A Conversation with Yuen Yuen Ang about China and Political Science

 

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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