 Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Australian Centre on China and the World. And I'd also, just before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and to especially acknowledge the knowledge and custodianship of their elders past and present. I'm not going to have a lot to do this evening. The people down here are those who are going to do the work for you tonight. But I would just like to say one or two words before we begin. This is an extraordinary evening. This is a wonderful celebration. We are acknowledging and celebrating our friend, our colleague, our fellow traveller, Luigi Tomba and his wonderful success in winning the Levinson Prize for his work. This is a really major achievement and I would just like to add personally that, of course, this prize indicates that Luigi is a great scholar but he's also a great person and it's a pleasure and an honour to work with him and the prize could not have gone to a better recipient as far as I am concerned. Now my role will end in a moment. John Unger will take over the officiating but first, for those of you who don't know John, I'll just say one or two words about him. It's very apposite that John should be taking over this evening because he is one of the great scholars of modern and contemporary China in his generation himself. He has been editor of the China Journal for 18 years, one of the absolutely top rated journals in contemporary Chinese studies across the world. He's been head of the Contemporary China Centre of this university for many years. I'm a member of the Bell School and particularly apposite on this occasion, John was chair of the Levinson Selection Committee in two separate years. So there are very few people who know more about the ins and outs of the Levinson process and what it means to win a Levinson Prize than John Unger. So thanks John. I'll hand over to you and thank you everybody for coming. I hope you have a lovely evening. To be awarded a Levinson Prize is indeed a very major international accomplishment. It's international in the sense that it is organized by the China Council of the Association for Asian Studies. That is the Asian Studies Association for North America, but it is so large that and its activities are so diverse that it's actually the international organization for the world in Asian Studies. And so it is very much of an international prize, not given from within specifically any given country. Since there are no other major, major awards like this, I guess in the field of modern China Studies is the closest we get to a Nobel, which is of course also awarded once a year. There are actually two Levinson's. There is one for modern China Studies, which is defined as beginning in the year 1900 and one for traditional China Studies. That is pre-20th century. And it is named after Joseph Levinson, who was an eminent historian of China, whose life was cut off in late middle age in a boating accident. And the modern China Levinson Award covers a very wide array of books. It includes the last period of the Qing dynasty, includes historical works on public and China, literature going all the way back for more than a century, books in every form of every social science discipline, every humanities discipline, all types of books on contemporary China, books on Taiwan, books on Hong Kong. It's a wide field that he won within. And it is a surprisingly large field. Believe it or not, several hundred books are published every year in this area of modern China Studies. And of course, a committee cannot look at several hundred books. So the way it works is that each publisher is invited to submit what the publisher's editors are convinced are the one or two best books that they published that year on modern China. And the committee therefore receives somewhere between 40 and 50 books. And they have been pre-selected for their excellence, and for the most part, they are very good. And one or two members will read all the books in an initial cut, and then the whole committee will read the final short list of eight to ten books. And those eight to ten books, I think anyone who has served on that committee knows, are just surprisingly good. And each time, you just don't expect to be that many books in a year that are that good. And there's lots of emailing back and forth, and then a short short list. This goes on for months until there's a consensus. In the two years that I served on it, it was unanimous that one book is simply plainly supreme. And that was Luigi's, among a whole number of excellent books. I mean, it is, you know, having served on the committee, I recognize it's more of a prize than you think it is. And I've read the book, in fact, that I've read it twice when it first came out, and within the last two weeks. And I very much believe that it really deserved it. It reserved this prize. It's based on a vast amount of astute research over decade. And more than that, I think more than most books, it is analytical and highly conceptual. And it does something which I think is relatively rare. I think a whole number of books try to be analytical and try to bring in theory from various aspects of social science. But it usually doesn't work. And I think in Luigi's case it does. He brings it in where it's apt and does it in very plain understandable English. He weighs the extent to which it is appropriate and helps to illuminate it, what he's discussing. And it makes for an intellectual and a very enjoyable read. And I'm sure that the other members who are sitting up here would agree with me on this. I won't go into the contents. I'm supposed to be speaking briefly to start us off and others will be going into some of this. But I just like to point out that one of the strongest points is that it's not on a single topic, as it were, although it focuses on the neighborhood. But rather it uses that as a vehicle to explore a number of the most debated and most important topics in contemporary China. It provides an entirely new angle on state society relations in China, one that I have not seen before. And that is something that I write on. And also a whole new way of seeing how China is governed at the grassroots. It explores the rise of new classes in China. And China is one of those very few places where we really can see within a period of just a few decades the rise of new classes. And it does that very coagently. It examines the rise in China of a new type of city planning. And the implications and results of that are reshaping and incredibly reshaping of the physical and the social landscape of urban China. And of the rise of class based neighborhoods and communities where there had not been before. It examines the organization of grassroots self organized organizations, the conflicts within the neighborhoods they become involved with, and it helps to provide an answer to the issue of whether civil society is emerging in China. I could go on, but I am supposed to speak briefly. There are other major themes, one of which Christian will be elaborating on. Each of us will be talking briefly in turn in order to leave a lot of time for discussion. First, Nicholas Lubert will give a short description of what the book is about, what the main themes are. And Nick is a postdoctoral fellow here at CIW during the CIW auditorium. He studies issues of Chinese development and particularly rural issues. He will be followed by Christian Serace, who will spend several months, several minutes, briefly analyzing a couple of aspects of Luigi's work. Christian is also a postdoc fellow at CIW. He has a forthcoming book, in fact with Cornell University Press, about the Sichuan earthquake and about the politics surrounding it in its aftermath. I've read some of his writing on this, and it was on this particular, what I've read is on how after the earthquake, the party sought to maintain the ways in which it sought to maintain and bolster its legitimacy. And this is also one of the themes of Luigi's book, and so they were actually writing in different ways on a parallel theme. He will be followed by Qian Lin Liang. Lin Liang is a PhD student of one of Luigi's PhD students. He has just returned last week from a long fieldwork experience in a Chinese city. And so he will be able to speak from that perspective of his own experience and how that, you know, from within China, having read the book in China and his feelings on it. And then Luigi will have a few words to say. And after that, we will, as you can see, we're like a television, a television chat show. We will engage, we will make the attempt to interest you by engaging in discussion of some of these major themes and analyses that appear in Luigi's book. And then, of course, we will open the floor to you for both a whole, hopefully a sufficiently long period of questions and comments. Thank you. So without further ado, here is Nicholas LeBatt. Thanks, John. Well, I know you've all read the book in great detail. So I probably don't really need to provide a synopsis. You didn't just come here for the free drinks and food, but perhaps just to be safe, I will provide a brief overview of the book. And maybe we can start with how Luigi defines the book himself. In a recent interview, he said, the government next door is a book about Chinese residential neighborhoods, the numerous conflicts that take place in them, and the ways in which the Chinese government governs an increasingly private society. Classic tomba understatement. I think with the award of the Levinson, we can now take this a bit further and confidently state that the book, through an examination of neighborhood life, provides a rare glimpse into the inner dynamics of contemporary China's dramatic socio-political transformation, and allows us to make sense of the contradictions and paradoxes that seem to define this transformation at every turn. The book is based on a set of political ethnographies, which Luigi conducted over 10 years. The project began as a search for the fabled urban middle class, who were, by all accounts, destined to turn China into a liberal democracy with a thriving civil society. So Luigi started by living in well-off neighborhoods in Beijing, before moving on to Chengdu, and finally Shenyang, in China's Rust Belt, where he examined industrial communities that had been negatively impacted by the restructuring of China's state-owned enterprises. These experiences of living in the diversity of contemporary China revealed something important. While different types of neighborhoods are governed in very different ways, they are all nevertheless intensely governed by the party state. So Luigi uses the five chapters of the book to illustrate how the rationalities of this governance are manifested in different contexts, through social clustering, micro-governing, social engineering, constrained contention, and exemplarism. In short, Luigi's findings demonstrate that the members of the emerging property-owning middle class are not releasing themselves from the shackles of authoritarian government, as many predicted. Rather, the government next door turns conventional thinking about the direction of China's socio-political development on its head. Instead of bringing about the fall of the regime, the privatization of urban housing and the emergence of an educated and affluent property-owning middle class has strengthened the party's legitimacy and ability to rule. This is partly because this emergent middle class is not a coherent group of people with shared interests and uniform goals. This non-class of property owners is atomized and locked away within their separate gated communities. Moreover, these groups, through their ownership of property, are heavily invested in the state, albeit to different extents. Therefore, while conflict is continuous throughout the book, it takes place behind the closed doors of gated communities, and within, as Luigi puts it, arenas of contention that are framed by discourses restricting fundamental critique of the Chinese government or the socio-political system operating in China today. In this way, China's contemporary urban neighborhoods have been enlisted in a project of consensus building, which has thus far consolidated party power and authority. So, Luigi, based on this hopefully relatively accurate depiction of your work, I was hoping you could elaborate in your comments a bit more on the issue of the atomized middle class. The specter of this coming popular uprising that seems to dominate depictions of China's political future. I'm not asking you to become some sort of pseudo-fortune teller, the likes of which are quite common in the field of Chinese studies, but perhaps you could discuss some of the disparate forms of protest, contestation, and struggle that you outline in the book, and reflect on the types of scenarios that would be required for them to break out of the gated communities, both discursively and physically, and coalesce into wider movements. So, with that, I will pass it on to Lin Mian. Thank you for attending this book event at the only Chinese phase on the stage. I will take the responsibility to talk about the Chinese reception of Luigi's book in China. I was doing my fieldwork for my PhD project in China when I heard Luigi receive the prize, and I shared the news with my friends on WeChat. WeChat is a Chinese messaging communication app. A friend from our news agency saw the new information and wanted to write a piece to introduce Luigi and his book to the Chinese audience. Once this piece was published, several Chinese publishing houses came to me and asked me if Luigi had an interest to publish the book in Chinese, have a Chinese translation, and Luigi said yes. So now there are several Chinese publishing houses now containing the Cornell University Press for the copyrights. So, also for this reason, Luigi asked me to talk about the Chinese reception of the book. That forced me to do research on the responses and the reflections from the Chinese audience. Certainly, I book on the Livingston Prize, which is a prize that is very well-known in China, and especially among the Chinese intellectuals. So, it draws much attention, but the Chinese audience does not stop by knowing Luigi's name, but starting to relate his ideas to the social issues and the social events in contemporary China. I will show several cases that some Chinese scholars and intellectuals discuss about Luigi's idea. One is the new modes of grassroots governance in urban districts. In Beijing, nowadays, there are a group of local people known as the Chaoyang masses and the Xicheng older ladies. They are said to be the volunteers for the state to monitor the local situations and the social stability. Once they find people who feel suspicious, for example, by insects, stealing, and so on, they will report to the police. And many of these older ladies are retired or lay-off workers. And they are now mobilized by the state to manage the local society. Some readers refer to this group as the community cultures, Luigi has mentioned in his book, and explains their rationale in participating in the local state governance. And the second issue, you can also see the recent Chinese book review come out by relating Luigi's idea to the Chaoyang masses and the Xicheng older ladies. And here is the book review on the right hand. And the second issue is the recent policy change on the gay community in China. This year, actually last month, February 22, the Chinese government launched a new policy saying that no more gay community will be built in China and the existing gay community will be subject to reconstruction, so as to broaden the roles for public use. And certainly there are some speakers who are supporting the government, but it also draws many criticisms. Some argue that this new policy is against the property law and the threatened quality of life of the house owners. And more importantly, you can see here, the argue that express the independence and the autonomy of the house owner community, which actually Luigi has discussed at the round in his book. Some Chinese commenters build on Luigi's argument and anticipate that there may be an urban governance transition in the way that the middle class style governance at this distance will collect and the working class style direct governmental control will become dominant in China. And here is another article that relates Luigi's idea to the current debate. However, there are also some different opinions regarding to Luigi's idea. One, for example, one I find interesting is that from the Chinese audience is the government's sudden launch of the new policy puzzles me. If the self-governance of house owners is an intentional choice for the government to rule the Chinese middle class and the strategy runs well, why does the government suddenly abandon it? And the audience comment that I feel that probably the government in fact did not pay much attention to the gay community before and now it finds this community is difficult to rule so it wants to break them down. So there may be not a clear class divide between the middle class and the working class governance. And another question is about whether these house owners are forces or democratic forces. They ask house owners are said to be politically conscious and they are in line with the government discourse and the defense of the self-interest are usually constrained within the gay communities. So they are not filled as the democratic force as taken in western societies but the new national policy wants to swap out all the gay communities and they are actually seriously violent, the old house owners' rights. So can we expect those un-democratic people to cooperate and step out the gays and become democratic in the light of the new policy? And lastly, apart from the above debates, by discussing the Chinese reception I shall return to the media exposure on Luigi and his book as a prize winner. You can see the online website and they can also be read on the Chinese mobile app. On the left is one of the most popular online media in China and in the middle the Scientologist research is popular among domestic Chinese scholars. And several days ago my friend sent me on the last page I found that Luigi was also reported by a study abroad research group. I guess Luigi may receive much more PhD application from China in the next few years. Thank you. I'm very honored to have a chance to say a few words about Luigi Tomba's The Government next door. And I would like to use this opportunity to talk about some of the important contributions Luigi makes to how we think about approach and engage in research of China. So it might be helpful to begin with a list of things the book is not about. As Luigi states in the introduction, quote, this book is not interested in providing yet another answer to the question of whether, when, and how China will democratize, end quote. This book is not telling a story in which economic reform gives rise to a middle class whose material and spiritual aspirations, naturally, spontaneously if you will, translate into the demands for civil society and more political freedoms, however those freedoms are construed. What we are looking for and what we are trained to see when researching China, imperceptibly if not often directly shapes the data we gather, the data we do not gather because it doesn't appear on our radar, how we interpret it and the conclusions at which we arrive. Therefore I want to emphasize how thankful I am and how thankful we should be that Luigi does not ask these questions. And instead sets about looking into the nooks and crannies of urban space at local governing practices, rationalities, and discourses. Since I only have a few minutes, I will limit myself to one example, as John mentioned, an example that I work on my, a topic that I work on myself, of how the book contributes to redefining some of the core concepts in the study of Chinese politics and that concept I would like to talk about today is legitimacy. So here too Luigi does not approach legitimacy as an abstract question of political regime type or from the assumption that people in China inwardly ask themselves is my political system legitimate. I mean to be frank how many people even think in those terms outside of abstract academic exercises and formulations. Instead Luigi approaches political legitimacy as something that is produced and ongoing in people's everyday practices, habits of living, and ways of speaking about their lives. So one of the important mechanisms analyzed in Luigi's book is how people's personal desires, how their aspirations, and their expectations, and even their frustrations, even their complaints can internalize and elaborate the official party state discourse and reproduce its power. So this is not a story of coercive state power indoctrinating people at gunpoint, but one in which state policies and state discourses frame how people make sense of their lives, which also contours how they encounter and perceive the state. So again to quote from Luigi, for the practices of government to become legitimate the values that justify them need to be broadly accepted. So in this book Luigi expertly shows how the Communist Party discourses of social stability is interwoven with middle class desires for safety and enclosure, and then materialized in the gated community as the preferred site of urban living. It is also important to note that there is not a one size fits all or homogenous discourse, again as Luigi himself puts it, quote, different and even opposite in contradictory governmental logics can be applied at the same time, end quote. So further to this point Luigi's case studies demonstrate that these framing arguments people use to make claims on the state and pursue their own interests can be radically different depending on life histories and most importantly depending on the specific spatial arrangements in which they live. And again Nick touched on this in the introduction. In post-industrial urban settings there are contested legacies of socialist entitlements. In affluent middle class settings the discourse of consumer rights and personal quality contour and shape how residents in the state communicate with each other. So I think that it is precisely because of the multiplicity of different spaces, discourses, and practices that Luigi shifts away a bit from the term legitimacy without abandoning it altogether to propose a new idea of consensus. In Luigi's definition consensus is an arena of interaction. So even when and I want to stress this point because I think it's really terrific even when people have grievances and there are a lot of upset people in Luigi's book their contention is still constrained by a delimited field of shared values norms and discourses. So again the idea of simply being angry with the party state or being or having a problem doesn't mean that it's a crisis of legitimacy because it's actually reproducing and thinking in the same logic. As the official party. So as such consensus doesn't mean people necessarily support or approve the Communist Party or that all is harmonious under heaven but that people are at least arguing about the same things rather than say demanding a systematic reform. So I want to conclude as well with a question for Luigi. In the book even though there's a lot of contention it seems as if people's desires and values are more or less in sync or can be in sync with party discourse. However even if right now for the time being people have internalized and continue to elaborate in their own terms what originated as party state ideologies and discourses we also know that beliefs ideas and words can take on lives of their own and they can congeal into expectations that people are reluctant to abandon or couldn't imagine their lives without even if those structures of experiences only recently came into existence and this is great point of what's happening in China now with the proposed demolition of the gated communities if that's been internalized as an expectation and a right that now is threatened to be taken away. So my question then is very simply what happens when the state and social discourses fall out of sync with each other and what happens if new state goals, policies and priorities upset the fragile balance and ecosystem of consensus. I was thinking of what kind of words it should use to start with and just express the kind of feelings that one has at this time and I thought it was humbling, I thought it was all very unexpected of course I thought about the word pleasing, I thought about being grateful and I think grateful in particular to the ANU and CRW for supporting me but also the one word that I came up with was that I'm very glad that I'm actually able to share this moment with some of the closest colleagues and friends who have been working with me over the last 10-15 years so that is the main feeling that I have and it's a difficult feeling it's difficult to be proud possibly because I still have my Catholic mom on my shoulder here that tells me that being proud is not a good thing but I certainly am, I'm also proud to have been able to receive this recognition and it's great that I can share it with all of you so thank you very much for organizing this and for having me and for engaging with the ideas of the book. As Linliang mentioned there is interest in China which is very good news for me because one of the things that disappointed me the most was that if you try to buy the book through Amazon which is the normal provider with people even in China go, you will not be able to buy the English book in China so it's very difficult to get access to the book in China so if a Chinese version of it comes through and it looks likely then at least a much larger, much more global audience of people who are actually the participants in the stories that are in this book will have access to the topics and clearly the fact that there is an interest also tells me that I have probably touched on the really difficult point in Chinese society not just I look at it in terms of what it means to be governed in these communities but many people look at it as a very important part of their existence real estate property is something that is very central to the existence of many people so let me say a few things about the book I don't want to say too many things and not because I want you to buy it because I think it's appropriate that we then open up the conversation and tell you a few things about how the book came about so if I wanted to say what I was trying to do with this book I would say that it's an attempt to study the way in which the discourse of Chinese politics manifests themselves in citizen life and we know that Chinese politics is often seen as a very mysterious thing something that is really impossible to understand or impossible to see or it's very difficult to find out what the mechanisms are that lead to political decisions but in a way besides this there's also a very clear manifestation in everyday life of what Chinese politics is of many of the things many of the discourses that we hear in the press and from the government etc actually have very clear practices that are directly derived from it what many have done I think in many cases has happened when studying Chinese society in the relationship between state and society John mentioned city society is one of the concepts that has been used to do that analysis is on one side to look at politics so to look at the discourses of politics to look at mechanisms of politics and on the other to look at the practices of governance at the local level so there's much more work that has been done over the last couple of decades about how local governance works and a lot of work that has been done on ideology that has been done on ideas and how the Communist Party has adapted is on thinking to the new situation what I was trying to do is try to bring them together to make sure that some of the ideas that we see and that we have studied things like quality or things like social stability, social security how do they become part of the practices and so I thought the best place to do this is to go into the place where people actually live in the residential communities and these are places that have in the meantime in the last 30 years changed very significantly so the research for this book grew organically in my acknowledgement I remember the time when John and I had first had a conversation he probably doesn't even remember that but it was so long ago had a conversation about trying to work out where the middle class would leave and try to understand something about the middle class there was 12, 13 years ago, a long time ago we don't care if we remember when but so the first thing I was trying to do was looking for the middle class and I thought what I do is just knock at the door of the middle class I go to the places where people think that the middle class leaves and towards the in the early 2000s when they started where all these bars of new gated communities and residential communities in large cities they were supposed to host the middle class and knock at the door and see if they're home and that's what I did when they don't live there and what I realized is they indeed the middle class was at home, were at home and they were much more at home than I was expecting because one of the things that I realized is that the reasons why they have become middle class is because of the connection that they have had with the real estate market with the house, with the home ownership with the identity of being a homeowner and the identity of being something akin to a middle class something that they would probably never define themselves as middle class, not at that time at least seemed to be the same thing and so I started to investigate what that meant and I realized that the type of middle class that one finds at least the first generation of middle class was not really the type of market driven middle class that one would have expected from after 20 years of reform in China but rather the people who had been able to acquire and access very early in the piece real estate properties because of the subsidization that they had received from the state and so many of those who were in these neighborhoods that I consider as being middle class were actually public employees, people working for the state but people having a relationship, a family who had a relationship with the state and therefore had been able to have access to all of those different types of subsidization different policies that had been happening between the late 80s and the late 90s and then during the first decade of the 2000s so there was something there that appeared to me as an important part of what as an interesting point to pursue so what I also realized is that there were not just different types of people from what we had expected but also they were interpreted by public discourses in a very different way so we think of the rise of the middle class as being the harbinger of democracy and proposing or propelling the transformation of China into a different type of policy and the way that the Chinese government and a lot of the Chinese academics interpret this is exactly the opposite so they see the rise of middle class as a stabilizing factor as a way to maintain social stability and so why shouldn't the government actually try to engineer them, try to produce them and create them because having a large middle class especially a large middle class that comes from the public sector is certainly something that can produce important outcomes in terms of social stability the other thing that I noticed is that these people had a lot of conflicts so they were absolutely not quiet there's a lot of conflicts going on and still today if you go into China's neighborhood it's very likely almost every community has at least one group they protested against their developer they protest against their property managers they protest against local governments and times but what they do is that they also use the same language that the government provides them with so they reproduce the same language to advance their own grievances and this in a way is a way to contain those conflicts to make sure that those conflicts actually remain very much connected to the specific interests that people have that they want to protect so that's what I found and the next consideration again this organic grow of this very long time that has been thinking about this too long definitely was well this is a very particular type of community but what happens in other communities are the same patterns of governance are the same type of understanding of governing happening so I decided to go in a completely different place which is Shenyang in the Rust Belt of China in one of the most industrialized cities in the 1950s and to try to see where the community is there very different types of community also somehow circumscribed because that's the traditional way of work unit residential communities whether the similar patterns were to be found there these were communities where a lot of unemployed people especially in the early 2000s and mid 2000s you find a lot of unemployed people from the old state and enterprises so they're very different people from the middle class in Beijing and they had very different grievances they had very different demands to the government and from the government however again what I found is that when they wanted to advance their grievances they were trying to replicate exactly the same language that the government was using with them and the language that the government was using with them was different from that of the middle class of course it was about saving the middle class it was about providing them with a parachute it was about the role that this working class or wrong class so saving the working class and providing a parachute for the working class and making sure that the working class that the working class is protected through this period of very dramatic transition. So again, what I found was some sort of connection between what the government says and what people use as a language for them to advance to run their own very local grievances. So in the end, what I found is that neighborhoods allowed us to look at the interaction in a very specific way. They allow us to almost embody the idea of this arena of contention that Nicholas and Christian had mentioned, the idea of arenas of contention as the places where state and society interact. In my understanding, I prefer the question of the idea of an arena of contention to that of traditional civil society, one-to-one type of relationship, because it allows for many different types of relationship happening at the same time. So the state can say certain things to one class, say some other things to another class, allow certain things to one class, for example, allow a certain level of autonomy for middle-class communities, but very little autonomy for unemployed workers who may actually become very dangerous. So there's a different type of government, of governing practices that allow certain groups in society that are more reliable, considered more reliable, to be governed in a certain way, whereas others who are not as reliable or are considered as socially troublesome, if you want, need to be governed in a different way. So what happens here is that there is a series of discursive arenas, if you want, where what the government does is setting different boundaries. It sets the boundaries of what the relationship is going to be, what is going to happen through those interactions. What's happening in those interactions. And this is the main thing that I try to do in the book. And sometimes it is, I think sometimes it works. I think it must have worked at a certain point. And but I guess what I also wanted to say is that, just because I need to make a plaque for the book without a few comments, that's it, is that there's a lot of stories. So this is narrated through as many stories as I can imagine. And many of these stories are surprising. They are stories of different people and their interactions with their lives, but also their interaction with the government and the ways in which this happens. And in fact works to cumulatively create an increase in legitimacy for the system rather than a decrease in legitimacy. So this is all I'm going to say about the book. I'm happy to take any more questions about this. But if I may just address some of the issues that were raised. So Ms. Sauer-Nicholas, Nicholas you suggest this to elaborate a little bit more about the idea of the middle non-class, as I would call it. It's defining the middle class is always one of those difficult experiences. One of the first things every time I give a talk on the middle class, the first question they receive, yes, but how big is the middle class? Or how do you measure the size of the middle class? And this is something I'm completely uninterested in. I have no interest in knowing the size of the middle class because I don't sell anything. So if you were someone who wants to sell cars, then you need to know how many middle class people are earning enough money to buy cars. But in my case, what I'm interested in is the process of transition that people have. How do people get from being poorer to be richer? And how does that happen? Because that is what reveals the way in which society changes. But so what I'm saying in the book is that what the people I'm talking about are what I call the first generation of the middle class. This is sort of a, clearly there is a second and a third generation coming up who have very different characteristics and we can get into that in a moment. But certainly what one notices is that besides this large group of people that comes from the public sector, in fact there is a great fragmentation in the group that we call the middle class because they may come from many different backgrounds. They make wealth can come from many different places but also it can be justified in different ways. And so even within the Skated Communities you find some time heterogeneity that is sometimes divided into groups. So to give you one example, there was one example in the book where within the same Skated Communities there was a group coming from the public service and a group coming from say market activities or private enterprises and they were clashing with one another. I mean the main grievances was for the private employees they were saying that those people only got property because they were attached to the government because the government paid for them and the public employees were saying well those private people just don't have the quality to be here. They don't have the soldier. They have money and who knows how they make their money. Maybe they were corrupted. And so there was a very clear distinction between those two groups but mostly it was a distinction that came from the way that they justified the way they got there. So it was not really about I belong to some sort of middle wealth where actually we're connected by the fact we own property and therefore need to confront the state on that but rather it was much more important for them where those properties were coming from. So this type of distinction are very important. And as I said, the new generation of the middle class is much more even more fragmented and even more scattered and doesn't have access to the same type of subsidization. So if you enter the public service, sorry, the public sector, so I'm talking about companies and public companies and public service of course as well. After 1998 you're not entitled to receive a lodgement from your company as you would have been if you had entered before 1998. So 1998 is the watershed and everyone who entered the system after that is in the much worse position today to buy houses. The other reason why they're in much worse position is because all that has happened has actually all the subsidization has made sure that so many people had houses and so many people bought a apartment, so many more people bought a apartment than a market would have allowed that today the prices are highly inflated. And as we know in the Beijing is the most unaffordable place where to buy a house in the whole world, not just in China. The top five cities are all in China. So clearly what was an advantage for that generation has become a disadvantage for this generation and so you have a lot of very creative way of going about this, which are very similar to things that happen in other parts of the world. The other question, maybe I should move to Lin Liang's question at this stage. Was there another question? It was the, you only had the one, yeah. Thank you. The things that Lin Liang says are very interesting in a way. I was very surprised by the fact that people knew about the Levinson Prize in such a way. I mean, I could have imagined them to know who Levinson was, but knowing that people know about the Levinson Prize is a good thing. And so your question is basically, well, why is the government changing its policy if it works so well, which is what I'm saying. So what I'm saying is that there is a special aspect to governing and that having communities and having those communities as isolated, little, as isolated communities as circumvent, almost autonomous communities, if you want, is something that allow the government to see the differences between the different groups. So there's a certain legibility of the process that the government allows to happen and that helps with governance. So that is my argument. Now, what is happening now is very interesting in a way it is a bit unexpected. I must admit that I'm wondering whether the government has read the book because I think what I'm saying in the book is that there are both advantages and disadvantages in terms of governance and gay communities do make it harder for the government to control certain groups, so the middle class groups who have been given a certain level of autonomy and self-government, et cetera. So the one example that is in the book is about the one-child policy where at a certain point, if you live in a private community, your management company will be the one in charge of implementing the one-child policy. And so it's much easier to get around the private management person or the person who is in charge of this in the management company than it is to go around the offices of the official government offices. So what happened is that there was a lot of complaints that the more money you have and the more you manage to live in these stated places, the easier it is for you to just escape the regulations of the one-child policy. Now, these things may be changing, but this is just to give you an example that the government has been concerned about the incapacity to actually enter these places and perform activities of government. I think the advantage so far has been that, despite that, that by providing autonomy, they have been relying on these middle classes or these autonomous groups to actually govern themselves and maintain the behavior, if you want, and not become antagonistic. Now, what may happen is that the current government is much more concerned about rioting. And it is a bit of a paradox, if you think, that putting down walls will prevent rioting. But it is likely that this is the explanation, in my opinion, because what is happening is in this way it would be much easier for the government to actually enter these places and to see what is going on in these places. Now, it seems like a gigantic operation. Almost everything that has been built over the last 20 years has gates. So destroying those gates is going to be a very big thing, and many homeowners, as you suggested, are not going to be happy. So if they try to implement this, it's going to be a major disaster. Well, maybe not, maybe not a major disaster, but it could certainly lead to further and even more conflicts. The other thing that may be something that the government knows that we don't. So the government may know that the real estate bubble is going to burst. And if that's going to happen, then the amount of activity that is going to take place in this, the amount of adversarial activity that is going to take place in this, community is going to be very large. And so having those gates closed is not a good idea. So opening up the gates will allow the government to control this type of activity. And this takes me to something that Christian was saying about the out of sync, what happens if they got out of the sink. And clearly there is a risk for that. I mean, there is a risk that one very large crisis, and my example is always the example of the real estate bubble, one large crisis could affect a very large number of people all involved in the same industry, if you want, or all with interest in housing. And that this could lead to a very significant amount of contestation. Now, I think what I want to say is that there is this possibility, but there are two aspects. One is the aspect of the capacity to adapt that the government has had on many occasions. So there have been crisis before and those crisis have never really taken, they probably have never been the size of a potential nationwide housing bubble, but they have never taken too long for the government to adapt the things that they wanted to do. And in this respect, I want to go back to the idea of consensus that I'm trying to deal with advance in this book, which is the beautiful thing about what I call consensus, it is not static at all. So it's not, it can change and adapt if you want. And the legitimacy of the leaders is not staked on a specific behavior, but rather on a more general understanding that what they do is good for the country. So that is the one thing that everyone sort of attend to when they think in this consensual way. And so consensus is not really about something, it's not that we agree on something. We, there's a consensus, the consensus is simply the capacity that the state has to set the boundaries for a discussion where in the end the government is always gonna have the last word. So there is this capacity to create the discourses inside which people will be allowed to advance their grievances at the local level, while at the same time the government will maintain the capacity to control the extent to which this contestation are going to happen. And that is something to do also with the very large capacity that the government has. I mean it still has control of large parts of the economy. It still has control of the whole territory. It has control of the way in which territory is classified. It has control of the cities. It has control over the police. It has control over the military. And it has control over the law as well. So the capacity of the state to actually intervene is still very significant. And it's in no way it is reduced by the idea of consensus. And the fact that consensus is a flexible thing that can be applied in different ways in different places and in different eras and different times, allow the government to recreate those boundaries and to make those boundaries new at a time of a crisis. So I tend to be generally pessimistic. I don't know whether pessimistic is the right word, pessimistic about any time of structural, systemic change happening in China anytime soon. But I think that looking at the mechanism of how the government does it and how the government does it exactly with the people who are potentially the ones who can create the most trouble is one of the best way of understanding why the Chinese Communist Party is still legitimate today. So this is why I didn't wanna answer this question and in the end what I do is trying to suggest that this is what's happening. I'll stop here and so that we have a bit of time for conversation and thank you again. Others at China 9294. One of the things that's more in southern China was the building of the dam and the relocation of millions of people. And so the question is about the maturity of the communities in the different communities and why there's issues of aging in the communities where the maintenance of infrastructure and those kind of things came up. So I'm seeing a blur of your light. Yeah, that's both very good questions. So the way in which the governance works is that if you just for simplicity you may want to, sorry, very loud. You may want to divide richer community from private community, from public communities. So private housing from public housing. There are many different types of public housing, many different types of public housing, private housing. But what you have is in certain cases people own their house. I mean, the land is still owned by the government. They own their apartments and the apartment in this high rises. And you have to think of these places not as the typical American-gated community with few residents in a very high quality. I mean, there are some of those as well, but some of the big-gated communities that were built at the end of the 90s have something like five, 6,000 families. So they're very large and they look much more like public housing in some places in Europe or here. Those are governed by private companies. So they're not governed by private companies, but private companies take over many of the functions of the governance that normally the government runs. The public ones are generally under the system of the so-called neighborhood committees, so which is the lowest, it's not really the lowest level of government, but it's a community organization that is very much connected to the local government. So there's a district, a sub-district, and then a level of sort of self-governance, as it's called, which is basically meant by cadres paid very little by the government, by the local government. And they run the services in the public housing, so to say, in the public community. So if you think of Shenyang, that would be the model, and in Beijing, for example, some of these private-gated communities, that would be the model. One of the things that is surprising is that besides the specific functions that are performed by these groups, where you have, for example, they keep the common places clean, or they have guards, security guards at the door, at the gates, or they organize activities within the community, et cetera. Besides those, they also take over some of the more traditional things that the community, the public community would do. And so One Child Policy is one of those things that happen. And sometimes they have contracts, so private management companies have contracts with the government to perform some of these functions. And it's very strange, because they end up having to implement campaigns within the public campaigns, hygienic campaigns, for example, or sometimes political campaigns that are run by the government. So they become agents of the government, if you want, but they are paid physically the money of the homeowners, so the homeowners pay them. The other thing that the homeowners can do is to create their own homeowner organization. And the only power that the homeowner organization actually has within the community is to sign a contract with the management company. So it doesn't really have a power to represent the homeowners towards the government. So what they do is they only run the private interests of the homeowners within the community. But even so, the amount of conflicts that happen there is just gigantic. I mean, there's thousands of conflicts, almost every community around the country in every city is under this kind, as this type of grievances. But it's a little bit of a hybrid system where you have privately managed communities, privately owned and managed communities, and on the other side, publicly owned and managed communities. And as for the maturity of the communities, there's a very big difference between places and between communities. In the traditional working class communities, for example, there's a long-term bond among the people who live there because they've been working together for a long time, etc. And they were part of the same work unit. They had the same interests. And sometimes they're sort of the same age because those are the places where the elderly remain because the quality of the housing is not very good. Whereas the new communities are places where people have moved in recently. So you have to think that there was no private property of housing in China until the early 90s. And so you start seeing the first large communities in Beijing were built around 96, 97. So that is when the real-state market, the real real-state market has begun. And since the end of the 80s or the beginning of the 90s, between the beginning of the 90s, when there was almost zero private home ownership, until the mid-2000s, when there were over 80% of home ownership among the people who are resident in the city, not migrants, I mean, the change has been gigantic. So you have hundreds of million of people who've moved from either public housing or rental housing into new communities. So those are communities that, as you say, they're not ripe. They don't have the same texture as some of the others. And so it may also be very difficult to create activism around important things. One of the things that I haven't said, sorry, I'm responding too long. One of the things that I haven't said is that there's, on one side of the government, has allowed a lot of autonomy at the very local level within the community and has allowed very little autonomy outside of the community. So you can form your own organization within your own community but you cannot form across a community organization. So this is one of the ways in which authoritarian states work. You prevent localized movements from becoming large and this has always been one of the main tools. And so you have these cases that are seen where the homeroomers have been protesting within the community and the police has not intervened. They haven't really cared about them and been doing that for days. And then at a certain point they decide to march out of the community and suddenly the police comes and just bash them basically. So again, there's a certain level, the space is important and what can happen in the space is important. So if they destroy the idea of the gated communities, they will resolve in a completely different way of governing. I was just wondering just from hearing you speak, whether like these gated communities can create some kind of, I don't know if you would call it a siege mentality, but they kind of become hostile to, you know, they kind of organize within themselves and they become hostile to ideas outside of that. And so they become hostile to other ways of doing things and the government's way of doing things and the government's idea of the way that they should be doing. Yeah. Well, they certainly do. I mean, one of the things, I guess one of the things about consensus, and I like my colleagues here also to China if they want, is that it's not about liking the government. It's not about liking what the government does. A lot of people hate the government. They just, you know, they don't identify themselves. So they don't see themselves as being supportive of the government. What they end up doing is then using the same type of rhetoric and reproducing the power of the government because that is the way that things happen and because those limitations are also the ones that allow you to achieve something. So if you break those limitations, for example, if you go out of your gated community and protest against them, then maybe you will not even achieve the smallest of outcomes. So it can be a very strategic way of doing things, but on the other side, it also produces a very real outcome. It produces the conviction among people that there is a way to do things and that that way can actually bring advantages to you without having to express your hate for the government. So certainly people don't particularly like that. I mean, one of the things we say by legitimacy in China is that there is a very significant difference between liking the system and liking the cadres. So a lot of people accept the idea that the current system is legitimate. So they can say, I support the rule of the Communist Party of China, but at the same time, they say, well, the cadres are corrupt or they are, they're not doing the interest of the people. So there is a lot of that going on and that distinction is one that can only be productive in a system where there are no elections. Because if there were elections, clearly things would be very different. But in a system where there is no authoritarian system and there are no elections, then you can see that as having an impact and people adapt to it. And knowing from that very long experience that however they may hate the government, it's a much better way to do it, to adhere to the languages, to the discourses and the practices of the government. Hi. Hi, Louis. Congratulations to you. You know, in the past 30 years, China has transformed a lot, particularly from rural land to open land. So in the process of these kinds of significant transformation in China, so we have many kinds of, we call the neighborhoods in China. For example, we same gated communities in China but different ways governing in these communities. For example, some universities get communities, some military force gated communities and some private gated communities. So in the past 30 years, many transformation changes so quick. Another important thing is the policy. The central government issued different kinds of policy to change. So for example, one child policy to two child policy and then now, 2016, the central government want to demolish all the war of the gated communities. So now it's a heated debate about the neighborhoods in China, particularly. What's next for the neighborhoods, new start neighborhoods in China? For example, how the main participants of the local government, particularly the town levels government participants and open communities and the owner of the apartment of a house in this area and open floating workers in this area. So what's the neighborhoods about this next? So could you give us some comments? I think it's a new book for you. Yeah. Thank you, yeah. Well, I wish I had my little camera in the head of the government officials that will decide what the next policy is. I'm very, I think it's very interesting what is happening right now. I mean, it's a complete game changer. If you think about the whole structure of the cities in China, if you just think of the cities, you know, one of the photos that I used to show to students when I was talking about this segregation created by gated communities were like Google map photo of how, you know, and you could draw circles around each neighborhoods. Basically nothing in between. So there were just walls against walls, against walls, there were roads in between. And so this was the way cities have been, this is the way cities have been built over the last 20 years. So now the government is suggesting this is no longer going to happen. And in itself this is a game changer. It's a game changer in the sense that new places will be built in a different way. They will have a completely different idea about community and cooperation. And we know how the built environment is important for this to determine the ways in which communities operate, for example, or also in the way in which communities are governed. My impression is that we may go towards a greater level of control over urban life rather than a more open society. I think what we are going to see are new mechanisms where people are probably going to be required to be much more accountable for the things that they do. And the other thing that is going to happen which is something that the homeowners are not going to be, well, may actually be happy at a certain point, is that the government will have to reclaim, take back all of the functions that the management companies have had. I mean, you think in terms of security, there was large parts of the Chinese cities that did not need security at all or almost, very rarely needed the intervention of the police. So there were large chunks of the territory that didn't need the police at all or needed the police only in exceptional cases, but not for the day-to-day function of a police force. That's going to change. If you open up the gates and you allow everyone to move around and homeowners are going to feel much more insecure because one of the reasons why they move into these communities is because they're secure, which we know they're not, but that's the narrative. And also they're going to feel like that they're expropriated of some of the functions that they used to control and some of the control they had over their own territory and possibly some of the freedom to do something that are different from what happened outside. So in a way, opening up the gates may actually result in not necessarily more freedom, but rather much less autonomy if you want because then people will be all coming in the same way. But what's going to happen? I don't know. I don't know, I guess. It's all work from the Research School of Computer Science. I see Broadband gets a couple of mentions in the book. I couldn't see smartphones in there anywhere. Can you see the consumer citizen having a device where they could report potholes and broken windows and things having an effect on how these things happen in some ways providing a sort of a consumer version of democracy, but still allowing a level of control? I think maybe hard to deny that Chinese are probably the greatest, the largest market for smartphones in the world. I mean, they also produce most of them, I think. And certainly it's not uncommon to see people going around with two or three smartphones at the same time. And as you say, I mean, these communities have started using Broadband very early. You have to consider that the internet arrived in China in 1995 and it was just on a unique system. It became ubiquitous at the beginning of the 2000s, but then since then it exploded and there is no way that anyone would be able to sell an apartment in Beijing with that Broadband. And what has happened, it has also created sort of its own little community. So you had the forum, the online forum where people would participate and mention their grievances and somehow again, very segregated. So you will have the forum of your community and then the next community will have a different forum, et cetera. Now the use of other technologies, like smartphones is so ubiquitous that there is no doubt that people will are really using it for the purpose that you exactly mentioned. And both in terms of their participation in the consumer society, but also in their participation in the intellectual discussion society. And one of the things I was saying is that the way that people found out about the book was WeChat, which is, you know, and not because Lin Liang sent a million different messages, but rather because he'd been a very popular Chinese person. He has a lot of friends and suddenly the news went out to a lot of people. So I have absolutely no doubt that there will be significant impact. I am a bit concerned by the alienation that it also produces among young Chinese in particular, but that may be something we should ask him. Yeah, thanks, it's great talk and congratulations. And just not a question, but a kind of self-reflection from an urban Chinese young person. I'm thinking about, I'm the person who grew up in the center of Shanghai and then moved from doing a child home move to a gay community in Pudou which developed. The human relationships become so dramatic different from my childhood where usually you have a very close neighborhood relationship, but become, you are more kind of very far away from your neighborhood. You don't really have intimate relationship. You are leaving blocks and blocks and blocks, but you don't really have intimate relationship. You don't really say hi to everyone. And also talking about young people, we are getting more and more anxiety and worry. But it's kind of deliberate that we are, we are complaining things every day. And you don't have such a vision of your future that it's a vision, you're getting really short-sighted. You have certain kind of concerns. The concerns doesn't really mean that you are consciously decided by your own, but just because we don't know. So you have anxiety, you have spiritual loss, you have anxiety of knowingness and information, exploration, rapid change of the whole dramatic change of political landscape. So everything come up that we don't know things. So that's why we are kind of lost. We lost, that's why we share the same language with the imagined government. We don't know who it's government. We just criticize them as an imagined enemy, but we strategize it. We become well-modern educated person. So we use the same language and trying to strategize becoming better. Even we are still very short-sighted. We still very not long vision. We don't have clear strategy of 20 years plan. So we're changing jobs every time and moving everywhere, which may make a bit better for us. So that's kind of concepts of Chinese people, even leaving box and box. So my kind of comment is opening or destroying the box doesn't really change anything. It's exactly the same continuously happening in urban Chinese mentality. Second kind of observation is looking at the news and disaster happening last year, like the expression in Tianjin. And also the crisis in Shenzhen where a lot of 85 persons with disaster happen. And if we look at the media, there are certain kind of quietness. Nothing can be seen and heard from the public media about the protestant or the life. They didn't have any anger. The angerness doesn't be publicized. So it's a successful governance. It's a kind of consensus between victims and the government. We don't know. So I'm not very optimistic in that kind of sense, but we are not fortune teller as all of you just mentioned. But we can feel that the more closer to the microscape of inter-relationship between the people and the space make help a bit about what the Chinese mentality is in the future. Thank you. Sure. That's all very good points. I guess, let me start from one disclaimer. If you've read the introduction of the book, you know that there are lots of disclaimer because I am myself, I find myself having to justify why I'm using the word consensus. And what I'm saying is that I'm not even beginning to think that China is a society governed by consensus. I mean, clearly, this is not what I mean. And the other thing that I should probably, the disclaimer that I should probably add here is that it also isn't a critique. I'm not criticizing the Chinese citizens for being involved in this. It happens as a construction. It is simply a modality in which the government operate, in which this cooperation, if you want, in this relationship between state and society is defined and produced. So clearly I am very aware. I mean, having been in China for a very long time doing this research, it's not very aware of all the anxieties that are attached to this. And in fact, one of the things that you find with homeowners is the reason why there are so many conflicts is that people are so anxious because, first of all, a lot of their savings have gone into buying apartments. And so anything that could even remotely reduce the value of your apartment is something that is threatening to the whole livelihood of your family. And you know how buying a house is important for a number of other things in China. If you don't buy a house, you don't get married. It's not necessarily... It's not always like that, but it certainly is one of those one of those things that creates some anxiety. So families invest in apartments for their children, etc. And now they are over-committed to that. So that is one aspect. There's a lot of anxiety in everything that happens. And there are lots of anxiety related to the things you say. The fact that people are really not in the know. I mean, despite the fact that there is a much greater circulation of information today than there used to be. So you're more likely to know many more details about Tianjin today than you are likely to know anything that happened in Tangshan in 1976, just to make it an extreme case. But despite this, there is clearly still very significant levels of uncertainty about what happens. And especially people don't really know what the attitude of the government is. You say it's an imagined government. It's a faraway government. And this is also demonstrated by the fact that you have... For example, in all public opinion surveys, you find that central government receives a certain amount of support and local government receives a much lower amount of support. And those type of indication tells you that the only thing that people know and they can't complain about are the governments that they actually have relationships with, not the central government. The central government is a bit of a divinity somewhere and people relate to it as something that can sometimes even support their own grievances. So they refer to the ideas of the central government. And so yeah, I think the anxiety is one of the things that happened. And wealth has not reduced it. As you know, becoming wealthy is not enough to rise in the social ladder. You also need to be able to behave in a certain way. And people have studied this and there are very good reasons for this to be the case. Just be wealthy is not enough, as I told you in this relationship between the public employees and the private employees. They're both relatively wealthy, ones have the status and they have the don't. So that's another level of anxiety that is added, which also comes from this demand to continuously improve one's own in Chinese over society. So also to respond to what you were saying, particularly with thinking about post disaster discourse and how information is managed. So I know this because I've been rewriting the introduction to my book, which is precisely on this. So sorry that I'm plugging my own book in there. I don't want to co-opt your event here. But the idea that the disaster, that the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 was a Tianzai, was a natural disaster versus a Renhuo, or a manmade catastrophe. A lot of internal party publications and documents so that they were very conscious of maintaining that it was a natural disaster at all costs. And so in other words, for those of you who aren't familiar after the 2008 earthquake happened, a lot of school buildings collapsed, over 5,000 children died in the collapsed school buildings. And then the question is, why did these particular buildings collapse when buildings next door government edifices did not collapse? And this has raised the question of shoddy construction material or what they call the tofu drag construction. So this counter discourse that starts to circulate or percolate or challenge the official state's representation of it as a natural disaster. And think about it, if it's a natural disaster, then the Communist Party is the hero. If it's a manmade catastrophe, then the Communist Party and the developers are the villains. So to cut off that, and again, I think Luigi brought up a good point. It's not just discourse. The state also to use an Altaisarian term, they still have the repressive apparatuses. So the bodies that wanna circulate and go and tell these stories, these other stories, they get arrested or their phones are tapped or they're, so in these particularly sensitive cases, not in everyday or ordinary politics or even then. But so the way of, and actually just to get to the point I wanna make when I meet people who visited the earthquake zone from Beijing or from Shanghai or people traveling through Sichuan, almost 90% of the people I talked to, or when they find out that oh, you researched the earthquake, didn't the party do a fantastic job? It works, you know? And then when you're there and you're in some village in Wenchuan County and you're talking to people and they're upset with the things that have happened, well, you know, it doesn't work as well. So that kind of discourse then generates of these, so Luigi's, and actually Luigi's work has been very influential for me to think about and conceptualize how these patterns work. That's not just, so that is a form of control but then that gets taken up and that gets then repeated as common sense and then things just filter in to, so I'm a huge, huge fan of the conceptual work that Luigi does in the book. Can I, if we're gonna do a conversation, I'm gonna butt in too then. I just think what Luigi brings up is a really good point and the idea of anxiety and it makes me think a bit of early work looking at Chinese society like Fei Xiaotong and the ideas of the anxiety that is implicit in a rural society and how you see that kind of recreating itself in urban China and it's just so interesting that the idea of social stability is such an important discourse and yet it's premised on instability really and this very short term way of thinking and this is a question I was thinking about before the event actually because what your book does really interestingly and well is show us how what we empirically see as a very neoliberalizing China. I mean we see it right in front of our faces but how it still maintains this continuity of governance that doesn't seem to make sense on its face but you show how there is this continuity and I mean I think Christian would call it the Maoist DNA of Chinese governance but I don't know, would you say that maybe it's just a very Chinese way of governance, is this something that goes even further back? I mean we have the old sayings about the mountain is high and the emperor is far away, is this something that's just very Chinese exceptionalism in a way? Yeah, well I tend to be very wary of exceptionalism and also to be wary of us putting too much emphasis on labels like Maoist or like when we say the Xi Jinping is Maoist and there's a problem there or when we say that China's confusion, that things are inspired by that, mostly because especially in the mainstream discourse you find that being associated with the fact well the Chinese then can never be democratic because they don't really have their confusion, the Maoists, so and this is simply not leading anywhere I think it's just one of those ways in which it's easy to bash China and say they never and it's also one of the discourses that the government uses, so people don't really want democracy here, why do you want post-democracy on them? Or and as soon as much more about this than I do in this respect, why should we expect them to want democratization? So that is the thing that concerns me a little bit in trying to describe those things but continuity certainly is one of the, so the way that I look at it is through the ways in which this understanding that I very much today are constructed in individual lives and so people will have had long-lived experiences as some of the government will host work, long-lived experiences that determine the way in which they see the world and those long-lived experiences are Maoist, they come from their families, they come from earlier communicated knowledge if you want of what society is all about but they also come through a number of different institutions that people are exposed to from school, family and social institution, institutions simply that the way things are done, the way that people refer to one another and the way that communities sometimes work, the relationship within community, the way the status is produced. So for example, when people accept that Suja is real, that quality is real, that there is an actual inbuilt intrinsic quality in human beings, they are buying the government discourse that says there is a hierarchy and there are certain people who need to improve themselves more than others and so improving oneself is one of the feminist imperative but also one of the Maoist imperative and also one of the Confucian imperative and so all those things become real, they are real because they are not simply something that the government tells you and then you believe you. So it's not just the ideology that comes at you but your entire experience is determined by this type of connections and this type of ideas. And so this is where I think it becomes special if you want because of the very long experience that people have had but I think it's important that we try to find the root in the individual experiences rather than in sort of the Chinese exceptionalism which I think is sometimes a bit concerning. On anxiety, well, we all know there's the urban side of it, there's a great book by John Offberg on anxious wealth which reproduces in a certain way the original peasants' anxiety about wealth, creating wealth makes someone needing to also achieve the status that is attached to wealth. If you're just a pavéneu or if you're just someone who has made money out of a company or because you've bribed a lot of people, you're never gonna be a high quality person, you're never gonna be accepted in the ranks of the high quality or you've never been, you're never going to be accepted in the ranks of the urban which is the high quality that may have exhausted the capacity of the audience as well. So anyway, I wanted to thank you all very much, it's a pleasure and it's a honor to have this moment, celebrate with all of you. Thank you.