 Welcome to this seminar by the Sova China Institute. My name is Steve Tseng. I am the director of the Institute. And for this evening, we have a fantastic speaker speaking on an extremely important subject. The speaker is, of course, Professor Tony Sage. And the subject is, what explains the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party rule? Before I introduce Professor Sage, let me just clarify that if you would like to ask any questions using the Zoom platform, please use the Q&A box at the bottom. If you are using the Facebook feed, your question will be relayed to me through the chat box. When you raise the question, it will be very helpful for my background information if you could say who you are. And a half a sentence of introduction of who you are would be very helpful. But if you would like your identity not to be reviewed, please say so, and I will not review your identity. Getting back to the subject itself and the speaker, Tony Sage is the Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University. Before he joined Harvard, he was director of the Philological Institute at Leiden University in the Leiden Institute. He was educated at Newcastle University, so was and Leiden. And he is, if I may say so, Tony, a British-American scholar of particular distinctions working on the politics of China. He has published very, very widely on the politics and the history of contemporary China. He's got well over a dozen books to his name. I'll mention only the five single-authored books. And they are government and politics of China, Chinese village, global market, providing public goods in transitional China, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party, and China's science policy in the 80s. I understand that he has just finished a new book which is on the history of the Communist Party and the title is From Rebels to Rural, 100 Years of the Chinese Communist Party, which should be available sometime in 2020. Probably next year, I guess. Oh, sorry, 2001 indeed. And with that, I will hand over to you, Tony, and then we will have some excellent discussions, I'm sure. Over to you. Okay, thanks, Steve. And good evening, everybody, or good afternoon, good morning, depending on where you're zooming in from. So as everyone knows, the outbreak of COVID in Wuhan and the government's initial handling of that outbreak, yet again, raised a round of headlines about the durability of Chinese Communist Party rule, and was this going to be China's Chernobyl, or was it, in a phrase I used many years ago, when looking at the issues related to SARS, much ado about nothing? Well, clearly the global impact and the damage to China's international reputation certainly means it wasn't about nothing. But domestically, the CCP seems to have taken control of the situation, and perhaps even benefited from its response. While it is true that initially, citizens expressed outrage at local government mishandling of the initial response to the pandemic, it was soon followed by widespread support, as far as we can see. Once the country's central government took tough action to lock down the city of Wuhan, followed, as you know, by a shutdown of most of the country. So that phenomenon of dissatisfaction with local government performance, but greater satisfaction with the central government is actually in line with the findings of numerous surveys which have been conducted over the last decade or more. But it's not the first time that the Chinese Communist Party has faced questions about its ability to retain credibility. And yet, 40 years plus into the reform era, 70 years into its rule, CCP control appears solid and it retains generally strong support. Now, especially following the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1991, many observers, not only outside of China, but also in discussions with those inside of China, people began to surmise that the Chinese Communist Party might be the next to fall. Now, that follows the train of literature that we saw in the early to mid 1990s, which was focused on transitions, along with the notion of a third wave of democracy. But by the end of that decade, we see that transitions literature beginning to give way to resilience, paradise. Maybe these are not transitions, maybe they're not transitions on something to us, but maybe they're new hybrid forms of our autocratic authoritarian rule that may be longer enduring than we perhaps had expected. So questions were raised then as to whether authoritarian regimes would reform. Is there a hybrid form and how resilient might systems as that in China might be? Now, Steve, who was just introducing gave his own account on this in 2009 with his views of consultative Leninism, where he outlines a number of factors, including reforms to preempt public demands for democratization, along with another number of four other key items that he talks about. But it was Andy Nathan in 2003, who was one of the first to highlight what he termed this authoritarian resilience. And of course, much of the academic literature, as you all know now, has some reference to authoritarian in it, some reference to resilience. But he felt that that enabled the Chinese Communist Party to becoming part of the 1990s wave of democratization. And his argument stressed the institutionalization of the system via a number of factors, normalized leadership succession, a system of promotion governed by enhanced meritocratic advancement rather than factional ties, a clearer division of responsibilities and the expansion of avenues for citizen political participation. However, I think it's clear that all those trends have been undermined to some extent, especially since Xi Jinping came to power. And certainly normalized leadership succession was not the case as Xi took power in the struggles we bought Xi live back in 2011, 2012. So then the question arises whether CCP resilience has actually eroded, yet it's still there from the outside, it's still looking stronger than ever. So what I'd like to do in this talk is review a number of factors which have been put forward to try and explain this regime resilience in face of multiple challenges. Now, while the Chinese Communist Party, of course, can employ coercion and threaten those individuals and groups that it deems to be a danger, it's inconceivable that it could retain sufficient authority over the long term through the threat of force alone. So what I wanna look at in this is maintenance of power that exists, sorry, that examines shifts from utilizing charismatic authority to placing emphasis on ideology, the manipulation of nationalism, historical justification, the inheritance of the Chinese tradition which I refer to as cultural appropriation, and then finally to its performance legitimacy. And I guess one question to those listening in, is it any of those or is it none of the above? And I'd really like to know what you think it is if it is none of the above. So there was an immediate need to provide for the party of policy flexibility to actually break from the past. On the Mao Zedong's leadership, the Chinese Communist Party, of course, had survived the traumas of the Great Leap Forward which caused tens of millions to die from famine despite the revisionist writing in China at the present time and the Cultural Revolution which tore apart the ruling elite and wreaked havoc on the political institutions. But of course, at that time, China's population was ill-informed with virtually no access to external resources by which they could judge government performance either in absolute or in comparative terms. Mao Zedong's authority was unchallenged and the nation operated under a system which comes very close to Weber's definition of charismatic authority including deference to an adulation of the supreme leader. However, of course, once Mao's death removed him from the political scene, September 1976, the party had to explain its right to rule in different terms. The cult of the individual, the infallibility of the party would no longer feasible justifications and perhaps one needed more earthly criteria to explain its justification. Also, at the same time, the glow of revolutionary history was dimming and fading into the background. It became increasingly difficult to justify continued CCP rule in terms of past triumphs such as the claims of defeating the Japanese, victory in the civil war and rebuilding the war-torn economy. So there was an immediate need then, as I said just now to provide the party with policy flexibility to break from some of those dogmas from the past. Deng Xiaoping, of course, viewed raising living standards as a key to reviving the system's credibility, albeit, of course, under continued party control. So to provide legitimacy, the phrase socialism with Chinese characteristics emerged and that is seen as a guiding principle. The concept, of course, was used to legitimize amendments to traditional Marxism-Leninism, which have been pursued at different periods of time and to claim them as socialists, even if they appear to deviate from more traditional concerns. So essentially what the CCP said or did, it was socialist policy. That was combined with the assessment that China was still in the primary stage of socialism. And that, again, allowed greater policy flexibility with the introduction of measures that have been formally denounced as catalyst. Speaking to one of the people who was credited with developing this phrase, the primary stage of socialism, he said to me that actually what he said was that China is not even yet in the primary stage of socialism, slightly different spin on it. But what it meant was that markets, of course, as you know, would play a greater role in allocating goods, stimulating economic activity. And this really reached a high point with General Secretary Zhao Ziyang's presentation to the 13th Party Congress back in October 1987. And what Zhao did was attack the true, two traditional shibboleths of state socialism, central planning and state ownership. The planned approach to the economy was to be reduced dramatically, opening up the way for the further development of the non-state sectors. And in a very radical break with the past, Zhao claimed that the owners of private enterprises who employed a workforce would receive some income that did not come from their own labor. But it would also include income from shares and profits from the work of their employees. That, of course, was not accepted by all. More conservative party members viewed such measures as having no place under socialism. But deflecting criticism that these were capitalist mechanisms, Zhao simply stated that, oh, such mechanisms, they're not particular to capitalism. Now, following the suppression of the 1989 student-led protests, Dong Xiaoping and his supporters decided that part of the answer to reviving the party fortunes, labor satisfying people's material needs. And we see the description now of a socialist market economy, that while the state remained a dominant economic player, the market would play a greater role in allocating goods and rewards. And there was also, again, the reaffirmation that China was indeed in this primary stage of socialism. That, of course, was intended to take ideology and politics out of economic policy and to permit the use of previously denounced capitalist mechanisms, such as markets, material incentives to stimulate growth. And then if we fast forward to the end of the 1990s, of course, we see General Secretary Jiang Zemin trying to make the party more inclusive and representative of society by opening the path for private entrepreneurs to become members of the Chinese Communist Party and placing the expanding middle class on the same plane as workers and presidents, as encapsulated with the three represents. So that led a lot of the writing about China to emphasize with this delivery of the economic goods to focus on performance legitimacy as the prime source of regime support. The problem is that as Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong thought declines as a source of authority, the Chinese Communist Party loses its power to explain development as a product of its supernatural ability to divine correctly current and future trends. Instead, better informed citizens are now able to judge performance on more tangible criteria, such as, is the quality of my life improving? Am I getting a better deal? So as a result of that, in my view, the party is sought to strengthen non-economic rationals such as the appeal to nationalism, to buttress its authority to rule, while it pains to stress that a more open economy would not undermine the preeminence of the party and the party control over society. So for many socialism with Chinese characteristics began to mean that the party can justify within reason almost anything. Indeed, one Peking University professor, Jiang Shigong, boiled down the usage of the term under Xi Jinping to basically be synonymous with party leadership and whatever the party said. So we do see the shift from the promotion of patriotism, nationalism to what we've seen more recently, this phenomenon of what people refer to as wolf warriors. So following the 1989 demonstrations and following the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, patriotic education was intensified for all students. Inevitably, this led the public to adopt more critical views of Japan, the old foe, and also more critical views of the United States, the new foe. If you look at the training box around this period of time that were used for students, it's quite clear that much of the criticism to build up the sense of patriotism was dovetailed with criticisms of Japan and the United States. But still, others recognized the need for deeper change if the Chinese Communist Party was to avoid the fate of the Soviets. It created a watershed moment in debates between those who favored ideological and economic orthodoxy and those who wanted to explore authoritarian rule combined with a more deregulated market-oriented economy. I think that latter group viewed themselves as neoconservatives, patriotic modernizers, descending from those of the late 19th century. And they stressed that moving forward, the party should draw on China's broader history and traditions, as well as those of its own revolution. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party could now focus on the Chinese-ness of its own revolution and stress the peculiarities of China to persuade people that only socialism can save China. But of course, as a number of students pointed out at the time, perhaps it was that only China could save socialism. So this brand of socialism that they were talking about would combine the best elements of traditional socialism and the innovations of its applications to China. I think very important this was the seminal piece which was written by a group of these neoconservatives, realistic responses and strategic choices. And it promoted the shift towards carefully guided economic reform under an authoritarian political structure. And that structure would then prevent the possibility of social dislocation leading to chaos. But it did talk about the fact that the party should move on from the methods that have been used to gain power as the party transitioned from a revolutionary to a ruling organization, something that was picked up later by Vice President Sun Qinghong when he talked about this need to shift from revolutionary to ruling party. What it meant was winding down the use of some of the populist measures and mass campaigns to implement policies that had an emphasis on class struggle. And whatever was useful in both the traditional and the present order would be adopted. And when appropriate, some best economic practices from the West, such as judicious use of markets could be introduced gradually. It's important because those writers are among the generation that rules China today and I think has influenced those ruling China today. However, what we do see as the nation has grown more economically powerful, I would say that elite and public perceptions of the West have become more critical. In here, I think the 2008, 2009 global financial crisis was crucial in that process. And it led to a questioning of the West's economic model and the general competence of the West and perhaps more of a belief that China was getting it right with what it has done. And that was part of and laid the further basis, I think for a more assertive form of nationalism, which of course finds strong support amongst online activists within society. As I said earlier, the nationalism is aided by the fact that the revolution was homegrown and not imported with Soviet hell as much as was the case in Eastern and Central Europe. We can argue about whether it would have survived without the Soviets, which I think is an interesting point to debate. But that history not only permitted the Chinese Communist Party grade of flexibility with domestic policy, but it also has informed its global stance. And the CCP came to rely even more than in the past on itself told history of humiliation at the hands of the foreigners to enhance its legitimacy. And that provided the party with a persuasive narrative independent of the Soviet Union, whose collapse as we know is obsessed Chinese leaders right down to Xi Jinping. In fact, shortly after his appointment, Xi Jinping asked why had the Soviet Union collapsed? And when he answered his own question, he stated it was because they wavered in defending their ideals and convictions. And for Xi in the end, nobody was a real man. Nobody came out to resist. So drawing on China's own traditions facilitates a strong argument for Chinese exceptionalism. It underpins the promotion of pride in the party's achievements. And it's a source of nationalist sentiment. That inheritance of course, also necessitates maintaining territorial integrity, a territory that is based on the late Qing dynasty and is about the most expansive in Chinese history. He finds borders with Tibet, Xinjiang, and of course justifies that Taiwan must be reunited with the mainland. So as you all seen in the news recently over the last year or two, CCP's more aggressive stance is best revealed by the maneuvers in the East-South China Seas, the passage of the national security law in Beijing that will govern Hong Kong and the rise of that assertive wolf warrior diplomatic corps. The dual assertion of China's success and its mistreatment of foreign hands has led to a more aggressive breed of Chinese diplomats who are not afraid to criticize those countries within which they are posted. And that's what people refer to as this new generation of wolf warrior diplomats who appeal to the strident nationalist voices within China and issuing polite diplomatic language. They aggressively counter comments they deal to be anti-China, often using pithy statements encouraged by the diplomats access to Facebook and Twitter, both of which of course banned in China. That approach I think was given a seal of approval in May this year by the Chinese foreign minister when he noted that China would push back against deliberate insults and resolutely defend its national honor and dignity. I think it also dates back to Xi Jinping's talks at the last work conference on foreign affairs when he made it very, very clear that China's foreign policy bureaucrats would not work as a bureaucratic force in international engagement, but they were first and foremost party members and therefore should reflect clearly the attitudes of the Chinese Communist Party. So we saw these criticisms from the diplomats pushing back, but there is a question about how effective it has been. And I think certainly that style of diplomacy may have been met with approval amongst nationalist circles. Some of those more traditional foreign ministry bureaucrats have been much more cautious and the international affairs academic community has also expressed caution or at least part of it. They have warned that those more aggressive responses may play well at home, but they're damaging China's reputation globally. In that recent, I think it was Pew survey looking at positive negative attitudes that China and a number of countries clearly reflects the increase in negative views moving forward. So history, of course, has always played an important role in the party's justification for its rule and the party has ensured this in two particular ways. First, official history is constructed to place the party and its leaders at the center of all that is good. And second, more recently, the CCP has appropriated elements from China's tradition that are useful to its rule. And although the leadership has never abandoned its faith in Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought, it has recognized, I think, that that ideology is insufficient in the eyes of many. And with those traditional mechanisms of legitimacy eroding, the parties are sorted not only to the nationalism, which I mentioned just now, but also to claims that it is the rightful inheritor of the Chinese tradition. Vice President Wang Qishan has stated that the party's legitimacy is derived from its history and is determined by popular support. So the party devotes considerable resources to ensuring that the correct history is presented to the people. There's a large coterie, as you know, of official historians working in an extensive network of party and state-funded institutions. And a crucial part of Mao Zedong's legitimacy was derived from his narrative of China's fall at the hands of the imperialists, the rapacious landlords, and the compredor bourgeoisie, and then of course of the redemption of China once the party saved the country from dismemberment and ruin. And Xi Jinping's narrative follows a similar theme intended to complete the unfinished objective of fulfilling the China dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. And Xi Jinping, of course, is just the latest leader who has taken to heart George Orwell's adage, who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past. Xi's criticism of historical nihilism seeks to eliminate writing that challenges official party history. And I think as the party has gained confidence under Xi Jinping, the memories of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution have faded. And of course, many of those alive today are unclear about the details. And so official history that we've seen backing away from previous critical analysis. One of the most obvious examples is the claims that actually very few people died from famine or other causes during the Great Leap Forward, for example. So Xi Jinping has warned historians not to dwell on a divide between the years before 1978 and the subsequent years of reform and opening up that came while back. There are not two Chinas under Communist Party rule, just one narrative of struggle and success. Mentions of the tumultuous events of the Cultural Revolution have been deleted, for example, from some new middle school history textbooks, leaderships of journals exploring alternative views of party history have been reorganized, and official publications have taken to referring to that period of the Cultural Revolution as one of arduous exploration and achievement in development, rather than as a massive political upheaval, social turmoil and violence. However, as Elizabeth Perry has argued, this historical legitimacy approach is fraught with problems, particularly as history changes and different leaderships come in and out and explains the party's need to keep a tight grip on the history which is being told. So while CCP leaders use Marxism to justify their rule and policy, its study has made compulsory in all academic institutions as well as media organizations for many in China and perhaps most, one might argue, it seems to bear little relationship to the way life is lived. So rather than providing a critical lens to view society and its development, Marxism was and is used to reinforce obedience to the party and its policies. So there's talk of moral decay, the loss of faith in Marxism, the lingering influence of Western liberal values such as a free press tolerance of a vibrant civil society. The leadership has now then turned to a selective interpretation of traditional culture, especially Confucianism, to bolster the appeal to socialism and to portray the Chinese Communist Party, not the nationalist Guo Mingdong in Taiwan as the true descendants of China's imperial past. Xi Jinping has claimed that the CCP is the genuine successor to China's glorious past. It's quite a remarkable assertion. Of course, we have to remember when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, it took power that it was forming a radical break with the past. It was gonna restructure society, it was gonna restructure the mentality of the socialist person living in China. And of course, that was even more extensive during the Cultural Revolution with the attacks in that period time which was going to destroy the vestiges of a feudal culture. When I first studied in China, it was during the criticized Lim Biao and Confucius campaigns. So to me, it comes as quite a shock when we see in the party now praising certain elements of Confucianism. And of course, it also seeks to undermine credibility for the Guo Mingdong on Taiwan, less so of course, the DPP as not having taken the Chinese tradition to Taiwan but it's still residing on the mainland centered in Beijing. And Xi Jinping though is not the first to trace that heritage and it echoes the populism promoted by his predecessors, Guo Jintao and Jia Bao. Yet Xi Jinping has been more explicit noting that together with other philosophies and cultures, Confucianism was taking shape and growing within China. And such philosophies were spiritual experiences, rational thinking and cultural achievements of the nation while it strived to build its identity. So the notion that the party has inherited and developed good practices and moral principles from the Chinese tradition seeks to anchor CCP legitimacy as the rightful inheritor of all that is good in China's past. So let me just turn for the last set of comments to this question of where the performance legitimacy can save the day. These two pictures here, this one I took back when I was a student in the mid 1970s and here in the distance is this village today. And it's an interesting story of the transition. Steve mentioned the book of Global Markets, Chinese Village or Chinese Village Global Markets about the transition from this vista to the one that we now see on the right. And administratively, this place is still a village even though you won't find much agriculture there. So while the CCP's appeals to ideology, history and culture to justify its rule, Chinese citizens live in the here and now. And I think we'll judge the party on how effective it is in terms of improving their material conditions and especially their life chances with the decline in the appeal of ideology and the party's moral authority, potentially, much of the writing by those of us outside of China has focused on the prime importance of performance legitimacy as the major factor explaining continued CCP rule. Most of that writing has focused on economic performance, maintenance of stability and sovereignty. Now, of course, we all know that the days of high level growth much of which anyway was catch up growth are now over and that is accepted by China's leaders. And they progressively lowered annual growth forecasts to around about 6%. That, of course, in term may overestimate the real economic growth that makes certain assumptions about growth that may be difficult to fulfill. And while COVID, of course, impacted on growth, we do know the economy is reviving relatively swiftly. A longer term challenge might actually be whether the temporary break in global supply chains causes international businesses to look elsewhere for future production. But the Chinese market is gonna remain attractive to foreign businesses. US business sold $250 billion of goods in China in 2018. But concerns have been raised about overalliance on key goods such as medical supplies. But there's a deep intertwining. I noticed there was an American Chamber of Commerce survey not so long ago, which showed that 92% of American businesses did not have an intention to change their production practices with relationship to China. So writers such as the political scientist, Yu-Giao Chu, stresses performance legitimate pragmatic nature with the setting of concrete goals covering, as I said, growth, stability and enhancement of national power. However, Zhu also notes correctly that there is a fragility of legitimacy measures because good performance can wax and wane. Such measures, in my view, are inherently unstable and thus may be insufficient for maintaining power. As such, citizens will grow used to the progress and push the government to perform consistently better to maintain its rule. So the question arises, are the diminishing marginal gains to performance legitimacy? Is it intrinsically unstable because of the concrete promises that are made that might trigger more of a crisis if they're not fulfilled? So if the economy continues to slow and the large ester dispense diminishes, does that mark the end to legitimacy based on economic importance? Here, I think there's an article by Hongxing Yang and Dingxing Zhao, which is very important because they write that the CCP's success is not only reliant on economic performance, but also its social policies. And that's something we have seen in a range of surveys. If we look to look at citizen satisfaction with government performance between 2003 and 2016, at the Ash Center, we analyzed a series of surveys. Now, obviously satisfaction is not the same as legitimacy, but the findings do shed light on the durability, I think, of regime resilience. And the surveys like many others confirm that respondents disaggregate the state and that there's much higher levels expressed to the central levels of government, but it declines progressively as government gets closer to the people. And that's important, of course, because it's the local government which provides the overwhelming amount of public goods and services. And that's where frustration upset is more likely to settle. Having said that though, one thing you will see is that satisfaction with each level of government has essentially improved since 2003. There's a slight blip in 2014 with District County and Village. And I think that is because of frustrations with the initial period of Xi Jinping's rule and particularly where there was a lot of stress on corruption. And we see that that is impacting on the way that citizens are seeing local government. The once corruption becomes more openly talked about, citizens responding to their village or District County level government begin to express greater frustration with their performance at that level. But since 2002, 2003, the Chinese leadership has focused significant attention on social policy reform, which I think might provide the party with deeper and broader support during periods of economic downturn. And such reforms might avert the social volcano that some people have talked about where the poorer members of society and those who have not benefited so well from reforms might rise up to challenge CCP rule. So I think the surveys raise questions about the view that the regime lacks legitimacy and is only held in place by economic growth and the stirring of nationalist sentiment. The findings to me suggest that Chinese citizens are responding positively to the government's attempts to rebalance growth along regional lines and to establish a basic social safety net for the country's most vulnerable citizens. And so if we look at where has the increase in satisfaction come from? Well, the highest level of increased satisfaction have actually occurred amongst populations that many have identified as potential hotspots for unrest and dissatisfaction. Over time, there's been an increase in the satisfaction levels of the lowest income groups, as you can see here, suggesting that the Hu Jintao and Yabao policies to redress the disadvantages of those who had not fared so well from the economic reforms did actually have an impact. And those policies, of course, as I've written about in one of the books that Steve mentioned, these policies included reviving the cooperative medical insurance scheme in the countryside where coverage had collapsed to just two or 3% in the 1990s and providing minimum living support payments to low income urban and rural dwellers. But there is also a regional effect in this process. Individuals living in the periphery, the west, the central, northeast areas also expressed greater increase in government satisfaction than those individuals living in the core coastal regions. Again, this attests to the impact of government policy that has redirected more support and resources to those areas that have not developed as quickly as the eastern coastal parts of the country. And of course, that area just benefited disproportionately from China's opening to international trade and its entry into the World Trade Organization. So of course, past performance is no guide to future development and we should be cautious with any predictions. But the surveys do, I think, raise important questions. One of which is can authoritarian regimes enjoy greater citizen satisfaction with public goods provision than other systems and thus enjoy higher levels for legitimacy? The surveys revealed that persistent inequality and slowing rates of economic growth had not as of 2016, the last area, the last date rather, when the survey was carried out led to increasing levels of dissatisfaction amongst Chinese citizens impact most strongly by reforms. I think this finding has significant implications for future communist party resilience. Thus, while it might be premature to declare the party immune from bottom up resistance, surveys suggest that satisfaction has been rising as I showed amongst lower level income groups and those in the hinterland. And the does remain goodwill toward the central government which is not seen to be associated with the problems that blight the performance of some local governments. However, as we know, seemingly stable authoritarian regimes can quickly unravel and citizen frustration can spill out onto the streets. The Xi Jinping administration has received mixed yet increasingly supportive responses in terms of citizen satisfaction. However, that does cut both ways. The rejection of any meaningful political reform would indicate that without coercion, the administration will remain increasingly reliant on ensuring citizen satisfaction through the provision of public goods and services. I think the leadership is aware of this and as a result, it's attempted to promote patriotism, nationalism and the pride in China's long history to counteract that. This is notwithstanding though, I think understanding citizen satisfaction has never been more important and I think it will prove critical to analyzing Chinese governance and party resilience moving forward. And let me conclude there, Steve. Well, thank you very much Tony for this absolutely fantastic talk which I think you have thrown in a huge amount of insights that are being picked up with the Q&A already. If I may, I would quite like to start off by asking you something that I think is related to your performance, legitimacy, but it's not entirely addressed. Which is that part of the performance legitimacy was based on the fact that practically since the tenement Mexico of 1989, the Communist Party of China had mostly avoided making a major policy mistake that could potentially destabilize the system. It's certainly until a couple of years ago, one can debate a bit more in terms of the more recent path as to whether certain policies would be mistakes, but at least even those have not yet backfired enough to cause a serious problem. That's something I think we need to acknowledge on the one hand. But on the other hand, the part of the systems that enable each to perform so well was because to use the party's language, there was increasing intra-party democracy or to use plain English. The parties they allowed greater and greater scope of internal policy debates since the collapse of communist countries in Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union. And that increasing scope of internal policy debates really helped the party stage the avoid making a policy mistake. And that has now been mostly stopped since the 19-party Congress. We are not seeing anything like the same kinds of internal policy debates any longer. Is this going to significantly witness the capacity of the party stage to avoid making mistakes and therefore secure its performance legitimacy? Yeah, I think this is a really important point, Steve. And I think, yes, I think over time, we're gonna see problems that may come with this over-concentration of power and the reassertion of dominance of the party. I'm answering two parts. I mean, I think the first is, even if you might not agree with it, one can understand why to start with Xi Jinping moved in the way he did. When he took power as a good party person, the situation looked an absolute mess. You just had the big struggle with Bosilai. You had a situation where local governments seemed to be acting on their own behalf. Society seemed to be slipping out of control. Corruption was rampant. And that he felt that the only way to rectify that was reasserting power within the party. And of course, he doesn't really even trust the party. So it's reassigning as much power to the center as possible. And yes, that does mean that a mistake could have ramifications far beyond a system which is more decentralized and that could protect itself. I think the other important aspect of this though is understanding really what contributed to, and I think this lies behind your question, to the progress that China was able to make. And that is that a lot of the dynamism came from local governments and local experimentation. And that has driven forward much of what we've seen in China. It's also true going back into the 1980s as well. Many of what was driving things forward was local experimentation as much as it was central policy guidelines. And I think under Hu Jintao Jiang Zemin, that was a major driving force and she has pushed back against that. And I think it is going to be one of the biggest problems that will that kill the initiative and dynamism, which we've all witnessed across China over that period of time through a much more heavy-handed centralized control. So I do think that is a major threat. And of course it goes hand in hand with Xi Jinping's decisions to abolish term limits on the state presidency. One might argue that at the last plenum, given that it was a plan outlining development to 2035, he might see himself performing in a Deng Xiaoping role of whether it's upfront or behind the scenes controlling the political agenda to 2035. All of that to me creates two sets of problems. One is, will the dynamism slow down? I think we're not only seeing that center local, I think we're seeing that state-owned private business, private sector development. And I think we're seeing it in terms of what you had written about what Andy Nathan had written about in terms of a more institutionalized process for the politics. Does it make succession down the line more unstable? So I agree with you, there are major risks there. Yep. The first question from the audience comes from Duncan Barlett, based in London. And Duncan would like to ask you that that you mentioned that China has a complicated relationship with the idea of the free market. What would you say about the relationship between the CCP and the stock market in Shanghai and Hong Kong? Yeah. I think the current leadership doesn't trust markets that underlies, and we've seen this historically, you get the push forward for greater market influence, greater market input into the allocation of goods and services, including financial services. And then if the private sector is seen to be developing too swiftly, you see a pullback that often the state reasserts its control. The question of the stock markets is a lot more complicated. China, the financial interlocking, say for example, in the US and China runs about five trillion US dollars. It's not easy to unwind. And China has very significant needs for access to global financial markets. There's nothing else that really can offer it that route other than through Hong Kong markets and European and American financial markets. Also in 2019, for the first time for 25 years, China ran a small current account deficit. I think that may well become structural if it hasn't become structural already. So that again is going to enhance the need for access to global financial markets. The domestic financial markets can never become at the present time global players, lack of convertibility of the room in B, interference by government. You talked about mistakes, Steve, one of the mistakes that people often mentioned to me is a couple of years back when they tried to intervene in the stock markets and they made a bad situation even worse with their actions at that particular time. Now, you'll need them as the way businesses do, as a way to operate within China, but that's not gonna help externally with their needs. Hong Kong becomes extremely complicated. This might sound contentious to say, I do believe that in part, China's what might be seen last year during some of the heights of the demonstrations as more of a hands-off engagement, which is certainly not the case any longer, may have been dictated by its concerns about global financial markets operating through Hong Kong. But I think it's assured itself that capital is capital and capital is gonna still keep flowing no matter what China does. And that in fact, global players might respond positively to China's actions. We saw at the Shanghai Financial Conference recently without naming names, certain big international financiers congratulating China on the way it runs things, the way it operates markets and so forth. So it is an incredibly complex relationship. It needs access to those global markets, but it is clear that it wants to control as much as possible in its own hands. But as I said, the domestic markets can really only serve a domestic base. And if you think also about Hong Kong, Shanghai obviously can't take over from that, Shenzhen can't take over from that, but neither can Singapore. Singapore is waiting with different kinds of investment assets from those in Hong Kong. So it's gonna stay a very complex relationship. Okay. We got over 20 questions in the box at the moment. The next one comes from Yves Saint-Thomas, a French professor at the Nafio College in Oxford. And the question is, don't you think that some part of the performance legitimacy induces more than mere output legitimacy? Fight against corruption could also mean fairness. Fight against poverty, social justice, et cetera. Your response, please. Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think that is true. If you look at the surveys from 2003 up to the present, up until the most recent one in 2016, corruption was always highlighted as the government public service that citizens were least satisfied with. And that has shifted. It's still relatively high in terms of dissatisfaction, but I think citizens' opinions and attitudes towards that have been improving. So in that sense, it's not purely output legitimacy. It does generate support within society around social justice, questions and social justice issues. You know, it's from the old Zhang Yimou movie, Judo where, you know, it's the common phenomenon that the person, the husband who gets beaten up in the village, the wife keeps going to higher levels of government, expecting that someone eventually is gonna set it right, that somewhere there is an ethical moral standard for behavior. But of course, in that particular movie, she never gets the kind of satisfaction. So I think what he raises is important. And I think we shouldn't dismiss or denigrate that. That it's not just, I think, the portrayal in the Chinese media of how badly systems have performed in the West, particularly around COVID. I think it is also that some people feel, or many people feel for our survey show, that the government actually is undertaking many of the right actions. And again, if we break up the what are citizens satisfied with, what are citizens dissatisfied with, you see quite clearly that the highest levels of satisfaction are really with those services that the old planning system was good at, building roads, building bridges, constructing schools, providing water, et cetera, et cetera, electricity. Those services that citizens were least satisfied with are those more individual and household-based challenges that they see as products of reform. Unemployment insurance, many of those safety nets having gone away. And that's why I think looking at what the government has been doing in terms of providing those social safety nets, also I think gives it a deeper legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens. Now we can argue that the medical insurance which is provided is very low, but it does cover certain basic needs. The hospitalization you're not gonna be able to afford to cover it if you're a rural dweller out of the insurance. So I think what you raise Eve is an interesting point and an important one that I think Chinese citizens, some of them do appear to be seeing that social justice is being addressed through these policies. Okay, I'll take a discussion in a different direction and then we'll come back to the issue of your legitimacy and resilience. This is a question from an ethnic Chinese person, Pearl Zhang. I will be slightly paraphrasing the question. Essentially what Shu would like to ask you is that hasn't the successful management of the pandemic in China in contrast to the failure of the Western democracies in handling the pandemic, demonstrate that what previously was being seen as the superior democratic systems now failing? If you're talking about most of the Chinese legitimacy performance. Sure, I mean, yeah, it's something which is often raised but what I would say is that Taiwan was extremely successful in controlling COVID and that doesn't have an authoritarian political system. New Zealand has been extremely successful and to a slightly lesser extent, so has Australia. So I think success or failure is not necessarily linked in that sense, a particular political system. And there is no doubt that China had advantages in the way that it could intervene in a way that wouldn't be so acceptable or plausible in a place like the United States. But on the other hand, the cover-up which led to the exposure and the lack of telling truth about it also created the problem in the first place. And to me, going back, thinking about SARS in 2002, 2003 is a very similar playbook where initially local officials sought to cover up the problem. It percolated up the system, there was denial but then once there was acceptance, the authorities in Beijing moved quite swiftly to control the measures. The one difference there I would say though was that there was greater cooperation between Beijing and the international health community and the American CDCs and the European institutions that had been the case previously and that has been the case currently. Now in part, of course, that is through U.S. faulting but not 100% entirely. So yeah, it's a common refrain, a system enables us to respond more quickly to disasters in a more effective way than others. I think going back to Steve's point, it's also true that if a mistake is made, it's probably more calamitous and disastrous than many other systems because you don't have those kinds of self-correcting measures. And the other point, as I said, some places have been extremely successful in a democratic environment in actually bringing a situation under control that might throw in Japan as well. Right, next question comes from Norman Stockmans from I think, Aberdeen. Could another factor underlying to performance legitimacy be sheer competence? Frank Peaker, for example, in his study of a party school was deeply impressed by the quality of the training of card rates. Over to you. Yeah, you know, I ran training programs for senior Chinese government officials for about 15 years, and I still teach at the Shanghai Party School, they're rising young officials. And there's no doubt they're extremely impressive. I do think there is a very high level of competence, the rigor, the training they go through for dealing with many everyday challenges. And to some extent, you know, the challenge of who gets the blame when the waste doesn't get collected from the street is not dissimilar in Europe or America than it is in China. And they're quite inventive and quite effective. Again, I think it goes back to the point though of does the become a barrier to effective policy analysis when the pressure comes down from the center about what is an absolute line that you must follow and how does that impact on your local community? I think it also relates to the things Steve said earlier that, you know, in Chinese is the phrase Yi Daoqie cutting with one knife. And where the party has always been very successful, I think, is where it's allowed that flexibility around policy implementation and allowing those well-trained local officials not to go against the party but to actually apply general principles and policies to what is most effective in their own particular administrative jurisdiction. And that has worked very well. Where the parties come in and often issued directives that you must shift to this or you must shift to that, that is usually where it's created significant problems, I would say. But yes, on the whole, officials are very competent. The one problem I think with the system is an authoritarian one-person role in the center often transfers down the system to a one-person rule at local levels. And that can work extremely well or it can work extremely badly. You know, I've been to local villages, local towns, local districts that have fantastic local leaders who've really done good things to the citizens under their jurisdiction. I've also been to areas where very bad local leaderships where local citizens really have no recourse against them where the outcomes have been very negative for the people living within that community. The next questions come from Kendrick Chan. And the question is that what do you think inference the positive perceptions that some overseas Chinese members of the diaspora have of the Communist Party? Is it still performance legitimacy or is there some other explanation? Why overseas Chinese are so positive? I don't know is the obvious answer to that. I'm not a member of that community. I think the first thing is what is our definition of overseas Chinese? I think people from Hong Kong, people from Taiwan, people from other countries in Southeast Asia who might be classified as overseas Chinese might have a different idea about the popularity of the regime in Beijing. If we're just focusing it on those who've come from People's Republic of China. Yes, I think on the whole from everything I see there is a relatively popular perception. I think it comes from the fact that yes China seems to perform well. I think that's been reinforced by the response to COVID after the initial outbreak where other countries in Europe and America may not have been seen to be performing as well. I also think that probably although overseas Chinese can answer better than I that there is a pride in the nationalism related to China's progress. I was a student in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. And if anybody had said to me in 10 years, 15 years, 22 years, China would be like this. I would have said you're crazy. And I think so for many Chinese people who are what, 45, 50, younger, they've only seen progress. And you know, in enhanced living standards you can get your own passport, you can choose who you marry, you can choose if you wanna travel. And those for many people at a personal level are very significant elements of progress. Not the same for everybody in China of course but for a very significant number. It is true. So I think it is a mixture of that progress, that performance I think, and you know, combined with the kinds of messages that are sent from Beijing, it produces a relatively powerful mix. Okay. The next questions comes from Jonathan Fembe in London. Does performance legitimacy lead to self-reliance and decoupling from the West? I think the answer is no with a codicil or two. Jonathan and all the others, I mean, you'll know that the mantra now is dual circulation that less reliance on the global economy, more reliance on the domestic. And there's obvious reasons for that. The trade war with the US, the idea that decoupling is moving ahead. The fact that maybe trade will not pick up afterwards vulnerabilities. Say you wanna produce your own semiconductors rather than having to bring them from the US. But is decoupling a realistic option? And there in a classic academic answer, I would say it depends. And it depends what element of decoupling you're looking at. If you break it out, decoupling is easier in certain areas than others. It's quite clear that China is going to come, try and become less dependent on the West in trading area. I think the reason it's signed on in January to the trade agreement with the Trump administration was to buy time to be able to diversify its trading patterns so that it could move back from that. It's heavily reliant on the trade. Although the US has vulnerabilities, 88% of mobile phones are produced in China, 90 plus percent of laptop computers. If you look at FDI, it's dropping both ways in and out. But the point I made earlier in terms of financial markets, I think that is impossible to decouple. AI and digital currency, I think are gonna become the two fascinating things to look at. And that's already putting pressure on a lot of Southeast Asian countries. And of course it's bringing up politics in the European Union as it has in America about can you run a Chinese system and a Western system when it comes to internet access and online services? I think one area where China's gonna push very hard is digital currency. It knows it cannot replace the dollar in trade, physical trade, even though swaps are increasing, settling in, premium B is becoming more practical. It's not gonna replace the dollar, but it might be able to get a head start in digital currency. So performance legitimacy, I think is going to have to include selective elements of engagement globally rather than representing a pure turn to inward driven development and consumption. Although as I suggested that we're playing an increasing role. Consumption only went up as a percentage of GDP, GDP by about 2% over the last decade. So despite that massive increase in consumption, it still means state investment is even greater. Okay. The next two questions come from two students from the United States. The first one is from Jess in Massachusetts and it comes via the Facebook link. The question is, what possible ramifications do you see in the overseas criticism of the CCP's inhumane treatment of the Uighur Muslims? I suppose it depends whether one means internationally or domestically. I mean, I don't think domestically it is going to alter the course of Chinese Communist Party policy. We have seen of course, attempts at responses by saying, no, no, no, no, these are for education. Therefore purposes that are going to provide these people with better jobs, so on and so forth. I mean, I think related to this, the essential point is I talked about history and the correct telling of history and narrative becomes very important. And you see that those places in China that have a separate narrative or story to tell about themselves are very problematic for a Communist Party based in Beijing to accept. So Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia recently, Hong Kong, Taiwan, where there's an external point of reference that's independent of the Communist Party narrative. It has always been very problematic for the party to deal with that. And it's often included repression, as we see currently. It is often included the belief that economically these problems can be developed away and you see continually in PRC, CCP publications, comments about how much they've invested in these areas and why aren't they more grateful? But we also know in other cases around the world where there is a different identity set, it often doesn't overcome these sort of fixtures, sorry, these frictions and fissures with the other communities. Internationally, the response on the whole has been relatively weak. I think it would only operate if there was a strong international coalition protesting about this. But then the question is, what can really be done in the international community to push back? I'm not really sure what those measures might be. Okay, this question come from a Chinese student at Harvard, he's an economist. You mentioned that economic growth cannot legitimize the regime in the long run. Since people tend to get used to the growth and growth may fade. Now that the party has been shifting people's attention from growth to nationalism, do you think that such a nationalistic approach can survive in the long run? Or perhaps people would also eventually become less excited about nationalism? In other words, does marginal is utility applied in the case of nationalism in China? It's a good economist phrase. The last sentence, I add this to it, sorry. Okay, all right. I never knew you were an economist, Steve. No, I'm not. I thought that was really where the question was driving at. No, no, I understand, yeah. Yeah, growth is slowing, but the question is, is there sufficient growth? And I think the answer to that is how the growth is distributed across the country. And there is a problem there related, and it goes back in part to the questions of decoupling in a sense that for consumption to really keep driving the economy, you need to redistribute some of the benefits of the growth to those populations that have not benefited so strongly to dent. And that's a political question. That's a political challenge. And will the kind of elites and the urban elites accept that or not? Under the current system, other current structures, it seems maybe it will not. So I think it's more a question of how the growth is distributed rather than the levels of growth. The Chinese economy, if it doesn't make a mistake, can keep ticking along for quite a period of time, quite acceptably. The nationalism issue is an important one. And nationalism, of course, is prevalent in many countries. If it's patriotism, that's one thing. If it turns into more of a xenophobic nationalism, that's quite a different issue. And I think it's also tricky for the Communist Party to deal with because if you stir up the emotions of nationalism, they can be very difficult to tamp down again. And if you look at this over a period of time, in the 1990s, for example, when I was living in Beijing, the anti-Japanese and the anti-American demonstrations which were taking place pushed or supported at least by the government because they knew students were gonna come out on the streets and others, they very quickly wanted to shut them down once citizens started saying, you're not nationalistic or tough enough. And they got very frightened about what the possible consequences of that. So it's both sides in answer to your question of whether the sort of enthusiasm around nationalism fades away as a mobilizing force or whether citizens in China push the government hard to be stronger, more vocal and more aggressive nationalists. So I think there's dangers on both sides of that proverbial coin. Right. The next question comes from Christian Patterson. There's a lack of transparency inside China and it provides distorted narrative of the domestic and international reality. How do we evaluate the authenticity or objectivity of satisfaction survey? Somebody else also asked questions about the survey data and given that Western opinion polls really are not very reliable at the moment, how do we know such surveys are reliable? Yeah, that's an important question. Not surprisingly, it's one we get all the time. Can you trust them? I would say two or three comments on that is that virtually all the surveys, whether they're done by people within China or they're done by people outside of China tend to tell the same story of dissatisfaction and lower level government, higher satisfaction with the central government. Now the central government satisfaction, if you break it out between extremely satisfied and somewhat satisfied, you see a different set of figures. The extremely satisfied is much lower, right? I forget the exact figures, maybe 35% or something. And the kind of mama hoo hoo, yeah, okay, we're sort of satisfied is a much larger block of that level of satisfaction. I do think there, there may be inconsistencies on a positive side. It might be that people genuinely believe the central government cares for them. Look at all the legislation's been passing, look at all the measures it's been passing. If I don't get those benefits, it must be because something is going wrong at the local level. It's the classic example that, if only the emperor knew what was happening down here, they would do something about it. The other side of it is, and when we've done qualitative follow-up, you often get the response, well, what's the point complaining about the central government? Yes, it could get you in trouble and they're far away anyway. I do think that the responses to what they see about specific surveys are probably pretty accurate because some of them express extremely high levels of dissatisfaction. Now, you might be claiming they're inaccurate. The levels of dissatisfaction are even higher, but that would be quite extraordinary because on certain services, they're very high. What we did was to try and counteract that. We asked people to rate satisfaction with, or the people doing it, rate satisfaction with the survey. And then later we asked how important did they think a particular public good or service was. And then you get some interesting correlations which get to the heart of your question, reliable or not. While it was still enforced, family planning was always rated as one of the highest levels of satisfaction with government service. It was a priority. Why say you're not satisfied could only get you in trouble. When you switched it and asked how important it was as a service for government to be engaged in, it fell to the bottom. The citizens really thought this on the whole thought this was not something for government to be involved in. So we had kind of countermeasures to look at where we thought some of these lack of authenticity might come about. And I think like a lot of things coming out of China, I would never dare say any of this is 100% accurate, but it does give you a sense of trends over time. And I think those trends are realistic as far as I would say or suggest. Okay. Next question comes from Joan Kaufman. I hope it is not the last question that we can fit in but we'll see. She refers to Scott Rossell's new book which suggests that the poor level of rural education plus the aging population is going to be a big problem for China in keeping up with the knowledge economy. What is your view on the risk? Well, there you go. What is your view on the risk for the possibility that increasing inequality will be a big risk for the party resulting from rising discontent from the half notes? Yeah, well, the answer what we've seen so far is it hasn't been the kind of problem that many people thought it might be or claimed it would be. Mighty King's Whites surveys have also dismissed this idea that there's a rumbling social volcano underneath. And certainly the work that we've looked at also as I said in the presentation also doesn't show that dissatisfaction. Although I just waved Scott and Natalie's book I haven't actually read through it yet but I do trust Scott's work and Scott's observations. He's been one of the best observers of what has really been happening in rural China. I do think what it is going to lead to is a very significant section of the population that's going to be excluded. Particularly if you look at China's made in China 2025 program and this whole role of trying to lift up the production processes and the quality of production. So without that investment into education and training for those communities, they really are going to be left behind. It for me paints into one of the scenarios that I see for China's future, which is one perhaps like Latin America pre some of its democratization and engagement where you have quite an authoritarian elite which is globally engaged and benefiting globally with an urban rising middle class which is benefiting well from international engagement as well as the domestic consumption processes but fearful of a group which is left behind in the hinterland and the rural areas and maybe the urban poor and that you get a rhetoric around which we see from the Communist Party at the moment about the necessity for stability and that needs more support for coercive apparatus. And it's an important question and one we'll have to look out for. And hi, John, by the way, hope everything's okay. Thanks, Tony. I think we've got about two minutes or so left. Let me try to squeeze in one last question from the continent, from Heidelberg, Germany, Cornelius, Reinsberg. The question is that having stressed the pragmatic nature of performance legitimacy as opposed to the appeal of nationalist ideology. Won't you agree that ideology still influences the way people assess government performance as it says for both the agenda and the criteria for what should be considered a successful implementation of that very agenda? Yeah, this is a really important question and it's something we tend to ignore because often people outside of China dismiss the idea of ideology even though we all work with different ideologies. And I do think that is true to certain extents that I don't know if it's the ideology but certainly socialism, it would operate in two different ways. One, by retaining the adherence by the party to socialism, it sets constraints about the realms of the possible in terms of reform. And it re-emphasizes things like the investment by the state, the role of state on enterprises and it has very definite consequences in terms of redistributive politics. So that's one aspect of it. I do think it's interesting what you say that citizens may well assess their government in terms of what the government is saying is going to do for them. And if it's stressing sort of equity principles, socialist principles, that I think maybe shows through in our surveys that the government is saying is going to address these policy inconsistencies, can call it social justice if you like, that the moment people feel that objective is being met and their satisfaction as a result is increasing. And so in that sense, it's not so much ideology as it is sort of policy statements or policy indicators that the party is saying it's going to conform to. Having said all of that, I still do believe that many people in China, and again, depending where you are, there's huge differences say between the Northeast and the South of China. Many people in the Northeast who grew up with a stronger socialist planning apparatus and approach I think is still sympathetic to many of those claimed socialist ideals. Those in Shenzhen, Guangdong may have a different perspective about what they want to see from the party moving forward. But it's a really interesting point to Cornelius that you raise. Well, thank you very much Tony Professor Sage for an absolutely fantastic evening of conversations with people from many different parts of the world. And regrettably, I have to draw this webinar to a close with apologies to many of you who have raised questions that I have not been able to fit into the framework of time that we have. And thank you all very much. And I bid you good evening, good day, wherever you are. Thanks, Steven. Thanks for the questions, everybody. Take care, everyone. Thanks, goodbye.