oriented regulatory framework and the UN principles to which the Ministry of Public Security committed China were neglected in this framework. An implementation of opium substitution was then decentralized to the Yunnan Department of Commerce. And that led to local cater capitalists interpreting the opium substitution scheme around local dominant business interests, particularly agribusiness interests and ignoring the MPS and UN guidelines. So what that has led to practice is that these opium substitution projects have been hijacked by local agribusiness interests expanding into neighboring Southeast Asian countries. And they're basically using this as a way to subsidize that expansion. So those business interests, some of which are state owned, some of which are now privatized but retain strong links to local communist party taters. They have internationalized to become the main implementing agencies of supposed central government policy. And what that means is that their commercial interests have trumped strategic ones, particularly when it comes to what crops would be used and where they would be placed. So the big boom crop with the first kind of big wave of opium substitution in the mid 2000s was rubber because rubber firms were running out of land in China and there was booming demand for rubber. The problem is that rubber doesn't grow at the same elevation as opium. So you cannot take an opium plantation and swap it out for a rubber plantation. So basically from the very beginning, the whole idea of open substitution was very dubious given the interest that we're actually driving. Now in terms of specific outcomes, it reflects the intersection of these actors and interests with those in the target state. And the Myanmar context, as people will know, the context in the borderlands neighboring China is that the state's control there is also very fragmented with lots of ethnic minority militias, some of them allied to the regime, some of them in ceasefires and some of them still fighting against the regime. So the result of this is that when the Chinese agribusinesses came in, they partnered with local elites, whether that's military, ethnic minority militias or the ethnic minority armed groups and engaged in land grabbing to establish plantations which led to forced displacement, the use of forced labor and the proletarianization of subsistence farmers. All of these violated the UN principles to which the Ministry of Public Security had committed China. The outcome of this is that it enriched the narrow elite that were involved, the local elites in Myanmar and the agribusinesses involved. But actually opium cultivation overall rose as did drug diseases in China. So you can see on the top left that during the biggest period of opium substitution projects going out from China, open cultivation increased and with a short time lag, the seizures of heroin and opium in China also increased. So I don't really have time to run through the full detail of the case study and other case studies, but I thought I might just read out this quotation from one of our informants who was a retired, very, very senior counter narcotics official in Myanmar because his recollection show what happens when another state encounters this kind of behavior on the receiving end of this kind of behavior. And then they encounter fractured China in trying to push back against it. So he says, we got very fed up and we said very bluntly to the Chinese, this is not the kind of development we want. They, the agribusinesses are cheating us and they're cheating you, they're lying to you telling you they're doing development. But these guys in Beijing, they don't know anything. And he's talking about the Chinese National Narcotics Control Commission, which is under the Ministry of Public Security. So that's his interlocutor as a foreign counter narcotics official. And they told him, you have no control over commerce and agriculture. So this is one of the big flaws we should have direct access to them. But these public security people, they're committed to trying to help us, but they're relying on the private sector who are not sincere at all. And the profit is the main thing for them. But they said, that's not our business, it's the mandate of another ministry in this case, Ministry of Commerce. He says, I don't blame them in Beijing, I blame Yunnan, the provincial government, we're neighbors, we know them well. Beijing lives in another world, Yunnan knows all about us, but they're not sincere. The autonomous provinces, they listen to Beijing but they have their own independent way of doing things. So it's important to say that this has not radically changed under Xi Jinping either. Because this is sometimes a frequent response to our research is that, well, it might have been true in the past, it's not true anymore today because Xi Jinping controls everything, having recentralized everything. But these problems are ongoing under him. So there is continued land grabbing under the cover of opium substitution projects, bananas and sugar cane as a new boom crop. And this has led to additional problems in Yanma and Laos, the soil degradation, the poisoning of livestock and serious health problems among farmers, particularly cancers. And meanwhile, as you can see in this diagram on the dotted line, these opium substitution projects have obviously done nothing to suppress the production of methamphetamine type stimulants. So it's not contrary to what people say, a success. And it's also not easily passed by realism or liberalism. So the Ministry of Public Security is sincere when it commits China to UN principles, but it is not in control of opium substitution practices. Neither frankly is the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing. The people really in control are local agribusiness interests and their political patrons in Yunnan province. So this outcome is explicable through a state transformation approach, but not through conventional IR theory. Right, I think I better wrap up there and we can take questions. Thank you very much, Lee. I'm gonna abuse my position and sort of have some starter questions on my own just because it's such an opportunity. I would just like to say that having read the book and it is out now is, I think you probably don't promote yourself as much as you probably could in this area, but it does a great job I think of going beyond a leader focused approach to China, right? I mean, you say that just now, but you do a great job of sort of going beyond, it's not simply what China wants, but a lot of the conversation is, what does Xi Jinping want, right? What does, and is Xi Jinping the new Mao kind of thing? And that sort of language and that sort of narrative is very predominant in IR, particularly in US China circles and grand strategy circles. And it also sidesteps the reform period because if you're linking Mao and linking Xi to Mao, you're forgetting the middle part, which is, as you say, hugely important to the story of state transformation and China's regulatory state. So I think actually there's a lot of other reasons as well. I think that could be highlighted here for reading your book beyond its validity as a theoretical approach to sort of bridge that gap. Two really cheeky questions, I think, but the first is to push you a little bit more as to why this China monolith approach persists. I mean, you do a great job at lying out sort of the polarizing between the situation between sinologists and IR people, but it seems to me that in this discussion around US China particularly, and particularly around grand strategy, I mean, is it because the China conversation in that area is becoming increasingly crowded out by non-China China experts, right? And I'm talking here about grand strategists, right? Who think they can apply grand strategy, you know, universally as it were, right? And the explosion of grand strategy of course is a discipline, right? Or as a field of inquiry. Or is it also because I think your approach, if applied, is probably going to be harder to do. It makes China harder to understand, but I'm just sharing out a couple of ideas there. The second question is a bit more substantive and it's about the regulatory state. If I focus on the case study that you talked about in the presentation, you do in the book talk about a particular incident in 2011 where Chinese cargo ships were attacked, right? On the Macong, and that led to public outcry in China. So my question is about what is the role of public opinion in the case of China's regulatory state? You know, there was a recent book by Andrea Giselli that I think did a fairly good job at sort of developing that a bit more. And similarly, just as it is for public opinion, what about the role of history, right? And of course your focus is very much coming, I think, from a fiscal economy angle. So I don't think it's very fair of me, but in your case in the book around the South China Sea, what role of history here, right? In the Macs and so forth in this idea of regulatory state. So if we can start with those and then hopefully move forward, but thanks, Lee. Thank you. And yeah, I mean, the way that you characterize the IRR discussion of China is absolutely correct. It is often, I mean, when I discuss the Belt and Road Initiative, I have a slide where I show the depictions of the Belt and Road Initiative as kind of a tentacles spreading out from Beijing and compare that to earlier Cold War propaganda. And I also have a kind of mock-up image of Xi Jinping as Blofeld, the Bond villain, because there is this such this kind of monomaniacal focus on him and what he wants and what he's doing, what he's thinking, that it's as if he's this Superman, this God-like figure who can control everything in China. And one of my interlocutors in China said to me, to control this, it would take a God. But the problem is we don't have a God. Xi Jinping cannot single-handedly reverse decades of state transformation in China. And all this talk about Xi as the new Mao is very unhelpful because if you look at what Xi Jinping is actually doing, he's making use of those coordinating mechanisms that I mentioned earlier on. That's all he's doing. He's not actually innovated in the governance of China. He's just using all of these mechanisms which have been available to his predecessors and have also been used by them at various times. Now, he's a very forceful player of that game. No doubt about that, the most forceful for decades. And he's doing it for reasons we can go into if people are interested. But that doesn't mean that the system has fundamentally transformed under him. In all of our chapters, we show actually considerable continuity and the struggle that Xi Jinping has in making things operate differently. Why does this monolithic idea persist? I think there's a number of different things you touched on some of them yourself. One is the nature of the Chinese Communist Party itself. I mean, it is authoritarian and it is quite opaque. So it projects this image of being this monolith. Xi Jinping says common prosperity. Everybody rushes to say, oh yes, let's do common prosperity. I mean, we're not going to know what it means, but hey, we can repackage what we're doing as being in line with common prosperity and all the terrified tech elites start donating billions to various projects. That is kind of terrifying to many people in the West and it appears to give this image of tight coordinated top-down control. And no doubt the Chinese Party state likes to cultivate that image. So in many ways, the Western commentaries along these lines are just doing the Party state propaganda work for it. And I do think you're right about China specialists being crowded out in the IRR discussion. I mean, it's quite explicit in some of the grand strategy stuff that people say, and I'm not writing as a sign on the tip, you know? I don't need to know about those things. You know, I just look at his international strategic behavior and that I think speaks to the need that human beings have for relatively simple heuristics. So you are absolutely right. They would take massively, you know, in the recommendations to policy makers at the end to take this model seriously as a way to understand Chinese behavior and to plan policy responses requires enormous amounts of nuance, enormous amounts of data gathering, and therefore much more investment in smart diplomacy than is currently the case. So in a sense that gets put into the too hard box. And I do think that has got to do with the craving that human beings have for relatively simple straightforward heuristics. This is too complicated. And I, our theorist has sort of played along with that in talking about, you know, elegance, parsimony, you know, it's been the thing to do. And therefore, let's just deal with units, you know? On regulatory state, you know, public opinion and history, I think the easiest way, that's a very complicated question, but the easiest way for me to address it is to talk about the South China Sea. So in the South China Sea case, what we argue is the regulatory framework around the South China Sea comes from two main things. One is this idea of the Nine Dash Line, the historical, you know, these maps which are mostly fabricated from the 1930s on this, which is very vague. Like what does the Nine Dash Line mean? Does it mean that China claims the sea in that line? Does it mean that they claim just the island? So sometimes it seems to be one thing and sometimes it seems to be another deliberately vague. And then the other thing, the other kind of regulatory idea is the idea of Wei Chuang and Wei Wen, which is maintaining stability and maintaining maritime rights. And the idea is that actors are supposed to balance between these principles, but obviously these are actually at times mutually exclusive. There's no sense of how you're supposed to balance between these things. So what you actually get is kind of wild oscillation within that framework. Sometimes very aggressive behaviour, sometimes very diplomatic behaviour by different actors, often at the same time. So it is consistently inconsistent. Now, one thing that the Chinese could do very concretely to reduce the propensity for conflict in the South China Sea is to clarify what the Nine Dash Line means, but they don't do it. Now, one of the reasons they don't do it is that if they are going to stick to their unclossed commitments, it would mean trading off all this stuff around historical rights and so on, which I think in terms of public opinion and history, the way that the South China Sea has been kind of mythologised in nationalist propaganda and education and so on, now makes it very difficult for the Chinese leadership to climb down on the South China Sea. And lots of literature about, especially peak crisis moments that the leadership, basically, because of the legitimising itself through continuous economic growth and nationalism, finds it very difficult to back down and compromise. And I think this is how that plays out very concretely in the case of the South China Sea. I'll leave it there. Thanks, Lee. We have a question from Mark Chan. So I'm going to read that out. So he says, thank you for the presentation. He's excited to be there, but he's curious about the influence of the business sector on Chinese foreign policy. And he mentions here the agribusinesses in Yunnan. Have you observed similar influence wielded by big businesses on the central government and the PSC? Can the clamp down on big tech and finance firms in China be seen as a pushback by Xi Jinping against their influence? Yeah, that's a very good question. Definitely, there is... State and enterprises are a significant interest group within the party state, very diverse interest group, because obviously there's only about 100 centrally owned state and enterprises left now, because they've been consolidated into these huge conglomerates, and the rest, about 144,000, are sub-national. So they're under sub-national government. The big central ones, I think, in many ways, are in a very, very powerful... And they can engage in influencing, interpreting, and ignoring. And there are many documented instances of this. Probably the most widely explored are the national oil companies, the national energy companies. They're very big players in lobbying government. They have direct access, some of their chairman that still retain vice ministerial rank, so they have direct access to policy makers and senior bureaucrats. They're able to push their agendas into policy frameworks, they're able to get central backing for their plans to expand into other countries. That's happened with the hydro power sector, for example. So one of the case studies that I've been interested in and is in the book is the case of the Mitzone Dam in Myanmar, which really blew up in 2011 when the Myanmar government suspended it amid widespread national protests against the dam. And this is often seen as a kind of strategic push by China to move its hydro power dams into neighboring rivers and extend its sort of territorial control. What we're showing that chapter is actually, this is the result of bottom-up activity by state-owned hydro power companies that are running out of sites in China and need to internationalize. And they've lobbied the center to back their business plans. And at the same time, neighboring governments want these dams. These dams were requested to have the idea of neighboring governments and the Chinese companies are stepping in to fill that gap and make money. And then they get top leaders to come in and sign some kind of shiny framework agreement and make it look like it's this great interstate agreement. But it's not. The center is just giving its imprimatur to the bottom-up activities of companies, which is just in it for the money. And then when there's local protest, it's all against China because it's a state-owned company. So it must be directed by the central government. What's China doing? They're colonizing us, et cetera, et cetera. And it blows up into a major diplomatic incident. So there are many cases where you can see that happening. On the tech clampdown, this is not my area of expertise at all, but the tech companies are just as opportunistic, I think as the rest, the stuff around the digital silk roads and all that kind of stuff, I think shows how they are able to bandwagon on these broad capacious policy envelopes for their own advantage. My sense is that the tech clampdown is sheeting ping reminding the private sector that it exists at the suffrage of the party state, broadly speaking, and that they ought to be more deferential to party dictation. And that this is a potential, the tech sector in particular, because it has such sort of cartelistic control over certain areas of the Chinese economy, like online payments and transportation and emerging kind of fintech stuff. It's an area where private enterprises always potentially an area in which an alternative power base might emerge within the political economy. I mean, it never really has in China because they're basically happy with the party state that has nurtured them. But when Jack Ma starts making remarks about how backwards Chinese policymakers are, then that sort of open defiance against the party state is not tolerated in the new regime. So I think it's just mostly about sort of cutting them, the tech oligarchs down to sides, reminding them who's in charge. It's one of the regulatory mechanisms that's available to them. They can direct regulators to go and investigate the affairs or they can block IPOs or they get, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks, Lee. I'm gonna put two last questions together. Maybe just one last one that's coming now. I think the first one sort of piggybacks a bit on what you just said about sort of Xi and the sort of central elites trying to regain some power. And it's about the anti-corruption campaign and is it an attempt to sort of centralize decentralization? And if that's an effective tool, I think we're... There's also a question from John DeVal, which is about, I guess, evoking history here and saying, is this a case that state transformation is sort of taking us back to the future? And the example of state of affairs in the 19th century, where foreign policy is not restricted to the center, but actually company states as it were. And so sort of applying that and he has here. In other words, is all IR theory that has developed around foreign policy analysis, which understands the state as a unitary actor, actually the historical exception rather than the norm. And then the last question here from Romain Gallix. He also thanks you for the talk. It's quite common in the West to say that Beijing and maybe coastal elites are disconnected from sort of real development questions and the reality of the country and that their assertive attitude is premature and not in line with the country's needs and abilities. Would you say your observations confirm this disconnected elite thesis? Right, so firstly on the anti-corruption campaign, I mean, yes, I think that's, I mean, this is quite common in authoritarian regimes that anti-corruption campaigns are used as part of factional struggle and also to centralize control. And I think that is part of the CCP's towers and discipline, which I mentioned as one of the regulatory mechanisms. So obviously, Xi has been a very powerful player of that game, but that's what that is really about, I think, yes, but this goes back to why he's doing all this, which is that this decade of sort of drift and dissolution and fragmentation and the corruption that has come with the interpenetration of business and the party state is that I think he genuinely thinks that CCP rule is in danger and he must try to impose greater discipline and remind the party state that it's there to serve the people and the objective of the people and not simply to serve a self-aggrandizing elite. And I think he sees that as an existential question and that's his mission to sort of save the party state from itself. On John's question, so I think your question is half right. So it is not ever a case of going back to the future, going back in time, because history doesn't go backwards, right? Time is linear, but this is we experience it as a limited human being. So in a sense, it's not going back to sort of imperial China, for example, where there's a sort of weak center and then lots of warlords or whatever because people have asked me that before as well, because in the interim, you've had the creation of a powerful centralized state apparatus and state-owned economy, which, okay, that has been transformed during the reform era, but it's not like you just wipe that out and go back to the status of an imperial time. So that's not the case. You're dealing now with the legacy of the Maoist system, right? So all the infrastructure of the party state is still there in revised form, but it is used and it can affect outcomes in a way that those mechanisms are not available to rulers of imperial China or other empires of the time. So it's not quite the same. The half where I think you are right is that the period of, there is a historical process of the consolidation of the nation state from empires and other transnational policies into territorially bounded sort of power containers to the extent that they ever were from roughly the 1940s to roughly the 1970s. And then they start to sort of unbundle and transform and become sort of post-national, post-Westphalian. And the argument here is that China has experienced that to an extent it's not simply a Westphalian power halving the way back to Westphalia as many people suggest, but it is true therefore that if you think about imaginaries that we have about the way the state works, the way politics works, the way we should theorize international relations, these are all legacies of that peak period of statism from the 40s through to the 70s. And it's remarkable how powerful the sort of imaginaries and the sort of common sense is that it's really stuck with us. If you think about sort of social expectations about the way the state should work and how governance should work and how the state should provide for its citizens and so on, there are all legacies of that period, even though that era has actually gone to an large extent. So increasingly in my work, the more work I do, the more I apply this framework to different issue areas, the more I see that period from the 40s to the 70s as the exception and not the rule. But that doesn't mean that we're going back to the way that things were before the state because we're living in the shadow, we're living in the ruins, if you like, not ruins is a bit far, but we're living in the legacy of a period when there were powerful centralized developmental states that existed to develop their national economies, national welfare states, reduce uneven development within their borders, et cetera. And we have those institutions still around to a certain extent revised, now promoting global competition in certain parts of their economies in the global production networks. It's a very different world to that of the 19th century. And then finally, the question on about disconnected elites ruin, you know, coastal elites and so on. My hunch from my case studies, it's not that coastal elites are the ones that are being assertive and premature. The ones that the provincial governments that are causing the most bother internationally are the more economically backwards ones. Hainan province is a major irritant in the South China Sea because it is engaged not in seagrapping but land grabbing. It notionally has authority over the entire South China Sea. So it has a strong incentive in saying, well, that means, you know, all of that area belongs to us and we can regulate it and we can grab it for our fishing industry and so on. It's engaged in very provocative behavior which embroils China in conflict with other neighboring countries. And Hainan province is just as bad but with relation to mainland Southeast Asia. And there's been various purges of Yunnanese cadres as a result of all this sort of freewheeling activity under Xi Jinping. But the evidence is that in many respects, it continues. The coastal states, if we're talking about, you know, places like Fujian and Shanghai and so on, then I would say that these have more of an interest in international stability and more interest in the status quo because they're so heavily dependent on the flows of international trade and investment. And that's generally the way that China specialist have understood it is that the more sort of inland provinces have a more sort of conservative approach and the coastal provinces have a more liberal approach. It would be good to see more investigations of that hypothesis to try to sort of tease out what are the regional differences and how they changed now that Xi Jinping, for example, is rotating personnel and stuffing his loyalists into provincial level administrations. I mean, there's so much to explore. This, you know, Fratch and China is about opening up a research agenda for IR scholars and there's so much that can be studied that we could only really begin to study in this exploratory study. Thanks, Lee. I think that's a really great way to end today's talk in terms of, you know, where do we move forward with the theory that you're advancing in the book and particularly the sort of comparative at a provincial sub-state level analysis of China's behavior and sort of approaches. There are some questions about COVID. I know that in your book at the end and the conclusion, you do talk about sort of the politics around that in China. I even had a question about this so-called warfare diplomacy. We don't have time for any of that, unfortunately, but we do have time to thank you and also to encourage everyone to buy your book, read your book. I think, as I said at the beginning, it advances in a really comprehensive manner this approach, a tough approach, a difficult approach, but perhaps, you know, an approach that helps us to understand the incoherences of China a little bit better. So thank you very much, Lee, for joining us and for talking about your book, Factor China with Cambridge University Press. Thank you very much, Lee. And a great pleasure. Take care.