Cornell University associate professor of government Jeremy Wallace summarized his new book, "Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China," at a recent live book event online.
Several analysts on China who took part in the event praised Wallace's book.
The event, was hosted and moderated by Scott Kennedy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) trustee chair director Scott Kennedy. Panelists included Yuen Yuen Ang, associate professor of politics, University of Michigan; Yasheng Huang, professor of international management, MIT Sloan School of Management; and Andrew Mertha, director of the SAIS China Global Research Center, Johns Hopkins University.
Wallace talked about his book's focus - the role of quantification in Chinese political authority.
"I think in the story of China's rapid economic development, the downsides, the negative externalities of this successful story in many ways is the story of hiding facts," Wallace said. "Kind of core questions that the book examines can be thought of in this way. How did a Revolutionary Communist Party come to justify itself through GDP statistics, and why is it shifting away from doing so?"
He questioned how these changing practices are understood.
"...Not just kind of the words that the regime or the government uses to talk about itself and to legitimate itself, as it were, but the real changing practices of kind of governance, of development strategy, of the kind of level of monitoring or anti-corruption activities, what have you," Wallace said.
Wallace noted that China focused on some statistics but then failed to count "what mattered."
"A few numbers came to define Chinese politics until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up," he said. "The central state focused on a few statistics, particularly GDP, and that this was very successful kind of promoting that those numbers and getting good development based on those numbers."
But over time, he pointed out, China did not report numbers on pollution, debt, corruption or data that was falsified.
"And that was kind of problematic as as these problems festered," he said. "And then what they counted did not measure up. That's the falsification idea, but also that the numbers themselves are not measuring up to performance."
In a slide presentation, he pointed out the "neo-political term, fix and hedge" and defined the fix as "corruption is slowing down growth, perhaps anti-corruption can fix growth issues" and "improving governance might fix concerns regarding living standards."
The hedge, in the slide presentation was "moving away from output-based justifications makes sense if you feel that output numbers are likely to decline."
Wallace spoke of the former Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, who delivered a speech that detailed many examples of the regime's success, including millions in government subsidized housing units that were upgraded, reservoirs reinforced, etc. Once Xi Jinping came onto the scene, "you have something very different," Wallace noted, adding that instead of Jiabao, who spoke before thousands of deputies, Xi spoke to a small gathering of politicians.
Wallace, who has watched Chinese politics for decades and seeing a "Chinese politician describe his caring too much about GDP growth, when it seemed for so many years that the job of a Chinese politician was to both promote economic development, promote these economic values, and then talk about it in kind of the most boring, technocratic way possible, seemed heralded a real change. And I thought an important, important shift of direction inside of the regime."
In explaining the book, he said "in many ways it is trying to think about the kind of shift in Chinese politics from a kind of a calm, technocratic engineering style of politics to a more populist, kind of like energetic, coercive, repressive politics under Xi Jinping."
He gave three takeaways from the book about authoritarianism.
"There's a lot of scholarship on the coercive nature of politics that is that regimes survive because they have control of a security apparatus," Wallace said. "And similarly, there's a lot of work on co-optation that kind of elites inside of politics kind of get paid off and that that regime survived in those ways. But there is increasingly not enough attention to the ways that regimes, governments justify themselves or convince their populations in themselves of their continued sense in ruling.
"Second, I feel like the general image about the ways that authoritarian governments fall is through a popular rebellion," he added. "Scholarship has shown that that coups and other kind of really elite maneuvers tend to be the source of lots of most turnover. Because of that, most of the scholarship has focused on these elite, elite dynamics. This book tries to to remind and to push the discussion back to to the masses because, in the end, mass politics shapes those elite dynamics.
"Third, it tries to push this idea about if we think about threats to the political regime or threats to the dictator, that pushes us to consider who is this dictator and what is this political regime," Wallace said. "And so trying to think about the contested identities of political regimes who rules? How does it go about ruling and why does it do so? And that these intermix of questions are always present."
Wallace said when thinking about authoritarian politics, these dynamics need attention.
He also discussed Chapter 7 of his book, which focused on the moment when there was a political change in China.
Wallace points out that Xi "personalized politics."
"Centralized politics kind of reinvigorated the party in all domains of social, political and economic life," Wallace said. "He's increased monitoring of local officials and in fact, of all society, increased anti-corruption activities, repression and surveillance. At the same time, there has been an increase in a serious emphasis on morality and tradition, in part shifting away from this kind of developmental list vision towards a more kind of like just a regime justified based on its morality."
Scott Kennedy then said, "I want to highlight what's so distinctive about the book. It shouldn't be is this focus on quantification as a source of Chinese Communist Party legitimacy, which we seem to take for granted. It's a part of the conversation that one just accepts as natural. And, obviously, now the Chinese are turning away from that natural what we thought was natural. And we're all running to catch up because we weren't let in on that secret, which you have now done for us."
Yuen Yuen Ang called Wallace's book "timely, rigorous and super engaging."
Ang highlighted a few key messages she took from the book.
"To me, this is a book about how about the political and governmental uses of numbers," she said. "As China enters a more advanced stage of development and how the political use of numbers evolves as the priorities of the top leaders evolve, it argues that at early stages of development, China used a limited, quantified vision that was very well suited for rapid growth. I completely agree."
But she pointed out the change under Xi Jinping.
"Later during Xi Jinping's reign, he diluted the importance of GDP but attempted to quantify everything," she said. "So that was kind of a big paradox. It jumped out at me.
"And if you just read those lists of targets, it's quite astounding, just the amount of tasks and the range and complexity of demands that are being imposed on these local officials," Ang added. "My favorite line in the book is this punchy and perfect summary about Xi, where Jeremy argues, the new normal is an attempt to fix the problems of the prior system as well as a hedge against and an inability to do so."
Mertha, of Johns Hopkins University, also praised the book, saying it exceeded his expectations.
"I was maybe a little bit afraid that reading it would not match my expectations. Fortunately, they not only did they match them that it matched them, but it exceeded them," Mertha said. "'Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts' is a book that immediately takes its place among the list of most read books on China."
Yasha Huang called the book "extremely timely."
Huang pointed out that others have published papers on data manipulation, "but this book is far beyond that," she said. "It is the only quantification of the political and governance and who and how quantification does that."
