Authoritarian Teleology
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 7 May 2025
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)
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 3 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).
Military Assistance in mid-20th Century Asian Warfare
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 17 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)
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics - How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 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).
Renegotiating Boundaries: The Political Economy of Territorial Urbanization in China
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 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).
The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Railway Development
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 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).
