China and the World Seminar Series

Authoritarian Teleology

Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 7th May 2025

Abstract: After the fall of the Soviet Union and the withering away of planned economies, the 20th-century literature on communism shifted decisively toward the 21st-century literature on authoritarianism. Iza Ding argues that, while the field of comparative politics appears to have moved on from communism, enduring questions and concepts have lingered through their doppelgängers, with the modifier “communist” now replaced by “authoritarian.” Paradigmatic thinking about communism has find expression in contemporary studies of authoritarianism. Ding identifies two threads connecting these two literatures: first, the centrality of questions surrounding non-democratic legitimacy and regime resilience; and second, binary assumptions about authoritarian states and their citizens. She critiques this paradigm on two grounds: first, a functionalist tendency in explanations of legitimacy and resilience; and second, incommensurability between dueling binaries about states and citizens.

Speaker: Dr Iza Ding (Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University)

Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy)

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

The Art of Storytelling in Authoritarian Regimes: Crafting Mainstream Consensus on Chinese Social Media

Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 3rd March 2025.

This paper introduces the theoretical framework of “event-based narratives” to analyse pro-regime messages by opinion leaders with the case of Chinese social media. We randomly sampled verified Weibo users and collected approximately three million posts from government, media, and celebrity users between January and May 2022. Using the subject-verb-object extraction, we reverse-engineer these messages to uncover the stories of “who does what to whom” and infer underlying strategies and beliefs. Our findings show that domestic events emphasize benevolent leadership, while international events highlight national unity. In state-led events, positive narratives are coordinated, while unexpected events see scapegoating and blame-shifting strategies. Furthermore, we trace the spread of specific narratives over time by comparing the timestamps of their dissemination by different opinion leaders online. We offer new insights into consensus-building and its role in propaganda and political campaigns within and beyond authoritarian regimes. 

Speaker: Dr. Yan Wang (Assistant Professor of Social Statistics at The University of Manchester) 

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub). 

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Military Assistance in mid-20th Century Asian Warfare

Monday 17th February 2025.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine highlights both the impact and limitation of military assistance in warfare. The mid-20th Century Asian warfare also witnesses rich experience in military assistance, including those from great powers or among countries in the region during the Second World War, Chinese Civil War, Korean War, and Indochina Wars. In particular, China was either recipient or provider of military assistance in these conflicts. The talk will assess and compare the impact of the military assistance on Asian warfare, and their long-term impact on Asian military modernization as well as regional security.

Speaker: Professor Li Chen (Renmin University of China)

Chair: Dr Qingfei Yin (Assistant Professor of International History, LSE)

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics - How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State

Tuesday 10 December 2024.

Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics offers a new account of economic policy making in China over the past four decades that reveals how bureaucrats have spurred large-scale transformations from within. Yingyao Wang demonstrates how competition among bureaucrats motivated by careerism has led to the emergence of new policy approaches. Second-tier economic bureaucrats instituted distinctive—and often conflicting— “policy paradigms” aimed at securing their standing and rewriting China’s long-term development plans for their own benefit. Emerging from the middle levels of the bureaucracy, these policy paradigms ultimately reorganized the Chinese economy and reshaped state-market relations. Drawing on fine-grained biographical and interview data, Wang traces how officials coalesced around shared career trajectories, generational experiences, and social networks to create new alliances and rivalries. Shedding new light on the making and trajectory of China’s ambitious economic reforms, this book also provides keen sociological insight into the relations among bureaucracy, states, and markets.

Speaker: Professor Yingyao Wang (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia) 

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub). 

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Renegotiating Boundaries: The Political Economy of Territorial Urbanization in China

Tuesday 19 November 2024.

This talk will explore the political economy of territorial restructuring between large cities and small counties in China's urbanization process. Over the past two decades, approximately 200 counties and county-level cities have been absorbed into larger cities, as the latter sought to expand their territorial control and undertake ambitious transformation projects. How can we understand the shifting boundaries and changing jurisdictional sizes in a political system where top-down decisions often override local preferences? Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this talk argues that while a city’s standing in the political hierarchy largely determines its ability to initiate city-county mergers, counties can still resist or delay full territorial integration. Original boundaries may persist despite formal mergers, unless the changes are seen as providing tangible economic benefits to local society.

Speaker: Professor Jianzi He (Duke Kunshan University) 

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Railway Development

Tuesday 22 October 2024.

The talk will present the speaker’s new book, The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Infrastructure Development (Oxford University Press), on the interactions between Chinese state actors and African politics. How do African politics affects foreign infrastructure projects? And what explains the variation of African state effectiveness in foreign engagement and public goods delivery? The book argues that the agency of African leaders is the central factor that determines Chinese-sponsored railway delivery. And such leadership can be generated not only from centralized developmental states, but also from leaders’ perceived threats of competitive elections in democratic states. Empirical data is collected from multi-year fieldwork in Angola, China, Ethiopia and Kenya with over 250 interviews. 

Speaker: Dr Yuan Wang (Duke ​Kunshan University).

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub). 

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Fast-tracked city unbound? Speed, scale, and risk in China’s overseas investment

Thursday 14 March 2024 

Fast urbanism has been one of the key aspirational characteristics of contemporary China. Speedy construction and economy of scale have enabled the rapid process of urbanisation in China. In recent years, real estate developers, who facilitated urban accumulation, have also attempted to advance into overseas markets, including London, which is the main case study for this paper. How do the experiences of speedy and large-scale urban development in China translate to overseas destinations? What risk aversion strategies do they adopt? What does this tell us about the nature and agents of capital? To address these questions, this talk engages with an in-depth empirical study of an urban redevelopment project in East London that involved a Chinese developer. By evaluating the business practices of the Chinese developer in London and tracing such practices back to China, this talk aims to shed light on the nature of urban manifestations of global China and the meaning of ‘ethnic capital’.

Speaker: Professor Hyun Bang Shin (Department of Geography and Environment, LSE)

Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Department of Social Policy, LSE) 

Venue: CBG.1.05 (1st floor), Centre Building, LSE

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

New Thinking on Rural Development in China

Tuesday 13 February 2024 

The talk will present China’s ongoing rural revitalisation program through different cases. The speaker has been working on rural development programs in Yunnan, China since 2015. Faced with challenges of rural-urban disparity and rural decline, it is critical to explore new development approach by adopting rural-urban parallel rather than sequential transformation. Rural revitalisation program is not simply increasing investment but focusing on regenerating new rural economy appropriate for small-holder farmers’ development. The speaker argues that in the past two decades, the development process from poverty reduction to rural revitalisation in rural China has produced a new development narrative. But it has been largely ignored by the development community.

Speaker: Professor Xiaoyun Li (China Agricultural University).

Chair: Professor James Putzel (Department of International Development).

Venue: CKK.1.07 (1st floor), Cheng Kin Ku Building, Lincoln's Inn Fields, LSE

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here. 

The Evolution of China's Development Cooperation

Thursday 25 January 2024

The talk will review three changes that drives the transition of China’s international development cooperation system: narrative change, institutional change, and strategic change. It will then analyze the recent trends of development finance between China and OECD DAC countries. It argues that, despite some conceptual and structural differences, China and DAC countries demonstrate similar patterns of development finance in aligning development and foreign policy goals.

Speaker: Professor Yu Zheng (Fudan University).

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here. 

The Role of Institutions in Urban Climate Governance: Learnings From the Global South

Wednesday 6 December 2023

Within the ecosystem of urban climate governance, Dr Deshpande seeks to understand the role of local institutions in pursuing urban climate policy or action in the Global South. Countries in the Global South are experiencing rapid urbanization and the city or municipal governments, operating under weak or under-developed governance structures, are struggling to meet the needs of a growing urban population. Under such circumstances it seems unlikely that these local institutions would possess the capacity to pursue urban climate action or policy. The aim of Dr Deshpande's research is to unpack urban climate policymaking and understand the role of local institutions in this process.  

Speaker: Dr Tanvi Deshpande (Research Fellow, LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub).

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Co-Director of the LSE-Fudan Research Centre for Global Public Policy and the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).

Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here. 

Property Institutions and State Capacity: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Agricultural Projects in Zambia

Thursday 26 October 2023

 A long-standing literature argues that African states have weak capacity, especially in regulating its land. Increasingly, scholarly work on foreign land acquisition in developing countries recognizes the ‘active state’ explanations that the African states and subnational actors have played an important and diverse role in (re)structuring access and control over land and natural resources. In this talk Dr Yang will contribute to this scholarship by focusing on the role of African property institutions and propose a theory of how land tenure regimes structure the processes of investment, including land acquisition and continued control over land after acquired. 

Speaker: Dr Yuezhou Yang  (Research Fellow, LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub).

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Communication, Culture and Rural Revitalization in China

Thursday 4 May 2023

PODCAST available here.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and nearly ten years of participatory action research in Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, this talk explores the role of communication and culture in Xi-era China’s drive to revitalize the countryside after decades of GDP-driven, uneven, and urban-centric development. China’s cutting-edge modern communication infrastructures and deep-rooted agrarian traditions serve as revealing sites for analyzing the possibilities and limits of the Chinese state’s rural revitalization strategy, while Zhejiang as the party-state’s chosen demonstration zone for achieving modernization and common prosperity offers a unique vantage point for a critical examination of the place of the rural in China’s overall developmental trajectory.   

Speaker: Professor Yuezhi Zhao (Simon Fraser University, Canada and Tsinghua University, China).

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Co-Director of LSE-Fudan Public Policy Centre, Director of LSE PhD Academy).

Autocratic China: Ideology, Bureaucracy and Repression

Monday 6 March 2023

Join us for free lunch and discussion on the origins of China's autocratic regime. Dr Xue will consider the nature of autocratic rule in China with a particular focus on the Qing dynasty and the use of persecution to suppress potential dissent. The talk will discuss the imperial examination system and the constrains autocrats faced in using this system to select bureaucrats. Finally, the speaker will touch on the role of ideas and how these can be used to legitimate autocratic rule.

Speaker: Professor Dr Melanie Xue (LSE Economic History).

Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (LSE-Fudan Hub Council Member).

Social Policy Development in the Post-COVID Age in China and BRICS Countries: Challenges and Opportunities

Wednesday 8 February 2023

Based on the speakers’ research on social policy developments in China and BRICS countries before and during the pandemic, especially in the fields of education and health policies, this seminar will be devoted to discussing the challenges and opportunities as these countries move to “build back better” in the post-COVID age.

Speaker: Dr Yifei Yan (Southampton University).

Chair: Dr Yuxi Zhang (School of Public Policy).

Listen to the podcast here.

This seminar is co-hosted with the Global Health Initiative .

Civic Engagement, Volunteerism and Philanthropy in Contemporary China and Beyond

Thursday 8 December 2022

In this conversation, Profs Hasmath and Hildebrandt will explore the relationship between volunteerism, philanthropy, and civic engagement in contemporary China. They will discuss the new forms of citizen-led initiatives that are complementary to, or supplanting, state-led ones.

Speaker: Dr Reza Hasmath (University of Alberta).

Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Department of Social Policy).

Listen to the podcast here.

Researching Public Opinion in China

Thursday 10 November 2022

In this research dialogue session, Dr Blake Miller and Professor Bingchun Meng will discuss their research on mediated political communication in the Chinese context and exchange opinions about some of the common methodological and conceptual issues that cut across their respective fields.

Listen to the podcast here.