Speaker:

Prof Yuen Yuen Ang
Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy
Johns Hopkins University, USA

Moderator:

Dr Teh Kok Peng
Chairman, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore

Date & Time:

Tuesday, 15 August 2023
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Venue:

Seminar Room 3-1, Manasseh Meyer Building
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS Bukit Timah Campus
469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259772

Reading materials:

Ambiguity and Clarity in China’s Adaptive Policy Communication
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/ambiguity-and-clarity-in-chinas-adaptive-policy-communication/0DF09304B7C624C0AC394EDE42ED344F

Essay: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-12-08/decoding-xi-jinping

Blog on article: https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/how-beijing-commands-how-the-communist-party-combines-ambiguity-and-clarity-to-maximum-effect/

Abstract:

In China’s one-party bureaucracy, central directives – including laws, commands, instructions and guidelines – issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council are the most important instrument of formal policy communication, yet their language has rarely been studied. This study highlights three politically salient varieties of directives: grey (ambiguous about what can or cannot be done), black (clearly states what can be done) and red (clearly states what cannot be done). Grey directives encourage flexible policy implementation and experimentation, black ones strongly endorse and thereby scale up selected initiatives, while red ones forbid certain actions. Together, this mixture of ambiguous and clear directives forms a system of adaptive policy communication. Using automated text analysis, Prof Ang classifies nearly 5,000 central directives issued from 1978 through 2017 into the categories of grey, black and red. This first-of-its-kind measurement effort yields new insights into the patterns and evolution of central commands from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

About the Speaker:

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is a faculty member of the SNF Agora Institute and Department of Political Science and also the first named professor at the Center for Economy & Society, dedicated to exploring “alternatives to traditional economic thinking.” Ang is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist. She has received scholarly awards from multiple social sciences. The American Political Science Association named her the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics.” Her books have received the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and Barrington Moore Prize (honorable mention, historical sociology). Apolitical, a UK platform for public servants, named her among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government for “research that resonates with policymakers and has the potential to steer the direction of government.” Foreign Affairs, the premier outlet on US foreign policy, named her writing among the “Best of Print” and “Best of Books.” Ang has been profiled in American, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and European outlets, including CGTN, Chosun, Die Zeit, Endgame, Freakonomics, Jiemian, Pengpai, The New York Times, among others. In her recent interview at The New York Times, the host Ezra Klein describes Ang as “[having] done pioneering work on understanding China’s political system… [Her perspective] has pretty profound implications… an interesting way of thinking about how we are governed here [in the United States].” She is a Singapore native and citizen who received her BA from Colorado College and PhD from Stanford University.