Transcript: Political Scientist Iza Ding on Authoritarianism, Legitimacy, and "Resilience"

The following is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast conversation with Iza Ding, recorded in Chicago, Illinois on April 10, 2024. Thanks to the great team at Cadre Scripts for the transcription, and to Lili Shoup for her careful and diligent checking of the transcript!

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China. 

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Chicago, Illinois. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.

And listeners, please support my work on Substack at sinica.substack.com. There, you will find, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, and now a wide range of offerings — James Carter’s This Week in China’s History; Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf; Andrew Methven’s Chinese Phrase of the Week; the You Can Learn Chinese Podcast from Jared Turner and John Pasden, and the outstanding China Global South Podcast, as well as weekly essays from our friends at the China Global South Project.

As I say each week in the intro, I am interested in how we think and talk about China. Every once in a while, I encounter someone with the same interest in examining our discourse on China, whether academic, within the social sciences and history say, or more broadly in media, in civil society, or just out there on the social media platforms that have now become, unfortunately, our de facto public sphere. 

Just in the last year, I have gotten to know Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China — and for my money, one of the most original thinkers when it comes to, well, the way we think and talk about China. I had the great good fortune to spend a good amount of time with her and a couple of other folks, Kevin Xu and Cameron Johnson, both of whom you will meet on Sinica before too long. The four of us had participated in the Salzburg Global Seminar and all happened to be headed to Vienna for a few days after, just to take in the sites. It was like a walking China salon held between cafés, museums, and restaurants. 

I’m delighted to be here in Chicago, where I just spoke last night at the China Town Hall, put on by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, organized here in Chicago by Iza, and it was a perfect opportunity to finally sit down and talk about her ideas on the discourse about China. Iza Ding, thank you so much for having me here in Chicago, and welcome to Sinica.

Iza Ding: Thank you for having me on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser.

Kaiser: My absolute pleasure and honor. Let me start, Iza, by asking you about a concept that I first heard you drop almost casually really. It was at a panel, an environmental panel, actually. It was about teaching about the environment in China, or teaching about environmentalism in China, and that was at the AAS Conference in Boston in 2023. And I’ve mentioned it before on the show. You call it “authoritarian teleology.” That might strike some listeners as sounding a bit jargony, but really it’s a pretty simple idea. And once you said it, once I heard you articulate it, I feel like I see it instantiated just everywhere. So, break it down for us. What is authoritarian teleology and why is it such an unhelpful habit?