Ask a Political Scientist:
A Conversation with Yuen Yuen Ang about China and
Political Science
Robyn Marasco and Interviewer: Charles Tien
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725364
Charles Tien and Robyn Marasco:
In your award winning 2016 book, How China Escaped
the Poverty Trap, you show how China’s economic development was made
possible by what you call “directed improvisation”—directives from leaders in
Beijing to local officials to improvise in finding solutions to everchanging
problems. Has this reliance on local level-improvisation changed under Xi
Jinping in recent years? Has this model been applied to battling COVID?
Yuen Yuen Ang:
Before I answer your specific questions about my book,
let me first zoom out and comment on some broad, “meta” issues about how we, as
social scientists, study social problems. That’s because all questions are
embedded within a meta-intellectual environment that we rarely notice, let
alone probe. Before we can appreciate answers to particular questions, we must
first practice meta-cognition: reflecting on the questions we ask and
the way we think. That’s usually how I think.
You shared with me an essay by Michael Desch, “How
Political Science Became Irrelevant,” published in The Chronicle.1
I find it timely, thought-provoking, and wish that there were more of such
reflections—however, while I agree with Desch’s lamentation that political
science has become (or is becoming) irrelevant, I do not agree with certain
aspects of his diagnosis. According to Desch:
The problem, in a nutshell, is that scholars
increasingly privilege rigor over relevance … Relevance, in contrast, is gauged
by whether scholarship contributes to the making of policy decisions … the social
sciences have increasingly equated “science” with pure research, or knowledge
for its own sake.
In my view, relevance isn’t only gauged by policy
influence. And the crux of the problem isn’t that in pursuing rigor, we’ve
sacrificed policy relevance but accumulated knowledge about epochal and
disruptive patterns, i.e., “knowledge for its own sake.” Now, to be clear,
there is plenty of excellent scholarship that has achieved both rigor and
relevance and contributed tremendously to knowledge. My point is, if you
analyze our disciplinary incentives and trends, that is, where we’re headed,
the real problem is that we’ve specifically privileged
“publication-friendly” rigor (a term I used in my interview with Stephen Dubner
in Freakonomics, adapted from the industrial term “machine-friendly
crops”)2—and,
in the process, lost our relevance not only to policymakers but also to readers
in general.
“Publication-friendly” rigor has two key qualities.
First, the inquiry necessarily builds upon an established literature with
stable, clear assumptions that does not require tedious on-the-ground
investigation or “description” (the word that shall not be spoken). Second, the
questions must be narrow enough to be precisely answered using standard linear
causal assumptions (one dependent variable plus ideally two independent
variables) and causal inference tools. The more established the assumption, the
smaller the question, and the more precise one’s evidence, the less reviewers
can poke holes in the analysis. Even novices quickly figure out that this is
the path of least resistance.
At what price? The price isn’t, as Desch suggests,
only policy irrelevance. The price is our ability to make sense of the
world—particularly important, complex, disruptive problems—for ourselves, our
peers, and any curious adult who wants to learn. This relevance is our
fundamental duty as scholars.
Take Katzenstein and Seybert’s critique of “the
‘embarrassing’ and ‘dismal’ collective performance of the field of political
economy in the years before the 2008 financial crisis.”3
The conventional literature’s assumption of stability and probabilistic risk,
they argue, simply couldn’t account for disruptions. Or recall Hopf’s comments
about the fall of the Soviet Union: “American social scientists did not look at
the problem and then attack it with inappropriate theories and methods; they simply
failed to look at the problem at all.”4
Publication-friendly rigor helps us know if micro
interventions in a stable environment have an effect, and no doubt, that’s very
useful. But insisting on this singular criterion of “rigor” and rewarding
mainly, or only, this form of inquiry has been an impediment to knowledge about
the issues that matter most: national growth, financial crises, great-power
competition, etc.
That takes me to my book. Despite its deceiving title,
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, this book is meant to be a
meta-critique of our intellectual paradigm—applied to reform-era China.5
As I argue, traditional assumptions of linear causality and tools serve us well
when studying complicated worlds made up of discrete parts that do not interact
with one another and evolve drastically over time (like toasters); they are
supremely ill-fitted, however, for studying complex social realities comprising
many moving parts and which produce unpredictable outcomes (like trees). The
question of socio-economic transformation on China’s scale is definitely a
complex, not complicated, problem.
Explaining it calls for a new paradigm, which I
sketched out with these distinctive features:
• A conceptual distinction between complex and complicated systems and the
corresponding courses of action.
• In a complicated system, causality is typically linear (X causes Y). In
a complex system, causality is mutual (X causes Y and vice versa in a coevolutionary
chain).
• People can exercise precise control over outcomes in a complicated
system (e.g., press a button and toast pops out of a toaster), but in complex
systems, outcomes can only be influenced, not controlled, by shaping the way
people interact, learn, and adapt.
• That leads to my focus on “meta-institutions” that enable adaptive
processes of problem-solving, as opposed to a particular institution for a
particular problem (for an academic analogy, our intellectual climate is the
meta-institution that shapes our scholarly output).
All of this applied to China brings us to the concept
you referred to: “directed improvisation”—the combination of top-down
directions from the central government and bottom-up improvisation by numerous
local governments, producing diverse solutions across spaces and over time.
I argue that what really lies behind China’s
phenomenal transformation isn’t any single factor (in fact, numerous factors
came into play). And there isn’t one static “model” across the country. What
the reformist leadership under Deng (1978–2012) did right was create an
adaptive climate that encouraged local state actors to constantly find
solutions to meet the national goal of growth.
The reign of Xi Jinping, beginning in 2012–13,
represents a structural break in Chinese political economy, featuring more
repression, more state control over the economy, and an ambitious foreign
policy in competition with the United States. Interestingly, directed
improvisation isn’t completely gone, but under Xi’s signature “zero-COVID”
policy, the system served a different, increasingly impractical goal: keeping
COVID-19 infections at zero. Local governments creatively found ways to preempt
infections, keep residents under lockdown, punish those who resist controls,
and rebrand their policies to sound less harsh. All of this made Chinese
residents so miserable that they took to the streets in November 2022.
CT & RM:
And political scientists were not in a position to
comprehend what was happening in the complex system …
YYA:
Thanks for your patience! The reason I took a long
roundabout to answer your question is to make larger points about our
disciplinary norms and trends that I normally don’t get to make.
One professional evaluation gave the verdict that my
book is a “modest proposal of Chinese exceptionalism.” I’m flattered that it is
a modest proposal (!) but I do not accept the assumption of Chinese
exceptionalism. I am questioning the fundamental assumptions of our
intellectual paradigm and proposing alternatives—except applied to China—how is
this inquiry exceptional? How are the complex systems, concepts, and methods of
co-evolutionary process-tracing I’ve introduced and demonstrated exceptional?
If I proposed the same paradigm shift and applied it to eighteenth-century
England, would it seem less narrow? Or is the perception of narrowness
motivated by something else? I ask these questions as provocation, not for the
sake of my book, but for the sake of our discipline and students, as my case is
but a tiny window to larger issues, both intellectual and social.
CT & RM:
Can you elaborate on these contributions to the
discipline? How does the study of China impact how we think about politics more
generally? How should political scientists study China?
YYA:
When I was a younger scholar, I was advised to follow
a standard template of analysis: the conventional wisdom (based on narratives
of Western experiences) tells us that economic development requires good
institutions and eradicating corruption, so why is China exceptional?
If you follow this template, your book would be
legible and make no trouble. The conventional wisdom is happy because even
though China is conspicuously large, it is still anomalous. In other words, the
conventional framing concedes the ground and volunteers to be quarantined in a corner.
In both of my books, I did not follow this template,
and it comes with significant costs.
The conventional wisdom, I argue, is founded on
reified narratives about the Western experience, mainly claiming that democracy
and good governance led to wealth and power. These narratives are partly true,
but they omit ugly, messy realities in Western development such as the fact
that when the U.S. was a developing country, corruption was rife and so-called
“inclusive institutions” were only limited to elite white men.6
My contention is that when China is compared to the reified, partly mythical
conventional wisdom, it is of course anomalous. But when it is compared to actual
Western histories of development, it’s not so different.
Was the process of coevolution between the economy and
institutions, beginning with imperfect institutions, unique to China? No, as I
show in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, similar processes can be
found in medieval Europe and nineteen-century America. Did Western economies
rise by eradicating corruption and being inclusive? Not really, as I argue in China’s
Gilded Age, using the American Gilded Age as an implicit comparison, the
rise of capitalism was not accompanied by the eradication of corruption, but
rather by the evolution of the quality of corruption from thuggery and theft
toward sophisticated exchanges of power and profit.7
Compared with the West, China is a newcomer on this evolutionary path, except
Xi today uses an authoritarian toolkit, as opposed to political activism and
muckraking journalism, to fight the excesses of capitalism.8
CT & RM:
You also show that China escaped the poverty trap by
harnessing what existing institutions they have and putting them to good use.
That is, China was able to take their existing resources and help jump-start
new markets. Can China keep doing this? Or is there a limit to this strategy
for economic success?
YYA:
Thanks for highlighting this argument, which nicely
illustrates my point above. We all know there is an established literature in
political economy arguing that “good institutions” are necessary for economic
growth. What exactly are “good institutions”? Institutional forms found in rich
democracies. Global metrics such as the World Bank’s Good Governance Indicators
consistently rank OECD countries at the top, and such metrics are used in
regressions. Evidence from regressions in turn justify policies in
international development that essentially try to “copy and paste” blueprints
from rich to poor nations. This is a whole ecosystem of ideas, metrics,
publications, international policies, prestige, and power that mutually
reinforce one another. It is as unshakeable as a giant oak tree.
I make a theoretical distinction between
“market-building” and “market-preserving” institutions.9
Dominant theories in political economy are theories about good institutions
(such as Weberian technocracies, rule of law, formal property rights
protection) that are necessary to preserve or expand markets that have already
been built.10
But where markets barely exist, which is the situation facing low-income,
pre-industrialized, and pre-modernized societies, building markets from the
ground up requires “using what you have,” i.e., repurposing indigenous
institutions to kick-start entrepreneurial activities even if it means defying
first-world norms.
So, to answer your question, China cannot “keep doing
this” and it shouldn’t. This is true of all societies. At the market-building
stage, societies can effectively repurpose informal, imperfect institutions
(e.g., non-Weberian bureaucracies in China, partnership between filmmakers and
pirates in Nigeria) to kick-start entrepreneurship, but as new markets grow and
mature, this process will generate new preferences for conventionally “good institutions”
as well as capacity for actualizing them.
The practical implication is that instead of trying to
“copy and paste” blueprints from rich to poor nations, which development
practitioners widely agree has backfired,11
we can help the poor make creative use of what they have. At least, as scholars,
we can document their innovation, explain how it arises and why it sometimes
scales up and sometimes doesn’t.12
I taught a class on “The State and Innovation” and ask students to search for
cases where economic activities and useful solutions arose in harsh conditions.
Even without carrying out fieldwork, my students found many examples.
One student pointed me to an innovative housing
project in Egypt called ADAPT (Appropriate Development Architecture and
Planning Technologies), which built more than 21,000 low-cost houses in 2010 by
incorporating local elements into every stage of the project and using
construction techniques suitable for the Egyptian climate. Another student told
the story of a Kenyan engineer and entrepreneur who turned plastic waste into
bricks and a sustainable business. These are not random stories; they represent
bottom-up solutions to endemic problems in the developing world: lack of
affordable housing and rich countries dumping tons of plastic waste in poor
countries, respectively.
As an academic of development, I feel ashamed reading
these stories: Have I, with my education, really made more contributions than
these less-privileged problem-solvers? Couldn’t I at least give voice to their
innovation and question the elitism built into the study of development?
But this work, in my experience, is not publishable.
When I present it, it is scorned. Going back to my earlier point, the problem
with political science isn’t that we’re irrelevant to powerholders in the
beltway; it is that we’re irrelevant to the non-elites we study.13
There’s plenty of interest in using non-elites to generate experimental
evidence, but no interest in documenting their innovation.
CT & RM:
In your second book you identify a kind of corruption
that helps economic growth. You call this corruption “access money,” where
large bribes or favors are given to high-ranking officials in exchange for
land, contracts, or credit. Access money can hurtle the economy forward, but it
can lead to inequality and excessive risk-taking. Does Beijing have an
incentive to stop access corruption? How would it go about doing so?
YYA:
The short answer, is, of course. Xi has made
anti-corruption one of his top agendas from the time he took office, because it
has metastasized to the point of emboldening elite factions and threatening
party cohesion. He has chosen to do so using a sweeping anti-corruption
campaign that has boasted about arresting millions of officials, rather than
through institutional reforms (e.g., laws requiring officials to declare their
wealth) and bottom-up political participation (e.g., investigative journalism).
Let me qualify your phrase—“a kind of corruption that
helps economic growth” (thanks, I note that you later qualified it)—because China’s
Gilded Age has been taken out of context, including by a few academics, as
an apology for corruption or a moralistic tirade against apologists for
corruption. In fact, I couldn’t make my point clearer that corruption, like
drugs, always harms, but in different ways:
Access money, on the other hand, is the steroids of
capitalism. Steroids are known as “growth-enhancing” drugs, but they come with
serious side effects … By enriching capitalists who pay for privileges and by
rewarding politicians who serve capitalist interests, access money can
perversely stimulate commercial transactions and investment which translates
into GDP growth. Yet this does not mean that access money is “good” for the
economy—on the contrary, it distorts the allocation of resources, breeds
systems risks, and exacerbates inequality … The harm of access money only blows
up in the event of a crisis.14
I suspect there is a tendency to think in a simplistic
binary of “good” vs. bad.” Thus, because I’m arguing against the conventional
wisdom that corruption necessarily impedes growth (which it didn’t in the
American or Chinese Gilded Ages), some take this to mean corruption is “good”
and ignore my warning about its distorting effects. That’s why I use the
analogy of steroids: it gives you big muscles fast, but do you want to keep
taking steroids if you know the side effects? At one seminar, there was a participant
who wanted me to make an unqualified argument that corruption is good; he got
upset and rebutted, “But what if taking steroids isn’t that bad?” My response
was: “But I am telling you the side effects are terrible; whether you
wish to believe me is a different matter.” As my editor once reminded me, some
people telegraph their beliefs onto what they read; they think you said what
they want you to say.
I’m sharing these anecdotes because they speak to
another broader issue in our discipline: neither researchers nor our audiences
are free from biases. Rather than pretend that biases do not exist, it should
be an essential part of our education to acknowledge and unpack them.
CT & RM:
What do you make of the government’s concession to
protesters’ demands to end the zero-COVID policy? Were you surprised by this
outcome? Can you help us understand China’s reversal on zero COVID?
YYA:
Sure, I’ll refer you to my essay in Foreign Affairs
in December 2022, “The Problem with Zero: How Xi’s Pandemic Policy Created a
Crisis for the Regime.”15
Briefly summarized, zero-COVID presents a puzzling situation where the ruling
party seemed to be sabotaging itself, insisting on futile, damaging lockdowns
even when the virus has turned milder and highly transmissible. Among Western
analysts accustomed to living in democratic societies where governments must
account for their actions, the instinct is to search for rational explanations.
The most common one is that the Chinese government fears that a surge of
infections could overwhelm hospitals (yet, during the pandemic, local
governments did not invest in ramping up health care capacity but rather in
mass testing and quarantines).
While these “rational” explanations are valid, they
fail to get at the real political explanation: because Xi said so. Given that
Xi is personally wedded to the policy, nobody in the bureaucracy dared to call
his command into question, even when it defied common sense. As indicated
earlier, local officials were adapting their methods more around maintaining
zero cases than saving lives. Extreme and prolonged COVID controls forced
desperate citizens to protest en masse in November 2022, on a scale not seen
since Tiananmen in 1989. It is only at that point that the leadership realized
things were out of hand. China reversed its COVID policy overnight, quite
certainly because, again, Xi said so.
CT & RM:
Is Xi weakened in any way, as a result?
YYA:
Certainly, the turn of events has overturned his
claims about the “institutional advantages” of top-down control. But it doesn’t
mean he would be deposed. Overthrowing an authoritarian regime requires
organized opposition, and the ruling party has been dedicated to preempting it.
CT & RM:
Lastly, what do you think is important for college
students to know about China?
YYA:
The most important thing for college students to learn
is the lens through which they view China and everything else. I’ll
share an example. Once, in my class, I was trying to teach my students about
the difference between formal and informal authority. I asked them to identify
“the real boss” of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s. My students
glanced at each other for a moment but knew enough by that point to chime
“Deng!” In fact, Deng’s highest executive title was vice-premier; unlike Mao,
he wasn’t the chairman of the party, and he wasn’t even the premier.16
Later a student came up to me. The “real boss,” she reflected, wasn’t
necessarily found on the organizational chart. “But if I insisted on wearing my
Western lens, I wouldn’t see it, so I had to temporarily remove the lens.”
Every day, we walk around wearing an invisible pair of
glasses given to us by our times, our society, our education, our family, our
peers. The primary value of a college education is not just learning about
facts and skills (though they matter, too), but becoming aware of our
worldview. Whether it is China, America, Shakespeare, or quantum physics, the
subject matter is a tool for self-discovery. It is only when we realize that
our worldview is filtered that we can choose which filters to select, keep, or
reject. If students do not learn this, they may have skills and a degree, but
they will not be truly free.
Notes
Robyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate
Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Highway of
Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia 2015), which reconstructs
the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative
dialectics, as well as several articles on critical theory and politics. She
can be reached at rmarasco@hunter.cuny.edu.
Charles Tien is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate
Center, CUNY. He was a Fulbright Scholar in American Politics at Renmin
University in Beijing, China. He is currently the co-editor of Polity,
the journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association. His recent
publications have appeared in American Politics Research, Italian Journal of
Electoral Studies, The Forum, and Electoral Studies. He can be
reached at ctien@hunter.cuny.edu
Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins
University. She is a faculty member at the SNF Agora Institute, Department of
Political Science, and Center for Economy and Society. Ang has received awards
from multiple social sciences—political science, economics, and sociology—and
she is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for Emerging Scholar,
awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical,
theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative
politics.” She is the author of two books, How China Escaped the Poverty
Trap and China’s Gilded Age, which won the Peter Katzenstein Prize
(political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North
Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and
Barrington Moore Prize (honorable mention, historical sociology). Her new
research is supported by the National Science Foundation. In 2021 Ang is named
by Apolitical among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government
for “research that resonates with policymakers [and] has the potential to steer
the direction of government.” Foreign Affairs named her writing among
the “Best of Books” and “Best of Print.” She has been interviewed on Freakonomics
Radio, The Ezra Klein Show, and Project Syndicate, among
other outlets. Her episode on Freakonomics was described by the host
Stephen Dubner as “one of the most powerful and fascinating pieces we’ve done
in some time.” Ang is an award-winning teacher. She can be reached at yuen.yuen.ang@jhu.edu.
1. Michael
Desch, “How Political Science Became Irrelevant: The Field Turned Its Back on
the Beltway,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 27, 2019), https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-political-science-became-irrelevant/.
2. Stephen
J. Dubner, “Is the US Really Less Corrupt Than China?,” Freakonomics
(November 18, 2021), https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/yuen-yuen-ang/.
3. Peter
Katzenstein and Lucia Seybert, “Protean Power and Uncertainty: Exploring the
Unexpected in World Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 62
(2018): 80–93 at 89; citing Benjamin Cohen, “A Grave Case of Myopia,” International
Interactions 35 (2009): 436–44, at 437.
4. Ted
Hopf, “Getting the End of the Cold War Wrong,” International Security 18
(1993): 202–15, at 202.
5. Yuen
Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2016).
6. To
quote the economist Ha-Joon Chang, “Institutional economists need to pay more
attention to the real world, both of the present and historical—not the fairy
tale retelling of the history of the world that has come to characterize
mainstream institutional economics today (from the Glorious Revolution to the
Botswana political culture) but capitalism as it really has been.” See Ha-Joon
Chang, “Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History,” Journal
of Institutional Economics 7 (2011): 595–613.
7. Yuen
Yuen Ang, China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast
Corruption (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
8. Yuen
Yuen Ang, “The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive Its Gilded Age?” Foreign
Affairs (July/August 2021), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2021-06-22/robber-barons-beijing.
9. Ang,
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Chapters 1 and 5.
10. The
term “market-preserving” institutions comes from Weingast. See Barry Weingast,
“The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and
Economic Development,” in Constitutional Political Economy Vol 2., ed.
Stefan Voigt (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003), 285–315.
11. Lant
Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews, “Looking Like a State:
Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation,” Journal
of Development Studies 49 (2013): 1–18.
12. Yuen
Yuen Ang, “Beyond Elite Innovation,” in forum, “Making Prosperity Local,” led
by Daniel Breznitz, in Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and
Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity, ed. Mariana Mazzucato, Boston
Review Forum 19 (46) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
13. I
reflect on a survey project designed by Vijayendra Rao and his colleagues at
the World Bank to be relevant to the village women they are studying in
India, some of whom were illiterate. We must question the notion that research
is relevant only when it influences powerholders. Moreover, in the real world,
even if academics can “influence” powerholders, this may not pan out the way
academics hope or expect. See Yuen Yuen Ang, “Integrating Big Data & Thick
Data to Transform Public Services Delivery,” IBM Center for the Business of
Government Research Report, 2019.
14. Ang,
China’s Gilded Age, 11.
15. Yuen
Yuen Ang. “The Problem with Zero: How Xi’s Pandemic Policy Created a Crisis for
the Regime,” Foreign Affairs (online edition), (December 2, 2022), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/problem-zero-xi-pandemic-policy-crisis.
16. As
Vogel concluded, “In the annals of world political history, it would be difficult
to find another case where a person [Deng] became top leader of a major nation
without formal public recognition of the succession,” see Ezra Vogel, Deng
Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2011), at 247.
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