This week on Sinica, Iza Ding, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, joins to share her ideas on how American academia has framed and problematized authoritarianism, especially when it comes to China. A deep and subtle thinker, she offers thought-provoking critiques of some of the assumptions that have become nearly axiomatic in political science and other social sciences in their approach to understanding politics in China.

3:13 – Iza Ding’s concept of “authoritarian teleology”

15:31 – The concept of authoritarian resilience

19:58 – The question of regime legitimacy

24:09 – The question of whether authoritarianism is an ideology

26:24 – The China model?

30:58 – Finding a balance between generalizability and the sui generis, and striving toward cognitive empathy and “Verstehen”

42:04 – The state of area studies and avoiding essentialism

49:32 – Iza Ding’s advice on how to become a better writer

Recommendations:

Iza: The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner — the story of Alison, the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

Kaiser: the guitarist Kent Nishimura, especially his recordings of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police, and “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan

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