This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Taisu Zhang, professor of law at Yale University, who discusses his recent work on the expansion of the administrative state down to the subdistrict and neighborhood level — changes that are far-reaching, and likely permanent. They also discuss a recent essay in Foreign Affairsi n which Taisu argued that Beijing is shifting away from "performance legitimacy" as the foundation of political rule, and more toward legality — not to be confused with the rule of law.
3:29 – Nationalism as legitimacy, and its grounding in economic performance
7:45 – The CCP’s unique approach to “legal legitimacy”
21:28 – Evidence from the Two Meetings, or 兩會 liǎnghuì
35:56 – Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era
49:40 – The role of the anti-corruption campaign in expanding local government authority
56:18 – Changes in local governance after COVID
1:01:27 – Who were the dàbái?
1:04:10 – Technology in China’s post-pandemic power structure
A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Taisu: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber; The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang; Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State by Maura Dykstra; The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu; and The Lower Yangzi Trilogy by Ge Fei
Kaiser: Kaiser: Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic by Mike Chinoy; and the many uses of beeswax
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Harvard's William Kirby on China's higher education system and his book "Empires of Ideas"
Does the Capvision raid signal a crackdown on consultancies in China? The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, formerly of Capvision, weighs in
China's draft regulations on generative AI, with Kendra Schaefer and Jeremy Daum
Xiong'an: Techno-natural utopia or authoritarian folly?
Earth Day episode: How can the U.S. and China cooperate on climate in this era of competition?
Legendary CNN reporter Mike Chinoy on his book and documentary series "Assignment China"
As the U.S. and China part ways, the Global South finds its own path, with Kishore Mahbubani
Sinica at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Boston 2023: Capsule interviews
The Maoist legacy in Chinese private enterprise, with Chris Marquis
Beijing brokers a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, with Tuvia Gering
The Xi-Putin meetings, with Maria Repnikova
Jude Blanchette on the Select Committee and the American moral panic over China
Inside Tencent's "Influence Empire," with Bloomberg's Lulu Chen
China and the electric vehicle battery supply chain, with Henry Sanderson
China and the Ukraine War one year after the invasion, with Evan Feigenbaum and Alexander Gabuev
Sinostan: Raffaello Pantucci on China's inadvertent empire in Central Asia
CSIS analyst Gerard DiPippo deflates the balloon hype and brings the discussion back to earth
Live in New York City with veteran China journalist Ian Johnson
Is China's demography China's destiny? A chat with former World Bank economist Bert Hofman
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free