The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China

DING, Iza. 2022. The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Iza Ding's The Performative State is essential reading for those wanting to learn more about the less visible reality of the daily challenges faced by street-level environmental bureaucrats in China. It lends flesh and blood to a phrase I encountered repeatedly in China in the mid-2010s when interviewing environmental activists: "Well, there is the law, but then there is the application of the law in dealing with pollution cases." Ding's rich and indepth observations transport readers back to the "airpocalypse" hailstorm and anti-corruption episodes of 2013, when she began her field research in Lakeville, a bustling and developed city on China's central coast. Given the developed context of Lakeville, Ding anticipated that bureaucratic behaviour would be all the more apt to achieve substantive governance, a "governance that is geared towards delivering the fruits of effective rule that people demand and deserve" (p. 7). In fact, it is recognised that authoritarian regimes like China often rely on performance legitimacy (Gilley 2009; Holbig and Gilley 2010; Zhu 2011). If they cannot meet people's demands such as economic growth or a healthy environment, the regime could be undermined by popular dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, Ding didn't find that. What Ding found instead, and this is the book's central claim, is that high levels of "external scrutiny" by the public, coupled with the bureaucracy's low logistical and/or political capacity, led bureaucrats not to deploy substantive governance, but to resort to performative governance, a "deployment of visual, verbal, and gestural symbols of good governance for the audience of citizens" (p. 7).

The book illuminates the theatrical side of environmental governance in everyday Chinese politics. The author bases her definition of performativity on Merriam-Webster's definition of performative as a means of image cultivation or the...