Celebrate the end of the academic year at our third International Book Blitz. At this popular event, open to all Weatherhead affiliates, a panel of Weatherhead Center Faculty Associates will each give a seven-minute “speed talk” about their recent book, launching us into compelling issues from around the world. A party for affiliates will follow the presentations.
Christina Davis, Director, Program on US-Japan Relations. Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, Department of Government, Harvard University. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton University Press, 2023)
Ya-Wen Lei, Professor, Department of Sociology, Harvard University. The Guilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023)
Michèle Lamont, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Departments of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University. Seeing Others—and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
Merilee Grindle, Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development, Emerita, Harvard Kennedy School. In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations (Harvard University Press, 2023)
Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business Administration, Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, Harvard Business School. Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Sugata Bose, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Department of History, Harvard University. Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 2024)
MELANI CAMMETT: OK, well, let's get started. Welcome, everyone. This is the annual International Book Blitz here at the Weatherhead Center. Very exciting. And it is one of our absolute favorite events highlighting the dynamism of our amazing faculty affiliates and showcasing the culmination of yearslong research projects that I have to get this in. We're often supported by the Weatherhead Center.
So if you haven't seen the book blitz before, you'll notice that this format is a bit different from our standard MO. Seated next to me on my right and left are six very distinguished authors from across the social sciences whose books were published in the last year, and they themselves will introduce themselves briefly. And as you can see from their name tents, they are in order of appearance. Ya-Wen Lei from sociology, Merilee Grindle from the Harvard Kennedy School, Sugata Bose from history, Michele Lamont from sociology, Christina Davis from government, and Meg Rithmire from Harvard Business School.
So I'm going to ask each author to present their book in only seven minutes. We're going to strictly enforce this. And this is a feat of synthesis in and of itself. If you look at the thickness of some of these books, of all of these books, seven minutes is really challenging. We're going to really enforce the pace with our resident timekeeper and content producer, Michelle Nicholasen, who put together this fantastic event, along with Sarah Banse and the other amazing members of our communications team here at the Weatherhead Center and the rest of the team as well. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Ya-Wen Lei.
YA-WEN LEI: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ya-Wen Lei. I'm a professor in the Department of Sociology, and my book, The Gilded Cage, was published last November. So empirically, I aim to understand the socioeconomic transformation in China since the mid 2000s. This transformation highlights a shift to a more high-tech oriented developmental model from an economy largely reliant on labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing.
And in my field work, which began after the 2008 financial crisis, and I observed how local governments in China attempted to evict what they consider obsolete capital and labor and replacing human workers with robots despite a potential adverse consequences for workers. And I also observed government's cultivation of the digital economy and the rise of internet related sectors as some of the most important pillars of China's economy.
And some of you might have heard of the term birdcage economy. Chinese government officials used the phrases bird and cage to refer to China's economy and the government's control. And they want the bird to grow, but they don't want them to fly away. And in the past, they didn't distinguish different birds. But as China shifted to technology development, the government began to distinguish between different kinds of birds and making it clear that they only wanted cutting edge new birds but not old ones. And they developed a lot of different kinds of technical and legal instruments to classify and evaluate labor and capital to facilitate this transformation.
And the instruments they use constitute a cage as they largely structure and constrain the actions and interaction of different actors, from government officials to citizens, workers, and businesses. And in this process, the internet sector emerged as one of the largest, most significant new bird. And with the privilege of operating within a relatively free cage, China's tech companies have constructed cages that influence numerous workers and users within their own digital kingdoms.
And my book delves into the lives of different kinds of birds within these cages, and detailing the construction of the cages, and the unequal consequences and contradiction the cages have generated. And specifically, I explored the tensions between the government and both new and old capital due to the bifurcated regulatory environment the government has created.
So one example is that despite the government's intention to control tech companies, as some of the most important new birds, they almost burst the cage and forcing the Chinese government to rewire the cage. And I also examined the tension between the government and the citizens regarding citizenship rights as the cages created by the government systematically discriminated against the working class. The Chinese government began to be aware of the rising inequality in China in the early 2000, and aimed to address the problem, but many of the measures it took to facilitate techno-development ended up exacerbating social inequality.
And additionally, I also analyzed the tension between tech capital and labor as tech companies are able to impose meticulously calculated rules for labor control in their digital kingdoms. And finally, I discussed the decoupling of reality and appearance. And despite the government's effort to increase legibility of predictability and efficiency, the cages and instruments have often led government officials to focus on the means themselves instead of the ends. And many stakeholders try to play and cheat in the game, and the system created in the process became very inflexible and distorted. And in my book, I show how the transformation of China's birdcage economy is linked to the combination of technological fetishism, or techno-nationalism and the ideology of meritocracy, as well as an increasingly repressive political environment where it's challenging for individuals with different views on China's techno development to express themselves and influence policy.
So The Gilded Cage aims to deepen and integrate the literature on the developmental stage and digital capitalism. So we know there has been a large body of literature on the developmental stage, as illustrated by the East Asian developmental state cases, and this literature tends to focus on successful sectors rather than addressing issues related to older, less successful sectors. And the literature has largely overlooked cases where a successful digital economy emerges as a developmental outcome. And on the other hand, there exists a body of literature critiquing digital capitalism.
However, most of these studies have centered on the US case and have not extensively explored the role of the government. And the Chinese case presents different kinds of relationships between tech firms, the government, workers, and citizens. And I call for an effort to study and compare different kinds of techno-developmental regimes across contexts and over time, and the rising geopolitical tensions and techno nationalism, and the return of industrial policy in the US show the importance of such an agenda.
And at the highest level of abstraction, China's gilded cage exemplify a scenario where instrumental rationality has become so prominent while communicative rationality, as theorized by Habermas, has been on the decline within an increasingly repressive environment. And in this context, we witness the perfect manifestation of what Max Weber referred to as the iron cage. And I will stop here, and I'm glad I still have time to express my gratitude to the Weatherhead Center for its generous support for my project. Thank you.
MERILEE GRINDLE: Good afternoon. I'm Merilee Grindle. I was a Professor of International Development, and for a number of years I was also the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies across the street. I'm now retired. I want to thank the Weatherhead Center for organizing this event, and thank you all for coming.
Among the many trophies that Cortés sent home from the conquest of Mexico was a brightly painted pictographic book from the highlands of Oaxaca. In the years after 1519, it was housed in the monastery of San Marco in Florence. And at some point in time, it was sent to Rome, where church officials dismissed it as nothing more than a children's book of little interest to anyone. For the next several centuries, the whereabouts of this codex are unknown. Then in the 1830s, it was given to Lord Curzon, a member of Parliament in the UK, by a friend. He passed it on to his son, who then passed it on to the British museum, where it was forgotten again until 1898, when Zelia Nuttall rediscovered it deep in the stacks of that institution.
It became known as the Codex Nuttall, and a rare facsimile of it was published in 1902 by the Peabody Museum here at Harvard. It tells wonderful stories of kings and wars and human accomplishments in times long past. The person who found this intriguing manuscript, Zelia Nuttall, was a pioneer in the new field of scientific anthropology. She was a protégé of Frederic Putnam, one of the founders of modern anthropology and the most famous of the directors of the first anthropological museum in the United states, the Peabody. She signed her letters to him, "Your goddaughter in Science," with a capital S. She was very proud to call herself a scientist in that era of discovery and invention.
Zelia was born in 1857, in San Francisco, and died in Mexico in 1933. She spent much of her life digging in the libraries and museums of Europe to find artifacts from ancient civilizations in Mexico. She had unparalleled knowledge of the accounts that Spanish priests and soldiers and bureaucrats left of their encounters in the new world. She was an expert in deciphering the pictographic stories left by the ancients and was fluent in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and their predecessors.
Zelia Nuttall made history by decoding the Aztec calendar and revealing the meaning of beautiful artifacts made of feathers, clay, jade, obsidian, stone, and gold. In addition, she discovered a document that shed light on the travels of Sir Francis Drake and identified a new period in Mesoamerican history. She knew as no others the gods, the myths, and the everyday life of people in Mexico before the European incursion into the new world. She asked critically important questions about what their lives were like, what they believed, and how they understood the stars and the planets.
Known for an insistent personality, Zelia Nuttall spent much of her life in Europe, and in the first years of the 20th century, moved to an elegant mansion in Mexico city, where she lived for the last 30 years of her life. There, she hosted everyone who was anyone from Mexico and abroad while continuing her life of adventure and discovery. A divorced single woman, she was widely known, and admired, and sometimes frightened by, among the scholars and philanthropists who built the new discipline of anthropology.
She was honored at international conferences, invited to the White House by two presidents, knew the crowned heads of Europe, helped build the anthropological collections at Harvard, the Universities of Pennsylvania and California, the National Museum of Mexico and elsewhere. She was one of the judges of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, and was honored as one of the three most distinguished women in America in 1915. She was cited in international and national newspapers as an authority on ancient Mexico, a lady antiquarian, as she was called, and was an early member of the scholarly associations that were important to women seeking careers in the sciences.
In one of her more talked about moments, she stared down the arrogance of a Mexican official who, dressed in a top hat and carrying a cane, sashayed through the ruins like those in Teotihuacan and Monte Albán, claiming authority over what scientists from home and abroad were allowed to discover. He kept her from undertaking an excavation that she dearly wanted to do, but she raised such a fuss that she has been credited in the years since as having caused his downfall a year later.
Zelia Nuttall pursued her career during amazing times. It was a post-Darwinian world that was fascinated with questions about the origins of human civilizations. It was an era that delighted in the study of science. It was a gilded age in the United States when modern universities and libraries and museums were established to proclaim the country's cultural advancement. It was also a golden age in Mexico, when an origin myth became important to the socially prominent. She lived through a revolution that redefined what it meant to be Mexican.
Eventually, the institutionalization of anthropology in universities led to her unwarranted eclipse as a scholar. From there, history seems to have forgotten her. This is her book, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico's Ancient Civilizations. Thank you.
SUGATA BOSE: I'm Sugata Bose. Thank you, Weatherhead center for bringing us all together. 1924 was a year of some importance for a series of Asian crossings and conversations. In April, 100 years ago, Rabindranath Tagore set off on a voyage in search of a better understanding among Asian countries, particularly India, China, and Japan, and to preach what he called was the unity of the Asiatic mind. Tagore was quick to explain that he did not consider any quality to be exclusively Oriental. All great human ideals are universal, he asserted. Only in their grouping, emphasis, and expression, they differ from one another.
During his halt in Hong Kong, an emissary from Canton arrived bearing a graciously phrased letter of invitation from Sun Yat-sen. Tagore declined the invitation, citing time constraints. Had he accepted the invitation, he would have found how Canton in 1924 had become the confluence of a diverse band of Asians seeking freedom. Shanghai, not Canton, turned out to be Tagore's gateway to China. The young poet Xu Zhimo was on hand to receive him, along with a large crowd of admirers.
Tagore arrived in Beijing on April 23rd, and the next day Liang Qichao welcomed him at a grand reception. Not everyone was as effusive as embracing Tagore in China. Tagore articulated the principles in his speeches which he believed ought to undergird Asian unity. "In Asia, we must unite not through some mechanical method or organization, but through a spirit of true sympathy."
On May 26th, 1924, the US Congress enacted the Johnson-Reed Act, widely referred to as the Orientals Exclusion Act, imposing a stringent immigration restriction on Asians. It was an election year in the United States, and President Calvin Coolidge promptly signed the exclusionary law. After Tagore's departure from China, his admirers in Shanghai established an Asiatic association later that year. "There is on foot an important movement to established Asiatic Concord through the common culture of Asiatic nations," The Christian Science Monitor of Boston reported from Shanghai. Inspiration for the movement is acknowledged to Tagore, whose teachings permeate the issued declaration.
Tagore's message of the intrinsic relationship between beauty and hospitality had a warmer reception in Japan than in China. "I have deep love for you as a people," Tagore told the Japanese, "but when as a nation, you have your dealings with other nations, you can also be deceptive, cruel, and efficient in handling those methods in which the Western nations show such mastery." He urged his hosts to exorcise the demon called nation in the interest of peace. Later that year, Sun Yat-sen would deliver more or less the same message. In November of 1924, Sun Yat-sen delivered an important political address in Kobe on the significance of greater Asianism in the resistance against Western imperialism. He made an unnamed reference to an American author as a prelude to his discourse.
The writer in question was Lothrop Stoddard, whose 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, had, in Mark Mazower's words, "really caught the international mood." Stoddard was an alumnus of Harvard, having earned his BA and PhD in history from this august institution. His other institutional affiliation in the early 1920s appears to have been the Ku Klux Klan. Stoddard followed up his warnings about being inundated by the tide of color with a 1922 book titled The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man.
"This American scholar," Sun Yat-sen remarked in his 1924 speech, "considers the awakening of the Asiatic peoples as a revolt against civilization." In Sun's view, there were civilizations and civilizations, and he referred to a bit of deft, strategic essentializing to talk about a dichotomy between the kingly way and the despotic way, and then threw a challenge to his Japanese audience. "Japan today has become acquainted with the Western civilization of the rule of might, but retains the characteristics of the Oriental civilization of the rule of right." And he asked the Japanese to make their choice.
Asia stands today at the end of an era as alternative futures beckon. This book, Asia After Europe, offers my interpretation of the changing balance of global power during the long 20th century between Asia and Euro-America by painting the portrait of an age. This is a history of intellectual, cultural, and political conversations across Asia to imagine a pluralized continentalism against the backdrop of phases of material poverty and prosperity. It tries to offer a fresh perspective on Asianism through its choice of a fresh cast of characters, some well known, like Tagore and Sun Yat-sen, but many others rescued from undeserved oblivion. I see my book as a tribute to those who a century ago challenged European colonial domination to dream of the futurism of young Asia. So the question that I end this book with is, what should we choose among inheritances from the past to take with us on our uncertain journey ahead? Thank you.
MICHELE LAMONT: Good afternoon. I'm Michele Lamont. I'm Professor of Sociology and African and African American studies, and I'm former director of this Center, and I'm also the director of the Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. And the book I'm going to talk to you about is very much influenced by the work of this cluster. We've had countless conversations over several years that has fed my thinking. So to explain to you what this book is about, you can look at the cover. We're not supposed to do PowerPoint, but hey, I found a trick. You can see the circle of inclusion with groups of different colors and different sizes that are further or closer to the center.
Well, the book is essentially about how to create a society that is more inclusive. And the context in which I decided to write this book is during the Trump presidency. As soon as Trump came to power, he passed these, the travel ban toward Muslim countries and then attacks on trans rights. You could really see the circle of who's in and really, narrowing down. And at the same time, we had all these social movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and now today, the farmers in Europe that are denouncing the fact that they feel their dignity is not being recognized.
And my specialty as a sociologist, for the last 40 years, I've been studying the transformation of group boundaries. And I decided during the Trump era to write a trade book, to try to help the general reader understand how boundaries can be made more fluid. And if you want, I'm really not focused on the intracranial. I'm interested in the social and cultural processes at work. So instead, I want to replace in-- the big ambition would be in the public sphere to get people to stop talking about tribalism, which is really grounded in a notion of human nature, about which I believe we know basically nothing. And to look instead in terms of what do we know in terms of how our social groups transforms, and how are their boundaries made more or less permeable.
So how did I go about doing this? Well, first I was depressed, so I read a little bit on the literature on how do people find sources of hope. The social science literature tells us it's all done through the being exposed to alternative narratives about what possible futures are. So I decided to focus on, who are the people who are creating narratives today. And because of my political inclination, I focused on the liberal and the progressive side of the political spectrum. Of course, many other people are looking at the production of narratives at the conservative side, and because it was the COVID, I could interview all kinds of people who would not have been available in normal times.
And I decided with my research assistant, we constructed 185 interviews with people whose job requires creating new narratives that might help us understand and imagine an alternative future. So examples, for instance, Joey Soloway, who created the show Transparent. When I interviewed her about why-- or them about why they created this show, they said, "I want to make trans people less abhorrent, more understandable. I want to represent them the way that they represent themselves to themselves, with dignity. I want to make them more familiar, not only visible, but also understandable through less stereotypical lenses in a more multi-dimensional way."
And what I just said was said by many, many people, whether we did 75 interviews with stand-up comics and Hollywood creative. Yes, that was the most fun part of the project. Everyone in my department wanted to be research assistant for this project, as you would under. Bill Hader You know, Mike Schur All kinds of really interesting people. But our understanding of the public sphere was not only people working in entertainment, but people who also work in politics, policy, incarceration, people from the extreme left. Bhaskar Sunkara of the Jacobin magazine, really a very, very wide spectrum of people.
And the thinking is really that if we want to understand how people can overcome obstacles, we have to think about social resilience, not individual resilience. And social resilience has to do with the institutions and the cultural repertoires that are made available to us on which we can draw as we are encountering challenges. One example at the institutional level, think about same sex marriage law. As soon as these laws were passed, there was a rapid decline in a number of LGBTQ youth in high school who attempted suicide. OK, this is a correlation, maybe not causation, but they were very much exposed to a message that, yes, you belong. You have access to one of the most sacred institutions in American society. So it's really where the role of narratives sending us messages about who's in and who's out and who deserves what.
So we also did interviews-- we, me and my research assistant-- with 80 Gen Z's, college students in the Northeast and the Midwest. And I didn't do these interviews myself because they're really pissed at boomers because of what we did to the environment. So if you want to have good interviews with Gen Z's, you send other Gen Z's to interview them. And the questions were about really, what are the challenges today and what kind of life do you want to live in today. And they said, basically, the American Dream is a total joke. It's not accessible to us. We've just coming out of decades of growing inequality. So we really want to live a life where we can be authentically ourselves today because we don't know how long we're going to live. And we want not only to live authentically, but we also want to be in a more inclusive society.
So the book includes a chapter on Gen Z's where we explain how they braid together various repertoires. I'm a cultural sociologist, so I'm very much interested in the cultural tools that are accessible to us as we try to engage in meaning-making and understand where we're going as human beings. So, on the one hand, they still maintain elements of the American Dream, and neoliberalism, and the focus on work and achievement, but they're also very critical of it, saying we believe in the life-work balance, unlike the boomers. They have been deeply influenced by the therapeutic culture, the therapeutic ethos, and they very much also embrace a notion of what I call ordinary universalism, what we all share as human beings.
So one chapter of the book is focused on this group, and then there's chapters that explain what are narratives. And I propose this notion of recognition chain, which describes how the cultural producers we've interviewed are collaborating with many organizations in the philanthropic sector to scale up repertoire. So the Ford Foundation, for instance, funded the film Roma, which depicts Indigenous workers in a middle class family, and really tries to humanize them. So anyway, this is just a very brief overview of what this book is about, and I invite you to read it and to tell me what you think about it. Thank you.
CHRISTINA DAVIS: Thank you for giving me a chance to share my research. I'm Christina Davis. I do research on international organizations, and believe it or not, international organizations matter a lot for our everyday lives. The United Nations tries to prevent war. The World Trade Organization tries to lower the price of goods and prevent trade conflict. OPEC tries to set the price of oil. Regional organizations try to coordinate on everything from environmental protection to common standards. Try. So international organizations don't always succeed at their mission. Much of my research has been about how organizations work.
This book turns to, why do countries join and who is a member. Because often the way organizations work, who gets in the club matters. And so I wrote the book Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations. This book steps back to look at how countries join organizations to show that actually international organizations are very much like social clubs. Ones in which the institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends and exclude their rivals. I analyzed the membership provisions in the international organization charters for over 300 organizations, from the United Nations to the coffee association.
And through this analysis, I could show that the rules overwhelmingly allow countries to be selected in as members, but the rules are very vague about what are the criteria to get in. So international organizations are more like a golf club with hidden criteria for screening members based on having a local sponsor, or being the right type, voted on by members. And not like the soccer team where you have tryouts to evaluate performance, selection by coaches looking for talent. And this matters because you get unexpected members, both in and those who are excluded. Even organizations that pursue universal goals like world peace, protection of the environment are not including all states.
And last week we saw this. The UN Security Council voted to deny Palestine membership. This is just one of the many cases. Previously, Russia had vetoed Kosovo's membership. Cold War politics kept Korea out of the United Nations until the end of the Cold War in 1991, when North and South Korea joined as two states, still hoping for eventual unification. This is one of the most controversial cases of what is a state that is being determined by the vote to get in and the power balance over those votes.
But even organizations that don't pretend to be universal, that are clearly small and selective, are not always so clear about what they're selective on. What is Europe? Show me the line on a map. It is being defined as the European Union expands, and it expands based on a changing set of criteria. Britain was rejected twice before it finally became a member and then chose not to become a member. And we know there are others who would like to join that do not join.
Even in the case of the rich country club, the OECD. The accession rules simply say the council may decide to invite any government prepared to assume the obligations. Such decisions shall be unanimous. Which is why it could go from a small group, but that small group included Europe and Turkey. Not necessarily who you would have expected. The most recent entrants include Colombia and Costa Rica.
So decided who is like-minded is often about other affinities, not just performance. And my book examines this process about controversial cases for membership, routine cases for membership, to show many factors influence who wants to join and who is allowed to join, and an important and informal criteria that shapes membership is geopolitics. It all comes down to security ties and like-mindedness on values from political regime to security alliances. Through my analysis of membership patterns across all of the organizations over 60 years, I find that geopolitical alignment is a significant factor for when states apply, whether they are accepted, and how much they're asked to do in order to join. From the WTO and OECD to regional organizations, alliance ties, similar foreign policy positions taken on issues brought to the United Nations become the basis for cooperation by bringing states into organizations together.
One chapter in the book takes on my interest in Japan, and so I step back from organizational stories to look at how does one country approach joining organization as a foreign policy pillar? Looking at a century of Japan's engagement in the world, how in the 19th century for Japan, the way to join international society and avoid colonization was joining organizations, establishing ties with other states, whether it was the Universal Postal Union or the Telegraph Union. To become a great power, a major power, meant being in the League of Nations, even if it meant taking on the International Labour Organization when you didn't want to recognize labor unions in the Japanese government of the 1920s.
So you get a lot of unexpected decisions and commitments being made as part of joining society and getting closer for foreign policy ties. At the same time, as Japan's government became more resistant to ties with Europe, and going it alone, it left organizations. On the path to war. After defeat in war, the first step for Japan to rejoin international society was joining international organizations. But it needed the sponsorship of the United States as its ally to be allowed in because many distrusted it. So these are the kinds of stories that I highlight in the book, and I hope you will read it to learn more about international organizations and foreign policy.
MEG RITHMIRE: Last and least. Thank you so much to the Weatherhead Center for having us, and especially the staff for organizing this wonderful event. My name is Meg Rithmire. I'm a professor at the business school, but this is not a management book. It's very much a book about politics, which is how I was trained and how I practice as a political scientist. And my work has been supported throughout my career by the Weatherhead and other groups on this side of the river.
So the theoretical motivation for this book is how do authoritarian regimes discipline business. So there's a very common idea in the historical literature of "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," in the words of Barrington Moore, meaning it's the bourgeoisie, property owning classes, that developed and agitated for democratic inclusion and respect for property rights over a long period of time. You can hear in this some more modern flavors from the 1990s, the idea that if the United States assisted in incorporating China into the global order, China's middle class would grow. Business owners would agitate for political change, and China, would become more like us.
More contemporarily, we have a different view, which is that most authoritarian regimes host what's called crony capitalism. Everyone's corrupt, businesses have political connections, that's how they survive, and everyone's invested in perpetuating these systems of corruption where political change towards something that looks more like democracy is unlikely. So I wanted to ask these questions about how crony capitalism really works, and the empirical context presents a lot of puzzles, which is why I chose it. The context, the book is comparative. It's on China under the Chinese Communist Party, Indonesia under Suharto's New Order from 1965 to 1998, and Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, which I date from 1958 to 2018.
Why have I chosen these three countries? Because they present a wide range of puzzles on state business relations and authoritarian regimes. First, the Chinese Communist Party, of course, founded a regime that was based on a Communist revolution, yet has outperformed all of the other economies in terms of economic development and the development of, frankly, rich people and capitalism. Indonesia and Malaysia, these regimes were both based on a hyper acceptance of capitalism and a rejection of communism.
Yet, we observe Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional being one of the most distributive regimes in modern history, based on a race-based logic, distributing basically from Malaysians of Chinese origin to ethnic Malays, Bumiputera, the people who are deemed ethnic Malays. And Indonesia, under Suharto's New Order, which was a hyper embrace of capitalism, but the capitalist spoils were preserved for mostly Chinese economic elite that dramatically betrayed Suharto in the 1990s. So Suharto was frequently called and his Chinese cronies were called best friends, closest friends. But it was precisely these friends that betrayed Suharto at the end and precipitated the downfall of the regime itself.
So why have regimes founded on alliances between autocrats and capitalists witness one side betraying the other dramatically? I'll give you a real example of what this looks like. How many of you have heard of Miles Kwok or Guo Wengui? He's Steve Bannon's close friend. So this Chinese capitalist from Beijing, who was originally a great friend of the CCP and of the regime, who then exiled himself to New York City, recorded all kinds of YouTube videos of tales of corruption, of Chinese political elite, and then somehow found himself engaged in a wide fraud scheme with Steve Bannon, which I don't know as much about as I do his fraud schemes in China, which I'll say more about in a moment. And so everyone's a crony until suddenly they're not, right? And every relationship seems very close until suddenly one side betrays the other.
Second, where has the discipline come from in China's economic growth in particular? So you observe Chinese firms that are competitive the world over, ruthlessly competing on quality, cost, scale, just-in-time production. And then you observe companies like Evergrande, which are incredibly indebted, and at the moment that they're the most indebted companies in China, nonetheless donating hundreds of millions of dollars around the world to charitable organizations or buying soccer clubs in Europe. How did all three of these regimes come to be seen as crony, and why do some crony arrangements end in political instability and disaster, much like Indonesia, and others seem to soldier on stable but stagnant?
The main argument of the book is, of course, that cronyism is an insufficient description for pretty much anything. It tells us nothing about the drama of state business relations and explains very few outcomes, like why some regimes generate economic growth and others generate stagnation. Instead, and I'll only say about the theoretical innovation of the book, is the concept of mutual endangerment, where you see a lot of cronyism and closeness, but it's with distrust rather than trust. So the classic adage of you keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It's very difficult when we see that some people have a relationship together, but actually they do so because they distrust the other, want information, want mutual kind of enmeshment and corruption networks, rather than being close and loyal.
So what determines whether you get mutual endangerment or something else? The book makes the argument that it's trust and financial liberalization. Which led to a second puzzle as I was working on the book, which is what happens when authoritarian regimes decide to liberalize their financial systems? The answer is not much good. Why? Because most financial systems, more than almost any other element in a modern economy, run on transparency, on accountability, and on an impartial judiciary that's necessary to enforce contracts more than just industrialization or the activities of firms writ large.
So when distrustful business elites, and my argument is that trust is not love, it's very thin, it's just, I expect your returned cooperation. In the book, I argue that Malaysian economic elites, including Chinese Malaysians, trusted the regime to return cooperation, or at least act how they said they would. Whereas the Chinese Indonesians in Suharto's Indonesia and contemporary Chinese capitalists, for reasons many of us have observed in the last few years, have never really trusted the regime, and are not likely to in the foreseeable future.
So the argument is that when distrustful business elites can access the financial system, they have incentives to capture resources and politicians, and you get mutual endangerment, which I argue is manifest in three different things. Asset expatriation, sending your money overseas to protect yourself, looting, inverting the value of your own firm in order to enrich yourself, and also kompromat, or weaponized information, enmeshing people in corruption not to get resources, but rather to implicate them.
So I will close, basically, with two different insights from the book, which hopefully you'll want to read based on this short description. It's mostly about China, but also very substantially about Indonesia and Malaysia. And I enjoyed learning about those regimes to write the book. First is that financial liberalization is always dangerous in authoritarian regimes, but much more so without trust. And the insight that comes from this basically is as follows. China did something we thought it could never do, which is build industries based on political institutions that were uncompetitive. But its next challenge is to build a financial system, and I'm pretty pessimistic that it can do so. And lastly, that authoritarian regimes and state business relations are inherently unstable in ways that we should actually explain, rather than writing continuous books about how stable all the authoritarian regimes are, but rather explain the drama inherent in that form of political organization. Thank you so much.
MELANI CAMMETT: Well, that was fantastic. Like speed dating, it was just a total whirlwind. So, first of all, I want to give a huge thanks to all of these authors for sharing your work with us and giving us a little taste of it. Now we're excited to have more. And in that spirit, we do have some copies of each author's book, and you are welcome to take one with you on a first come, first serve basis. I'm afraid I'm going to start a stampede now, and those of you closer have an advantage.
So just to wrap up, this is also a sort of end-of-year celebration for the Weatherhead. It's been a really long and intense year. So I want to thank you for being with us this year and wish you a safe and productive summer. Those of you that will be around for the next couple of weeks, two weeks from today, in fact, we're having an ice cream social on May 6th at 4:30 PM right here in the same location. So you're welcome to come and bring your families. Meanwhile, we do have some refreshments here, so I would love for you to stay with us here for a bit and enjoy those. And please join me in thanking our presenters.