 Hello, I'm talking today with Professor Steve Zhang. Steve submitted a REF 2021 case study entitled Engaging with China, informing governments shaping business strategies and enhancing media portrayal. Steve research was based on his analysis of government documents and statements news reports and scholarly articles. And he developed a framework for understanding Chinese foreign policy, a kind of a real politic, if you like, approach to to party Chinese government decisions around specifically around Hong Kong and Taiwan and how this was governed by sort of party political interests, in addition to or instead of ideology. So really interesting research and got a lot of traction. Steve over the course of several years before, so obviously during it's particularly when he joined us, started to engage with governments on some of his interesting ideas around foreign policy of China, particularly the UK government by the FCDO or the FCO as it was back then, and foreign affairs committees, and also the governments of Canada, New Zealand and Taiwan. Steve has also advised large multinational corporations with Chinese interests, for example, Shell and HSBC, and has reached an incredible number of people through engagement with film and documentary makers for the BBC Channel 4 and others internationally reaching almost four million more, I'm sure, viewers and listeners on really key TV programs and radio programs. So I'm really pleased to be talking to Steve today. Steve, is that a fair summary of your impact case study? Yes, I think it's an excellent summary of the impact case studies. I do have to say that luck has a lot to do with it. It is more than just sort of completely by design and it all works exactly as I had intended. I wish I had such foresight and a master plan. Reality is that I didn't really. A bit of luck got me to where I was. I see. So there was no master planning. There was no mastermind. It was more of an evolution of your relationships and research interests. I think there is an element that the kind of research I was doing would be and could be useful. I was mindful of that. And I was also, if you like, in a fortunate position that I joined SOAS as director of the SOAS China Institute. And the remit of my job was a lot of engagement. The Institute was meant to be, if you like, an overarching institution within SOAS, representing SOAS for China studies generally. So from the get go, my work would require me to think about how I would be able to reach out to audiences outside of academia, for which therefore one thing immediately of impact. And then one would also be thinking in terms of the different types of institutions or people who could be reached out for for this purpose. So the logical thing would be that you have the government sector, you have the private sector, and you have the more like general public. That's fascinating. In terms of then sort of maybe going back a step before we look at those relationships and the outreach of the key outreach of the Institute is maybe a quick kind of exploration of your, the political and social context of your research. I know obviously it's been a longstanding project. Your framework, consultative Leninism, was developed more than a decade ago and you have kind of elaborated on this as new and I mean, China has a very fast moving foreign policy base. So obviously you've had to kind of re-engage with the framework itself. But how difficult has it been to do so from a China Institute based in London? And what has it been actually better to have this distance so that you can have a broader overview? How has that sort of impacted on the research climate of your work? I think being at SOAS in central London certainly helped. And from the get go thinking about impact, thinking about the kind of issues that governments, NGOs, private sector and others would need to know also helped. Because I mean, here applies I think in particular to governments. China has been rising in the last decade very noticeably and is clearly changing the world. So governments need to have a better way to understand how the Chinese make decisions in terms of foreign policy or relationship with the rest of the world more generally. And it was very much with that in mind that I thought there really would be a need for a user friendly analytical framework that could be used not only for academic discourse, but for practitioners, for governments that make policy dealing with China for them to use that framework in their everyday policy making or engagement with China. Hence I designed this party-state realism analytical framework. And obviously for something like that, it has to be intellectually robust, vigorous as a piece of research that it takes the boxes for colleagues in international relations to see it as something that they would approve of otherwise you simply won't get it published. And it is also something that one is very mindful of the need of the RAF generally. You need outputs that are well regarded as well as outputs that can have impact. And for the purpose of the RAF, I thought the article fit in rather well. And with a bit of luck, it turned out I hope to be the case. Excellent, excellent. So I wanted to pick up on the thread of utility. You mentioned being in London and a kind of seat of power in terms of international engagement, a key hub of international engagement with Chinese foreign policy in London and how that sort of shaped your, maybe there's the rigor of your analytical framework and then the engagement with it. So being in London obviously shapes that engagement with it. And so how did relationships with the FCDO, then the FCO, but the FCDO now, the Foreign Affairs Committee, how did these relationships start? What was the starting point for these quite important discussions? Well, I think that really kind of goes back to before I joined SOS. Before SOS, I was at the University of Northingham where I was head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and before that, the director of the China Policy Institute. So in my previous job, I already engaged with the government in London in particular and some other foreign governments being relocated to London at SOS. It just makes everything so much easier in terms of that engagement with them. So there was something that I was building up on. To be honest, the previous round of graph, I also submitted an impact case studies which was building a lot around the kind of engagement I had with governments and international NGOs. I mean, there wasn't really much of any contact with the corporate world in the previous case in Northingham. The engagement with the corporate world was something that was completely new and designed and devised and developed after I joined SOS. But that is very much because of the Central London location. I got here and then renew some friendships and acquaintanceships with friends in the corporate world, talk to them, ask them what they need and it becomes clear that there was a bit of a niche. So I came up with the concept of a corporate membership for those London-based companies to join the SOS China Institute in fact for a fee. But in that process, there's also direct engagement with them where inputs could be provided to make them feel that those inputs were useful and they would therefore be willing when called upon to provide references to confirm that the inputs that I and colleagues at SOS were able to provide were useful to them and therefore in fact delivered impact. I mean, bearing in mind that when we talk about impact, it is evidence-based impact. It's not just what I think we have impact, it is what the recipients are willing to say and acknowledge that yes, you have provided inputs which have caused us to change something in what we do or plan to do or in our strategic thinking. And our corporate members were willing to confirm that. Yes, I know you received some brilliant testimonials which we submitted as evidence for the case study and really in glowing terms, your analysis, it was received by these people and these corporations. I wonder if it is for the engagements with the media and with documentary makers, with journalists and with filmmakers, you tend to see the end result, your analysis, your advice and then even introduced a camera and how it's edited and put together. You can obviously see how your research and your analytical framework has then been used by the filmmakers or the journalists to kind of frame their outputs. So it seems very direct if you like and it may not be what you envisioned at the beginning but at least it's there very, very transparently. But then with conversations and then advice through the membership scheme and also advice through select committees or meetings with the FCO officials, it's not as clear obviously, these are opaque processes of strategic development and policy making. How do you balance those two things? The transparency of the media engagement, very direct, very transparent and then the opacity of working with large corporations and governments. You know, it's difficult to keep motivated and to keep re-engaging. I think you are absolutely right to make the distinctions between the media side of the engagement and the engagement with both the corporate sector and the public government sectors. In terms of the private sector and the various governments, my approach was really quite straightforward. Offer them the best advice they are washed on the most vigorous basis of research, rather than simply rather than simply think what they want to hear and tell them what they've washed. All the governments that I had been advising have their expertise on China. They do have fairly clear policies towards China but they might not necessarily have all the insights that they really should have. And so by providing absolutely the best independent assessments, I think it was more useful to them because they would be able to pick up insights and ideas or challenges to what their thinking are, which will therefore require them or encourage them to make some elements of adjustment. And by offering them the best advice possible, then they would also escalate. The reality is that particularly when we're dealing with governments, the initial contact would usually tend to be very much the working level, but then if they found the inputs really helpful, they escalate and they bring in more senior people. And for an impact case studies, by being able to in some cases confirm that very senior policymakers were at the receiving end of the advice would make the impact come across as more real. So in that sense, more useful. I think the same also applies to corporations. Once they genuinely found your research and insights useful, they are more willing to confirm that it is very helpful. And I think one of the corporate members, for example, actually checked back with me to see whether the letter of reference should be signed by one of their senior executives or by the head of research. So they were quite willing and happy to do that. And obviously in that case, I requested the reference to be signed off by their senior executive because that would kind of provide an indication that it was being taken seriously at the senior management level, rather than simply at the working research analyst level. Now in terms of the media side, I think the reality was that most of the real impact were not in the very large number of news interviews. The impacts were I think mostly based on the documentaries. But how do the documentary makers reach out to me? I mean, I couldn't possibly actually reach out to all the documentary makers because I don't know they were going to be making those documentaries anyway and it would take huge amount of daily monitoring to be able to even locate that. So the approach I had was quite simply that as director of the SOS China Institute with a remit to engage and being aware that several years ago, we were not sort of as well profiled in the media as we should be. I did spend a lot of time doing huge number of media interviews in order to raise our profile and therefore we become an institution that people who are making documentaries on China would want to bring up and chat and say, I'm making a documentary on this. Are you going to be able to help? And again, the reality is that not every single request I received, I said yes, there are things that I don't know. I think one has to be honest about that. But there are others which I do know. And obviously for those that I don't know, my immediate follow-up thought would be does anybody else at SOS know? Can I get somebody else at SOS a colleague who would be able to help with that? And can that colleague be persuaded to do so? Not everybody wants to do that, some would, some won't. But once you actually are out there and maintain that profile, then you get those documentary makers to come out and reach out to you and you work with them. And again, providing the best scholarship-based insights which they may then find useful. That's fascinating. There's so many learnings I think for others as they listen to this because it seems to me that just summarizing both sides of this. So you've got your corporate and government approaches whereby over time that you've established your track record, you have understood that actually working through the sort of day-to-day and analysts, you then reach this more strategic decision makers and there you have the significance of your impact is when you work through successfully and reach those strategic decision makers. And then as you said, the interviews are fine and they helped you establish a kind of profile for the Institute which then allows you to and others in the Institute and in SOS allows you to then engage with documentary makers where the really significant bits of analysis can be embedded into those cultural outputs and reach a quite a substantial audience. So all of these lessons and learnings for others, they must have come at some, I mean, did you, are there dead ends or mistakes that you made on a way that you now would avoid? Are there any things that you think didn't work in the years that you've been engaging with these two forces? I think there are always areas where one can do better. I don't believe that we are perfect. We never are. In terms of the kind of engagement, I think that two, in addition to just do the best kind of engagement based on scholarship, there is also an element of engagement in getting the references. Now, there are some countries, embassies whose references in the end we did not use for the impact case studies. We didn't use them for two reasons. One, we got enough from the others. Two, the ones that we don't use are not strong enough, or at least not as strong as the others that we in the end used. But they're not strong enough, partly because I think when I asked them for references, I was very general and gentle in asking for the references. I think there are a couple of embassies, for example, might have benefited from something that is perhaps slightly more detailed in terms of guidance of what really are needed. We won't need that when we ask the FCDO for a reference, because FCDO knows exactly what the draft is and what really are the critical things for them to mention that would be useful for the draft assessment. Now, some foreign embassies really don't get that. Now, some get that very, very well. I think there was one foreign embassy which wrote a, what I thought was almost a model reference in terms of how they underlined the advice that were being given, were being taken seriously at very, very, very senior level, ministerial level, and how it was useful. But the others just didn't quite get that and were very generous in saying how much they found me nice and helpful and all that. Now, that's not actually very helpful for the impact. It's not about the individual being a nice guy and lovely and all that. It is about what were being put into the system and how that could eventually change their policies without giving specific details of how that change were taking place. I mean, we are looking at pretty contemporary government policies, so there is a limit to how much details they can say. But if they were saying that, yes, this was being referred up to our foreign minister and it has an impact on how we think about China. That's probably as far as you can hope to get in terms of a testimony from a government of what impact you have made. So we got some of them and I think we probably could have got more of them and if we have got more of them, we have better choices of what references we could have used and that could probably potentially have improved the eventual overall evaluation of the impact. There's probably always potentially a scope of how one can be a bit more strategic but I would tend to think that that's easier said than done because trying to be very strategic in picking which ones to help and which ones not to help is gambling. I mean, some of those that in the end turn out to be extremely helpful in terms of the reference might not necessarily have been what you were thinking of at the starting point. So I think where possible just be helpful with them and then see where you go and for cases that you know, this is not going anywhere. Well, that's perhaps the point to being a bit strategic. Interesting. That's really interesting. A lot of things to pick up there, including the fact that foreign embassies aren't as familiar with the ref and so need a guiding hand and the circumspect language that they use anyway is one of those things that you have to navigate around and reinterpret within the case study itself. I just wanted to ask my last question which was really about you mentioned right at the top at the beginning, so much of this impact was unplanned and evolved naturally from the engagement via the Institute. Looking at going forward and thinking about impacts in the future, what kind of lessons have you learned from this period and in terms of what worked and what didn't or what was obvious and what isn't? Are there things that you would change? Are there things that you would plan for now in the next sort of five years in terms of the impact of yourself or the Institute? Absolutely. I mean, I joined SOAS at the end of 2016 and when I joined SOAS even though there was an understanding that SOAS would submit an area studies submission for the RAF, it wasn't very clearly defined as to what that area studies submission would be. It took a long time for that to be finalized, so in my early stage I really was just drawing on a lot of my previous experience in my previous university of an area studies submission and what would be needed and just proceeded on the assumption that it probably would get picked up in due course. I think that was the wrong way of doing it. The right ways to do it is that we now know we have defined very clearly what the area studies submission for SOAS is and in the submission for the RAF, we have clearly outlined a plan for moving forward with area studies and we should stick to the plan and we should also support and encourage impact case studies based on that plan so that we will not end up in a situation where an impact case studies is there because somebody thought that it might potentially be useful was doing that it turns out to be a good case to pick up to use. We really should have it very much an integral part of the way how we move forward and for this I think the regional institutes and centres can be very useful because they are having the remit to engage with the outside world beyond academia not excluding academia but inclusive of academia and going beyond which means that inherently there is scope for them to deliver impact but if we change the regional institutes and centres into different kinds of institutions which result in them losing that remit then we are going to pay a price potentially in terms of impact case studies. And I certainly see that the institutes themselves that lend themselves to engagement in the creative industries I can see that documentary makers would come through and institute to be able to gain access to experts like yourself I can see that corporations especially something like the membership scheme would then be able to avail themselves of expertise in a way that makes sense to them. And so I can see that what you're saying Steve is to deepen investment and resources towards the institute so that these kinds of impacts can be deepened. Well thank you Steve for that brilliant analysis of the engineering behind your impact case study. For listeners you can access Steve's case study you will find the link to the REF 2021 website the results website where you can download Steve's case study and read it and all that's left for me to do is to thank Steve again and say goodbye thank you Steve. Well thank you Muta it's been a great pleasure. Goodbye.