In this talk, Dr Mike Gow explores the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the contemporary Chinese context, and the potential challenges arising from an emergent “corporate state apparatus”.
This “third realm” of political activity, alongside the coercion-wielding repressive state apparatus and the consensus-building ideological state apparatus, is the primary arena of performative citizenship, where citizens are able to contribute to state-building through active participation in their roles as entrepreneurs, managers, employees, and consumers.
Dr Gow asks questions about how state vision gives rise to a business ethics which appears to reorder the four key CSR priorities of corporations operating in Xi’s China: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic. This reordering constitutes a rejection of free market ideology, acknowledging the political role of business whilst also relegating the private sector under the auspices of Xi’s superstructural reforms.
The state’s use of legislative powers is discussed alongside the strategic use of symbolic violence, which combine to form a powerful mechanism for corporate control and self-regulation.
Finally, Dr Gow discusses the challenges this emergent “Corporate Socialist Responsibility” presents to multinational corporations operating within the PRC, identifying a “CSR Trilemma” which limits these MNCs to the fulfilment of two CSR priorities at the expense of a third.
Okay so thank you everyone for coming and welcome uh to this evening’s event uh we’re very pleased and fortunate uh to have with us today Dr Michael G uh from EDG Hill University in ormskirk Lancashire uh who’s come uh via a complex train journey on a day with lots
Of disruptions as I’m afraid tomorrow will also all the way from Liverpool to Cambridge to present for us this evening uh Mike completed his undergraduate work at Nottingham Trent University and then both a master’s and PhD at the University of Bristol um after which he worked at a variety of Institutions
Including New York University uh C andong Liverpool University and Coventry University if I’ve got everything right in my mind uh and has for the last four years four and a half years uh been at Edge Hill and today he’s going to talk to us on some very interesting and
Exciting new research on corporate socialist responsibility and the relationship between the state and businesses in China so Mike go ahead wonderful thanks very much appreciate it so um thanks everybody for coming along today um I have made some um typically sort of red propaganda style sort of PowerPoint presentations because that’s
What you have to do when you uh when you study anything to do with contemporary China um so what I’m going to be uh talking about today this is not research that is by any means complete and well formed um there are lots of threads to research that I’ve been doing over the
Throughout my PhD looking at the role of higher education in state building projects during the hudin administration so from 2002 to 2012 um and then since um 2012 trying to understand the role of other parts of um the non-state sector so looking at cultural Industries looking at things like the medium to long-term
Football development plan and how this relates to State building projects looking at things like red tourism um and one thing that keeps sort of coming up and coming back to me is that the the is is the role of the private sector and how the private sector is mobilized in
Service of State projects and it’s very similar to my early sort of um development of my PhD project where I originally submitted a proposal um where I was going to look at the marketing of higher education in China and after spending a bit more time out in China I realized that this is
Pointless because it’s not actually a market um higher education is still very tightly controlled through the Ministry of Education but also through the provincial um Municipal education bureaus in China so it’s very sort of tightly monitored system and the questions I started asking about higher education became very very uh different
Much more trying to understand the context itself sort of realization that before I can understand what Britain’s doing in China’s higher ed sector I need to understand more about China’s higher education sector um unfortunately I had a wonderful supervisor who intr uced me to some very interesting um theoretical Frameworks
Particularly gry in the work of Robert Cox I think was the first books that I was uh given and this sort of opened my eyes helped me think about these issues in a very very different uh different way um so but what I’ve become increasingly interested in since
2012 is is and and this comes from from living in China so I lived in China really for most of the time the couple of years back in the UK splinted in between for Masters and early PhD um but pretty much since 2004 to 2018 I was
Pretty much in China for most of that time so from 2009 through to 2018 I was there permanently so um and a lot of the things that I became interested in weren’t necessarily encountered through scholarship they were encountered through just being in China and seeing things that you think what the hell is
Going on here what what does all this mean so and I’m going to introduce you to some of those things in this in this talk so as I say this is not a finished uh article by any stretch of the imagination um it’s more a sort of a
Sort of look at certain threads that I’m beginning to think rather than just could be sort of individual papers or things that I could explore through Journal articles might be weaved together into something a bit more coherent so I’d be very interested to know what everybody thinks about this
This and uh any sort of constructive criticism or any comments at all more than welcome um so what I’m going to try and do um and this is just a just sort of brief look at the talk I’m going to try and get through these this first
Part anyway as quickly as possible I thought I’d bring in some context so I’m going to look at corporate social responsibility of CSR and the conventional wisdom that we approached this in Western Business Schools as it were so that’s my straw man that I’m going to just demolish immediately um
With regards to China uh and then I think an important thing is to look at xiin Ping’s new area but also how it contrasts and how it’s positioned within what has been referred to as the four Epoch of a CCP since about November 2021 um since the third historical
Resolution so I’ll explain all about these things and and then looking at xiin Ping’s New Era what the key characteristics of this are and some of the previous research I’ve done on cour socialist values and why this is a an important um an important sort of I wouldn’t say
Just propaganda campaign but an actual sort of central pillar of XI Jin Ping’s super structural reforms in China um and what I what I should I say this now no I’ll come to this later this sort of key Point um and then I’m going to introduce this idea of what I’m provisionally
Calling a corporate State apparatus so one of the things I think is absolutely fascinating about China um contemporary China is yes if we go back and look at those old Therian terms so we’ve got the repressive State apparatus the ideological State apparatus but really China’s is it the first instance where
We see a sort of postsocialist is it postsocialist but a postsocialist nation um with a well-developed economy and something that is becoming um a sort of an emerging consumer culture that’s that’s that’s uh happening in in in China and this is actually quite an important question due to the nature of
Uh the problems that’s facing XI jinping’s Administration um we you know gone are the days of double digit uh economic growth and what they call this performance legitimacy of the state and this seems to me to be a central motivation behind um a sort of range of
Shin Ping’s um policies so I’ll try and get into that but what I’m going to start off with is CSR and as I said it’s a bit of a straw man this but I think it’s kind of important to uh to look at so there’s generally and
This necessarily is is is a very sort of simplistic view of CSR it’s not going to go into a huge amount of detail but there’s pretty much two schools of thought so we’ve got this guy who we love to hate in the north of England anybody that’s in that sort of Freedman
Es Milton Freedman School of Economics argues that corporations should not concern themselves with anything other than making a profit bottom line um they deliver benefit to society precisely because that’s what they do um then we have sort of emerging in the 70s so the fredman doctrine was actually I think it
Emerged in the early ’70s in a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article that was published by fredman um and he’s saying you know we shouldn’t we shouldn’t care about any other stakeholders we should focus purely and solely on the bottom line then we get
Robert uh Freeman and he comes along and he says well money is just really it’s like blood throwing flowing through a business and the business is a corporate citizen you know it’s it’s not enough just to survive you’ve got to actually make a contribution to the society that
You you you you exist in um so introduces this idea that we need to consider other stakeholders not just stockholders or shareholders right so pretty two sort of schools of thought and actually I mean I’ve always sort of heard more on this side but recently there’s been a few cases prominent cases
Where I’m beginning to think fredman might have had a point um um so I don’t know if you’ve come across these cases so there’s a company called Theos has anybody heard of Theos yeah so this is the this is the um uh company set up by an entrepreneur uh at
Stanford Dropout why are they always dropouts I don’t know they always seem to want to be sort of drop out um so Elizabeth Holmes set up this company and created this machine called an Edison which allegedly um could um do blood tests at home and um test for a number of different
Conditions um it was effectively it was the import of the Silicon Valley fake it till you make it into the Med medical sector which brings all sorts of sort of moral complications with it uh turns out the machine didn’t work was a big fraud um the company was
At one point valued 9 billion um and then this is relevant by the way to the CSR so and then we get does anybody recognize what this might be so this is Sam bankman freed so he’s a a crypto entrepreneur excuse me um um and um has
Recently been found guilty of wire fraud and a number of other offenses in a New York Court um for defrauding investors basically um and he’s he’s famous for having this approach and this sort of philosophy that underpinned his business model called effective altruism so this idea
Which is kind of it seems to me like a bit like uh Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of wealth on steroids um but it’s effectively the same argument it’s okay for people to make as much money and to make obscene amounts of money as long as they give that back to society it’s it’s
An argument that could only really be written by a billionaire basically um so so we got so got this thing here and going back to these these arguments with this guy what fredman isn’t saying is he’s not really sort of saying companies shouldn’t care and just be
Sociopaths um what he’s saying is is the only reason you should do something is if there’s an economic interest for the company and it increases the bottom line so if your customers are actually saying you know we want to buy products that are more sustainably produced then
There’s an economic argument for you to build that into your strategy so I think freedom is a bit misunderstood but what what the sort of highlight well what I find fascinating about these case studies is these companies they became worth billions and billions of dollars and the reason it
Was allowed to get to that stage was because people were not looking at the bottom line they were focused on doing good for society and this allowed the sort of frauds to snowball basically because people were saying you know um we want to do good therefore we’ll keep
Pushing we’ll keep pushing we’ll keep pushing so sort of very very interested in these sort of contemporary debates uh around CSR you know should we focus on bottom line should we make a a larger contribution to society but when it comes to contemporary China this is not the
Debate that’s going on um we have this sort of um idea of free markets and and um that the markets should be separate from from the state and companies essentially have a huge amount of autonomy within that closed system you know free markets are not natural they are created by
Regulation right um and once you create that sort of regulated market companies uh that the the Freeman is sort of talking about then have a huge amount of autonomy within that um sort of regulated um framework to to act however they want but in China that doesn’t seem
To be the um discussion that’s taking place um what we are what we’ve seen is that there’s a very different emphasis and this was something that really became apparent to me when I interviewed the president of a university in 2012 and um in in sh very late on it’s
Probably only about four months before I submitted my PhD and this president of the University um I’d gone back to interview him again and in this final interview he really sort of opened up and started telling me some things that were really interesting um and what he said was say
Look what you’ve got to understand about Chinese universities is the way we look at it is in the west if you work at a university your job is to show the world how smart you are our job in Chinese universities is to deliver to The Five-Year Plan objectives of whichever
Jurisdiction we’re under so if you’re National University it’s the Ministry of Education if you’re under the ministry of Science and Technology you’ve got to feed in your research and expertise to that if you’re in the under the provincial or Municipal Shanghai Municipal Ed education commission you’ve got to understand what their priorities
Are and you’ve got to develop degree programs that uh deliver graduates to those Industries and this type of thing so it’s not about showing us how smart the the we are at University it’s showing us about how we contribute to the National development goals um and we
See a very similar thing with CSR discourse in in in in China it’s not about you know who decides what’s good is not the companies they don’t have that autonomy um so so this is something that I’ve been wanting to explore a bit further so when it comes to sort of conventional
Theory on CSR what this is a a very simple but I think quite elegant uh sort of model and what carolh says here with this CSR pyramid is the first responsibility of a company is to remain profitable going concern if it goes bankrupt it’s no use to anybody right
It’s actually maybe a drain on um the on the local community and other stakeholders so we have to make a profit once we start making a profit then we need to make sure we’re legally compliant um that we’re not putting our our sholders um Investments at risk
Through being taken to civil or criminal courts this type of thing um so we have to follow and make sure that we’re legally compliant only then only once we’ve ticked these two boxes can we even worry about starting being more ethical whether that’s developing new sustainability initiatives environmental initiatives whether it’s um improving
Our policies towards um inclusivity diversity these types of things uh we can’t even think of doing this until we are economically profitable and we are uh legally compliant and then after we’ve made some effort to show that we’re an ethical company that the core part of our business is being conducted
As ethically as possible with as many stakeholders in mind then we can start looking at what we call philanthropic initiatives which are usually what I’m It’s seems to be quite poorly defined what the difference is here between ethical and philanthropic but philanthropic seems to be initiatives that are outside the remit of the
Business so for example um Bill Gates giving money to try and uh clear malaria infections in subsaharan Africa that’s a philanthropic because that’s not really what Microsoft’s called businesses um so so this is the sort of conventional sort of theory or simplified version of that as
I say this isn’t seems to be what happening in China uh in in the Contemporary era but CSR is been talked about I think is the the form and we start seeing it becoming very prominent around 2014 2015 2016 we start seeing a lot of editorials in places like um
Chosa the the uh theoretical Journal of the Communist Party d gen but we also see it in a lot of discussion and discourse around this it tends to die off a little bit later on maybe around 2020 but there’s there’s a lot of discussion going on around what what is
A good corporate citizen that seems to be the discussion that’s going on um in those sort of journals but to understand this I think what I’m going to do for context is come back and have a look just very briefly um at how we’ve got to
The xiin Ping era and maybe look at some of the characteristics of that so we have these leaders 1949 to present so we have Malong D shaing janin huin shijin ping um and back in November 2021 there was what we called the third historical resolution the third historical resolution of the
CCP um there have there have been two previously one in 1945 and one in 1981 then we got one in 2021 and these actually have divided the party although there’s three of of them divided the the history of the party into four epochs and this is something that I picked up
Not necessarily from people’s daily or anything like that but after the historical resolution um in this era of what’s called sort of uh wolf Warrior diplomacy the ambassadors of all the embassies PRC embassies around the world they all have very active Twitter accounts um and there seemed to be a very consistent
Message going out through announcements on the embassy websites um that there are now four epochs it’s not three eras of the CCP it’s actually four um so let’s have a look at these so uh they divided them China before the establishment of the PRC so the first year of the CCP China
And Revolution 21 to 49 so establish in 21 and we get to 49 then the People’s Republic of China under chairman Mau from 49 to 76 is the second Epoch then we have d Ping’s opening a reform 78 is it 78 is it 79 is it 80 81 there’s a bit
Of uh discussion um for arguments so I’ve just put 78 to 2012 there and then we have from 2012 to present this is Xi jinping’s New Era and from what we can see is that this is going to last until 2049 which is the second of the two
Centinary goals the Centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China will be in in in 2014 9 so these are the four epochs in terms of leadership uh we’ve got ma becomes leader in 20 becomes sort of supreme leader I think is probably better phrase in
1927 we see the PRC founded for then we have the death of M in 76 dong emerges around 78 79 um there was a sort of interman with with with huag Fong was Ma’s anointed successor then after the Tiana minent we see J zamin from 1989 20
2 hent 2002 2012 and then she uh in from 2012 onwards and the historical resolutions came up very key points and they serve a very specific function in Chinese politics these documents they serve that we often hear the the criticisms of revisionists and historical nihilists but this these
Documents are essentially a revision of what’s gone before into an official history I think that’s a good way of looking at them so with the defeat of uh the Japanese and the emergence of the CCP and the sort of retaking of hostilities with the guomindang we see the first CCP
Historical resolution which really cements Ma’s place as supreme leader um of a CCP uh we then see the second CCP historical resolution and what this does is this serves to draw a line in the sand after Mao it doesn’t criticize Mao directly it criticizes the gang of four
Um who were just so that’s um Jing Ma’s wife and and three other senior poit bureaus that were were were in charge over the cultural revolution um and it it sort of revises that history K say ma was 70% what it 70% right and 30% wrong and that’s where this document comes
From it also kind of signals what grami would call a passive Revolution this is what the party needed to do to maintain its dominance and and maintain its power it had to change something the country was really on its knes at this point you speak to anybody
That sort of lived through this um you know family members of my on my wife’s side family I’ve spoken to quite a lot of elderly relatives and you know they kind of had mixed feelings about it but I remember asking one and and he just said how cool life before the opening
Reform was how cool bitter just bitter just a really sort of simple phrase that kind of captured and the way that it was said as well um was was just sort of reinforce how difficult things were um before the opening and reform and then we have this third CCP historical
Resolution and this seems to be intended to do the same as the second to draw a line in the sand between Dong’s opening and reform era the era of dong Jang and who and to say that this is the country is now going in a New
Direction so the question is is what is that direction I’ve tried to sort of draw up a few things here that we can sort of look at um so we have um it s we have a look at these sort of key features down here and
This is just thinking okay it’s not um sort of taken from any sort of sources or or lit sources or anything but we seem to have the sort of key features of the sort of Mara sort of focus on ideology on personality cult Perpetual Revolution revolutionary spirit and the
Populism of ma um it seemed to be ideologically driven um and requiring sort of loyalty and there was a lot of sort of factional sort of rivalries going on uh in that time what we see the emphasis going on under dong and I’ve argued this in a in a thinktank piece I
Wrote a couple of years ago is that you know we kind of we kind of coming to the view now that um the reform and opening was not a liberalizing in China it was um it was never a sort of relinquishing of of socialism it was
Never a sort of you know this Yellow River capitalism that’s eventually going to lead to democratization and this type of thing there’s been a kind of sort of reassessment of that in Chinese scholarship but there certainly the purpose seems to be to to to develop China’s means of production
Right it’s to develop the economy and to develop the wealth of the country so to build a wealthy People’s Republic of China so that if as and when they do move to socialism there’s stuff to share there’s actually things to share around um and what I what I’ve sort of argued
Is is it seems to me that dong actually is a move back to Orthodox Marxism getting away from Ma’s Great Leap from agrarianism straight to Communism dun comes back and says no what we need to do first is go and build the capitalist means of production before we can then
Socialize those means of production before we can then nationalize them under communism so uh but the key goal here is growth economic growth and enrichment and what we see in 2008 is we start seeing a tailing off after the financial crisis we start seeing a tailing off of double digit growth and
That quid proquo between the Chinese of people and the party state that we will not get political as long as these opportunities to get wealthy keep coming along this starts diminishing and it seems to me that this is a sort of defining characteristic of this separation between the reform era and
The new era the reform era is about creating a wealthy country the new era is about creating citizens for that country um and that is why I think the emphasis we see is on morality we see a lot of emphasis on core values we see a lot of emphasis on CSR and good
Citizenship um we see anti-corruption campaigns per ing um corrupt party members whether that’s a you know a politically motivated against rivals or not we can argue the case but there’s certainly been a major morale c campaign within a morality campaign within the party itself um and it seems you
Know sort of bringing in nationalism and patriotism and these s you know what are these ideas that are going to bind us together as a people and as a nation state so there was a a professor I was talking to actually a wedding up in
Beijing and one of the the the the the person who was getting married was working in the NGO Institute at chingua University and um he he he said something just in a passing sort of comment and he said um you know we we know what we’re not we know everybody up until shinpin
Came along was saying you know we don’t want to be American but what Shin Ping’s asking is what does it mean to be Chinese in the world today or what what does the think it means to be Chinese what does the party want Chinese identity to be sort of centered around
So this is something that I think uh is Central to my understanding of the distinction between these two eras um so I’m going to have to sort of speed up a bit here so shim New Era kicks off 2012 he stands up in November 2012 and starts
Talking about the Jong monk the Chinese dream he referenced in his inaugural speech at the 18th party Congress and then almost immediately he um by certainly early 2013 we start seeing these anti-corruption campaigns kicking into gear under I think is it Wang chian at this point um um was head of the the
Gway the the the central commission for discipline inspection um and you know a lot I remember because I just started uh my postto at um NYU Shanghai in August 2013 and there was still a huge amount of optimism that she was going to be a liberalizing reformer
But this was very rapidly diminishing it became very clear within the first 12 months uh of his uh of his taking over maybe not as party but after the the um March the two meetings in March it became very very clear that this was not this guy was not really interested in
Turning Chinese into an electoral democracy should we say um we a lot of people were very surprised we myself included as well didn’t realize how quickly it would go um and what we see starting what I see um emerging probably 2013 2014 2015 is I start seeing this
Sort of imagery around this is a famous poster of the core socialist values and obviously in China it didn’t have the English translations on it so I don’t know it’s a bit pixelated this so what it is is it’s it’s called the as so the 24 characters of the core socialist values
And there are 12 core socialist values each have two characters because they’re 24 characters and we have four at the national level four at the societal level and four at the citizenship level um so what China wants is it wants a country a nation that is prosperous Democratic uh civilized and harmonious
When they say Democratic not electoral democracy I think uh sort of democratic centralist um where the achievements of the nation are the Democratic achievements of the people coming together to work towards those they want a society that is free equal that has Justice and rule of law um again the
Semantics of these what they actually mean by that we’re talking socialist rule of law a lot of people insist it’s rule by law not rule of law um but they translated it in these terms these are official translations and then citizens who are patriotic dedicated who have integrity and are amiable or friendly
Uh and these this is what they want to see this is the and you know I I was looking at this stuff because I was cycling past it on the way to work and every um construction site in in China if they don’t sell the advertising space
They have to give them over to the local propaganda Department to put up the posters on it’s a kind of sort of Regulation there’s never there’s never any sort of advertising space Life free so we see lots of these sorts of posters and lots of them are traditional artwork
They they were what struck me was I kept seeing the same characters everywhere written in lots of different Artistic Styles but none of them none of them had any communist sort of imagery on them um but then in the bottom you would usually see something like the um um um I think it’s
Sh is the uh there’s a body within the CC P about uh building a um a spiritual civilization so we know that these messages were from the propaganda Department basically um but there was no there was no sort of they were very soft they seemed a bit more sophisticated in
The message that they were given across uh and this one I I thought it was something to do with environmental sort of campaigns until I actually looked at it a bit closer and realized no it’s a it’s a propaganda campaign from the from the state and this is something that
That that that we start seeing discussed um and we see xiin ping expressing this ambivalence towards the West is uh and towards um Western um countries it’s almost sort of a jealous looking at it saying that the the real important thing the reason that we can have electoral democracy and
Change our government every 5 years is because our values permeate those institutions and there’s a sort of large consent to those values right um but he and he may want that stability but he doesn’t want the Western values that that that sort of convey that stability he wants the stability but a distinctly
And uniquely uh specifically Chinese set of values or um what the the Communist part has deemed to be Chinese values um so this is quite early on this is uh it’s from a a speech it’s not the governance of China there was another book published around the same time that
Has a lot of speeches and and almost all of them there’s some mention of this uh sort of emphasis on values that shiin ping is talking about so just part that here for the moment um and I’m going to move on to sort this idea I mentioned earlier
About repressive apparatus so um just to sort of refresh memory here so the repressive State apparatus is the arena in which coercion takes place so if you step out of line if you break a law if you break regulations the party or the state and it doesn’t matter whether it’s
China or whether it’s anywhere else um is going to have to engage in some disciplining so the institutions of the repressive State apparatus we have the legislature the The People’s Court the procuratorate um the public Security Bureau which are the the standard police the people’s arm police which is a sort
Of military force um for domestic um incidents the PLA and then we have these two organizations so the ccdi is the party’s internal police force and the national supervision commission is something that’s been set up about four or five years ago I think um which kind
Of expands the remit of that to look at public employees so the ccdi the distinction is ccdi really only disciplined party members the national supervision commission anybody who is misbehaving in public office who may or may not be a party M so this is the repressive State apparatus we then have
The ideological State apparatus the compulsory education system schools colleges media trade unions I’ve put in there they might belong in the next one because all trade unions are are under the the part they’re not independent um but we also have Independent Media state approved Institutions and I’ve put the
Young Patriots and communist youth league in here as well because these are sort of um institutions where certainly the young Patriots every child up to the age of 16 I think is a member of the young Patriots uh in China which is the uh the school compulsory education age
Children’s Communist party arm and then the uh the youth league which is on campuses and the these seem to be you know sort of Institutions for training and and sort of not necessarily becoming a party member not everybody that’s in these obviously then goes on to become a
Full party member um and then I’ve come up with this idea that I’ve been toying around with for a while which is and I’m not sure whether this is right I originally started looking at advertising and I’m going to show you a few of these um ad um uh things in a in
A moment where I was calling it the consumer State apparatus or consumerism seems to be a very powerful um a very powerful way of communicating and reinforcing the sort of state vision so uh but it’s a bit it’s a bit um nuanced as how it works so
We’ll come to that in a second but actually I think it’s wider than that when you look at the way that the the party State tries what it doesn’t allow his Grassroots culture to sort of move up from the bottom everything is a top down imposed cultural industry um so we see
Things like i’ say tourism Music Arts Sports so you look at football for example um football they have a What’s called the medium to long-term football development plan but the amount of State organs that are involved in planning this is incredible um and what they seem to do is allocate resources where private
Sector players come in and compete over those um uh and that pushes the whole sector along a trajectory that the state wants they don’t tell the private sector what to do they distribute resources that creates this kind of buing competition and as long as some people succeed it will push the the the
Industry in that direction so if we look at football which is running into massive problems I know at the moment there’s actually uh a player for a former player of my favorite team Everton he uh currently looking at 20 years in prison litier he’s been found guilty of embezzlement and lots of
Crimes at the top of the Chinese fa um he was recently on TV giving a force confession on Chinese State television so the football dream as it were has maybe sort of died but the way that it has been brought the way that was brought about is still very relevant to
Look at um so 2016 to 2020 this is where we see massive amounts of investment going into particularly Elite level football but who’s doing this it’s not the state that’s doing it the state is creating that sort of environment that sort of terrain and it’s companies like Wanda it’s companies like hunga everr
Whove recently uh been uh told that they have to F for bankruptcy by Hong Kong Court um massive massive problems uh it’s companies like uh suing um the team that I used to follow in China was jangu suing they won the title in 2020 and then they went
Bankrupt and the club no longer exists it was liquidated so it which just absolutely sort of Mercurial rise and fall um going on there um and it there just seemed to be this huge sort of mass acquisition run amongst these private companies they were very very quickly mobilized to try
And serve these State goals so the distinction though here is that this seems to me where people can visibly perform their role as a good citizen where corporations can show that they are good citizens that they are contributing to the state’s goals this type of thing um
So that’s kind of the sort of theory I’m trying to sort of um it’s a bit difficult to pin down but that’s what I’m attempting to do with this um so I’m going to give you some sort of admittedly anecdotal kind of uh examples about the types of things that we’re
Sort of looking at and seeing so the first thing that I want to say is go back to the core socialist values the conduct of business people of entrepreneurs has to align with this and if it doesn’t well what happens well there’s a very good example does anybody
Know who this this company bite dance or this person jiming has anybody heard of him of getting some nods I’m getting some some shaking of heads so um b d Jang Ming I think he’s now number three on the huran rich list he’s very very
Wealthy man uh he stepped down as CEO of bite dance after a scandal several years ago and he had the the company was famous for two apps one was called doin I can’t remember the name of the other one it was it was a news service and
They got into a lot of trouble because the content that was going out through the news service was not reflecting the core socialist values and jiming disappeared for a few days and then he emerged giving a bit of a a sort of confession um I can’t remember was was
It TV was a sort of written statement where he said that bite dance would be reviewing its internal procedures to ensure that all the content that goes out through its platforms will reflect and uphold the core socialist values so it’s a very clear sort of political instruction that’s gone on
Here um is this important it’s B one of the so one the news app was actually removed and is never returned um so they were basically killed half the business of bite dance at that time but the other app doin is better known as Tik Tok in
This country so um in China they still refer to it as doin but it’s the same it’s the same app but it’s kind of ring fence outside China and inside China they’re two sort of two the content actually very different as well I think um so we get
These examples we get examples of very prominent CEOs being hauled into line we also see other examples with um with Jack Mah mayun um particularly that seems to me something that’s related to the evergr uh sort of sort of Crisis he invested a significant amount of money
In ever Grand uh and about eight months later his ant Financial IPO was pulled so some really interesting sort of things going on um in in in that but these entrepreneurs these prominent entrepreneurs they are being coralled by the state basically in in terms of these things the other way that this is
Happening is through regulation so bik dance just last week hired another 4,000 people to censor content on their platform um to make sure that it’s in line with what is acceptable by the state and I don’t know if they’re ever given any red lines it’s kind of a sort
Of gray area and they’ve got to be overly cautious to make sure that they don’t overstep the mark uh so they sort of overcompensate for these types of things the other sort of thing that we see with entrepreneurs and companies and this is a it’s sorry a
Separate anecdotal example um is we see a lot of philanthropic Endeavors that are geared towards State policies so one of she well she’s key economic policy at the moment is is common Prosperity um and what we see is a lot of companies so this is from Shanghai
Dong is it Shanghai Dong shanii Dong yeah so this is Shanghai dong the joint venture between Shanghai Automobiles and Volkswagen and they start talking about party building culture and propaganda work where they are helping to spread the message of the party through their philanthropic Endeavors including scholarships and training centers and
This type of thing um we also see examples such as this the Pingu chinan model in Jang um where we’re looking at companies CCP members Banks Enterprises donating in order to help um poorer people in rural areas become shareholders in these sort of initiatives so and this this is is
Something that we’re seeing a lot of increasingly when companies are setting up we’ve seen a recent uh development between 10cent Tung and um I think it was China Unicom which I think it’s about 10 or 15% of the shares had to be held by the employees there’s a
Socializing of wealth here so that term socialism what what’s been socialized it’s the means of production they become more uh owned by the by the um workers and and and therefore the not a sort of capitalist elite so we’re seeing little initiatives like this getting a huge amount of coverage in official party
Publications like people’s daily like CH uh chela like danen red flag Journal this type of stuff um so this is an interesting thing and you know these philanthropic things are not driven by the entrepreneurs interests they almost always align to a key government policy at the time whether it’s poverty
Alleviation it’s common Pro common Prosperity whether it’s training um programs to um to instill the core socialist values as part of the company’s identity this type of thing we see a lot of this stuff going on as well um I’ll skip past this next slid let
Some of thing so we have a look at the uh I think I’ve talked about this already but this is the sort of football plan this is from a paper I published with uh John Sullivan and Simon Chadwick um a few years back what we did went
Through the uh 2016 to 2015 development plan and identified these 21 different National plan objectives the ones that was scheduled for 2020 that was in the early stage uh of the football plan where it says sustained the will either be achieved in the medium or to the
Long-term um sort of part of the plan and as you can see got a fostering of football culture across China now that might that might seem sort of kind of a generic thing but if you go to a football match in China you’ll notice that there there sort of supporting goes
On in a certain way okay it’s not like going to see I don’t know Stoke versus Oxford on a Thursday miserable Thursday night there’s not lots of drunken people throwing pies at each other other and this type of stuff it’s a sort of very nice regimented sort of um sanitized
Kind of football environment that’s going on even the players if they have any tattoos have to wear coverings they’re not allowed to play showing any visible tattoos this type of stuff there’s the regulations uh all in terms of the sport so you see a lot of orchestrated stuff and it’s interesting
Because these are the fans finding ways to get around the regulations you know the the right we’re told that we can’t celebrate in a sort of boisterous way so how can we do it in a way that we’re not going to get into trouble they end up coming up with these sort of
Choreographs gold celebrations and all this type of stuff it’s really interesting um this picture I think is from this is from ever Grand it’s a Chinese National game but actually if you look in in the crowd on the larger image there’s hunga is the everr team so
This is Guang Joo um so we see a lot of um a lot of objectives but we also see a massive amount of Ministries Supreme Court um they’re creating Insurance Industries one of the biggest problems that they faced getting football played in schools is that the schools won’t
Allow kids to play football because they’re scared of being sued by the parents if the kid gets injured play so they’ve had to effectively build an entire insurance industry so that schools can ensure um campus football leagues so that the schools can’t be sued by the parents and all these little things
Things that are really sort of interesting so and and you know we see a lot of private sector be mobilized they see opportunities here they see you know you they see opportunities to make money and they they sort of compete after that and what this does is it drives this whole
Project along or it was up until about 2020 2021 okay so that’s for I’m going to go too much more detail with that another area that I have looked at and published again a think tank piece on was looking at Red tourism and this was born of a
Couple of experiences I had towards my end of my time in China in 2017 2018 and I was looking at Red tourism now a lot of people look at this there’s a huge amount of really interesting scholarship out there on red tourism what is it how is it being built where
Is it being built all this types of stuff but when I was taken on some of these tours well not taken on some of these tours it’s actually happened in a different way um I I I noticed something um when I went to Guin to yangar and I stayed in the
Shanga okay really nice five-star hotel it was my mom’s 60th birthday so that 2011 this was and she’d always wanted to go there and see Jang Yim Mo’s Impressions on um Leo Sania so this a big open air performance by Jang MO is a film director who famously uh directed
The opening sequences at the Beijing Olympics right so it’s if you imagine the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony it’s a bit like that but it’s in this lovely sort of it’s on this lake with these cast Peak on cliffs and stuff so we went to see this and but what it was
A sort of weekl long trip that we went on um and there were just some encounters that happened there that were just really sort of on my eyes like what’s going on here is this people when we say red tourism what we tend to think is the party is telling people to go
Away and learn about the history of the party and to be become a bit more sort of you know sort of patriotic and ideological and this type of thing this is not what is going on at all at these uh red tourism sites so give you an idea
Of how much this is sort of expanded there are a a number of these sort of national major centers um for red tourism and you’ll have some sort of Flagship sort of um sites for people to bury but they’ve got these sort of networks of areas around and they all
Have themes so Shanghai Jang red tourist area this is mainly in Shanghai breaking new ground founding of the CCP so the the place where the first CCP um Congress is actually in shint and D it’s one of the most uh one of the most developed sort of shint itself is a sort
Of it’s a sort of Monument to capitalism really it’s just Starbucks everywhere and this type of thing right it’s actually invested by I think a lot of Hong Kong and Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the sort of late late ’90s early 2000s but it’s also the site of the first CCP
Congress so we get a lot of stuff around there and you you have a lot of these tours that are organized that will hit Shanghai and Jang maybe go down to xaing see the home of Lun you know all of these types of things as well um and
They’ll visit multiple sites so there’s quite a lot of these around the country so I had to look at these seem to be the uh the main ones um but actually when you look at a map we plan these out uh these are official red tourist sites and
There’s been a very very clear and concerted effort to make sure that there’s a balance right around the country um in in all provinces um so we have a huge number of these and what you have sprouting up around these are sort of mini cottage industries you know tour
Guides you have sort of local uh tangible culture crafts food all this type of stuff um but when you but when people go on these is I I was sort have this assume like why would anybody you know okay you maybe go and learn about the history of the of the nation and
This type of thing but actually when you when you go and visit some of these sites you’re not encountering people that’s not why they’re there they’re not there because of any sort of political kind of Allegiance this is a £ 5,900 £ 5,900 R&B a month tour a 500
5,900 R&B per person tour that takes in some key scenic areas but also the mar and jingan in in jangi Province so this is a sort of key site of party history um and what we we see on this is that the people are going on these sites and
By the way 50% of the market for this is people between the age of 18 and 35 this is not old this is a lot of people a lot of young people who are torous Mo uh I think 18 to 24 year olds is about 20 20%
Or 22% and then 28% according to the latest figures that I’ve seen and what they’re doing is they’re networking yes they get to go around and learn about this stuff that’s a form of sort of cultural capital if you if you say to somebody you know have you been
To have you been to the Martis at Ching gang Shang it’s way better than the yanan Soviet you know this seems to be something that becomes a form of cultural capital and knowledge that that that kind of conveys a sort of sense of it sort of consecrates them as a good
Citizen if you see if you know about these things if you’ve been to these areas but also what they’re doing is they’re meeting other they’re staying in five star hotels they’re staying in the Howard Johnson Suites they’re staying in you know the the Rada Plaza in in in
Nanchang um they are networking with other farai other wealthy second generation young people and they’re meeting lots of people where all these other so there Social Capital this is why people people are going on these things it’s a really sort of interesting Dynamic that we see um where people are
Consuming the history of the party and they’re consuming what it means to be Chinese and what the state says Chinese people should be proud of but they’re doing it for their own personal kind of reasons there’s a sort of articulation between what the state wants and what
They are going for so there a couple of things that I just wanted to maybe um look at first there was some advertising issues so this is another area that I begin to see right how is how are how are how is business being mobilized in
Service of the state this is a bit of an odd one so what I’m going to do I’m I’ve got about four or five of these commercials but I’m only going to show two because it should get the message across so the first one um I’m going to
Show I think I saw it’s about 2015 2016 um when these came out both of these commercials both of these um pieces of of video and the first first one I’m going to show you is actually it’s from the propaganda department and just to give you an idea of of what types of
Message we see so it’s not it’s not so pla soldiers saluting uh with the sort of Chinese flag waving in the background we tend not to see too much of that anymore particularly outside Beijing um so I’ll show you that one and then and then there’s a second video I want us to
Have a a quick look at so I’ll just explain the context for this first video so so it is called um uni I think it’s called un after 63 years reunion I think is the the title of the video and what we see is we we I
Think we start off in in taipe and we see an old guy and he’s telling his granddaughter to write out red envelopes and uh so these are gifts with cash in them that you give to fam to young family members at Spring Festival and then he says to write another one
Write another red envelope and she she asks a grand out who’s it for and he’s like shut don’t ask this sort of thing and then we cut to Shanghai and we see something else going on okay and you sort of see what’s going there’s a re there’s a sort of family reunion coming
Up so let’s have a look and and see what you think of this because this is the style that we see of propaganda um uh in contemporary China so I think it’s 2015 or 2016 let me have a look okay so we’re starting off and this is where starting in in Taipe So This Is Us Now cut to Shanghai Spee Go go [Applause] What for okay so I apologize that I haven’t got any English subtitles for this so I’ll just explain a little bit more clearly what’s going on here so we have a brother in Taipei and he returns back to Shanghai we see his elder brother his elder brother that’s in Shanghai and
He’s preparing I think it’s Doro it’s a famous Shanghai knes dish um I find it interesting that Taiwan returns to Mainland that I think is probably very deliberate right um and then we see so so there’s nothing in here that’s about politics but there’s things here about identity there’s a lot of symbolic
Things going on here AR is on the is on the uh sign when he when he sees his brother he says AO which is GGA in Shanghai I think in Shanghai so um and this is obviously a Spring Festival commercial a bit like the sort of John
Le but this is from the propaganda Department there a whole series of these so I’m going to show you just very quickly another one um slightly different style but let’s just see which one you think is maybe more um more effective there is subtitles on this One Fore Foree Foree Foree Foree Spee with all children Okay so that got a bit of a laugh okay that’s the uh that’s what I was kind of hoping for so there’s something very interesting going on here I’m going to show any more of these running out of obviously time but what we what we’re seeing is that there is very little
Difference between State propaganda messages and what we’re seeing from advertisers I can show you loads I can show you Nike can show you Apple um can show you lots of Chinese companies we got a big Bank of all of these advertising we’re doing a bit of Semitic
Analysis on this um uh it’s just something that I need to bring up to date I think um but what we’re seeing here is is this a case of the companies themselves deliberately gearing their messages towards the type of messages we see in state propaganda campaigns and I
I would say no um because we we do see this before what what we don’t see before sort of 2014 2013 is propaganda campaigns with this type of message it’s much more sort of forceful hold High the red banner of socialism sort of stuff and that’s something that we’ve seen really take
Off in the xijinping new new era is that they are seem to be expanding their message to incorporate Common Sense Notions of what it means to be Chinese and what what good people um do and this type of thing so but one of the one of the issues whether
This is deliberate or not I’m not sure whether this particular aspect is is deliberate but it makes it almost impossible to distinguish messages that are coming from the state messages from those messages that are coming from the private sector they’re almost identical in a lot of cases and that um seems to
Be quite a sort of powerful way of of of communicating um so that you know if you’re unable to distinguish I mean I and this happened to me I was watching this commercial I was sat I was in a hurry to get to work and I jumped in a
Taxi instead of taking the subway and on the back of the taxi seats in Shanghai there’s these little screens and I was watching this and I was thinking Jesus it’s getting really good this propaganda and then the Coca-Cola bottle spins around in the I’m like wa I’ve got to go
And research this now and sort of sort of look into this is this something we’re seeing happening elsewhere um and it’s uh I just find this fascinating that it seems to me that we’re we’re seeing the state in we’re seeing CSR strategies developed to contribute to economic policies we’re
Seeing entrepreneurs being chastised if they don’t conduct themselves in a way that upholds the core socialist values we’re seeing Industries effectively being created with top down very clear guided policies like the football plan um like red tourism and then we’re also seeing advertising being almost co-opted through a very sophist through
What I’ve called the sophistication of Chinese propaganda so they becomes increasingly difficult for us to tell the difference so and that this is I I hope this is kind of making sense because it confuses the hell out of me at times as well but what I’m trying to
Sort of get to is is is the the the corporate activity and consumerism these seem to be spaces where people perform their citizenship whether they go to work you know they learn about it through schools through family through however but how they perform it and how they show other people that they’re a
Good citizen seems to be through what they’re buying what where they’re going who they’re you know what’s Services they using what brands are they buying certain brands have very close allegiances you you look at Apple sales over the last 5 years since Trump brought in um import barriers and they
Go up and down depending on what the uh signo us discussions were like that particularly point in time and it’s it’s exactly the opposite with Huawei so you see people buying Huawei phones because they want to show that they’re on side with the state so there’s this kind of
Sort of patriotic consumption that quite a few Scholars sort of written on um over the last couple of years as well um so this this whole Arena seems to be something that’s really interesting um there was there was another argument I was going to include on something I call
A sort of trilemma um for foreign companies but I think that would take too long for me to sort of go into so I’m just going to very quickly just wrap this up so what I’m trying to sort of argue here is that we have this if we go back to our conventional
Thinking is we have this primary responsibility to make money for companies to ensure that they are legislatively and regulator compliant that they’re not breaken any laws only then can they decide using their sort of autonomy a a strategy to becoming more ethical and therefore more attractive company and then perhaps
After that we’ll see uh philanthropic initiatives that aim to demonstrate even further what a wonderful good corporate citizen we are um this seems to be flipped in China or this is what I’m the argument I’m sort of trying to sort of move move towards or uh trying to figure
Out in my own head so what we see is it’s almost upside down the other way is philanthropy philanthropy is a is a visible demonstration of falty it reflects State initiatives such as poverty alleviation morality campaigns good citizenship education initiatives in poor rural areas this is what any any
Philanthropic initiatives seem to cont towards specific State policies like common Prosperity um whether you’re ethical or not is corporations it depends on how well and how carefully and clearly you’ve aligned your corporate values and conduct with these prevailing morality campaigns including the core socialist values so whether you’re an ethical
Company is nothing to do whether you and your board members or your senior management team think you’re ethical it’s whether the state as the primary stakeholder in all private sector companies thinks that you are if you demonstrate your your your fty through philanthropy if you carefully manage your sort of ethical uh
Publicly ethical profile make sure that you’re uh conforming to those you will then not likely break the law but if you are operating in an unethical way given the way that the core socialist values which was in incorporated into the constitution of the People’s Republic of
China in 201 18 um it now also features almost universally in any sort of corporate uh legislation it’s usually somewhere between article 3 and article 10 that you know companies uh creating online content must do so in a way that reflects the cor socialist values it’s actually legislation back in itself so
If you’re not if you’re not operating in a way that the state deems is in compliance with the core socialist values you may well find yourself breaking the law and those laws are a bit open to interpretation for the authorities to enforce in a ways
That are maybe useful for them to do so should we say they’re not they’re not open to interpretation so that you can defend yourself uh and if you break these laws or you deem to be unethical you won’t be allowed to make any money it’s very very simple this is the
Political Capital aspect what you’re doing is building political Capital here so that you will have access to the opportunities made available by the state so this I think there’s something in this argument I do need to figure it out what I’m thinking is is that all these different threads might form articles
Over the next some of them are already out the football and the red tourism stuff um but there’s other things that I need to look at and I think maybe this is bringing them together into a sort of coherent argument that’s what I’m going to try and do anyway so thank you for
Your time if anybody does want to read more these are some of the Articles I’m referring to so there’s a couple of think to pieces at the top and then there’s a couple of Journal articles here um if anybody does want those let me know I can send them to you I’m sure
You have access here at Cambridge to all these journals and things um sometimes we have a problem with that on my universities we don’t have access to every single Journal that we want um so the there’s a bit more of a sort of sort of elaborate arguments going on
There with these types of things so thank you for your time much appreciate it and thank you Bill for inviting me here it’s very nice to be invited to Cambridge it’s definitely a bucket list thing that I can tick off now so I do appreciate it thank [Applause]
You thank you thank you so much I don’t want to step on the question time too much because we don’t have that much time left for questions I will just say something really quickly though a couple of things the first is that I think this periodization into the three different
Time periods and the way you’ve characterized what’s driving it in the sort of ideological discussion as well as specific policy eras uh areas is probably the clearest such periodization periodization I’ve seen uh from anybody recently at least uh I think there’s quite a bit there I also think that all
Of these different strands together it’s more than one or two articles you could easily have a book book that’s what that’s what I’m maybe moving towards with this and and so I think that would be really useful um to look at on the red tourism I would just say about 10
Years ago I had a really interesting experience one other thing about red tourism actually is cint before it was sold out to the Hong Kong developers leing and all these other people uh was actually a workingclass neighborhood uh for decades uh in the old French concession and was really kind of
Attractive and and pleasant this way and befitting of the uh founding site of the Communist party now it’s it’s kind of ridiculous Communist Party founding Museum in the middle of a garish shopping mall um and and it’s it’s it’s almost jarring is I never got to see it
Before it was transformed to yeah it was about 2001 2002 yeah the whole thing changed um maybe even a bit later than that so that’s one thing the other thing about red tourism was about 10 years ago I had the opportunity to go to Lan in northern part of jansi Province uh which
Was you know where famous conferences took place and so on and it was in the summertime it was very very hot and I was with a group of political science colleagues from elsewhere in China uh and what we noticed we were talking about sort of as we’re going up the
Mountain talking about sort of different perceptions of politics around usan among people born in the 70s and person born in the 60s which was all of us basically uh and then we were starting to notice what all these people seem to be younger than us who were visiting the
This site which surprised us none of us anticipated that it surprised me when I saw the statistics and so so that rings to the other thing is it was hot and so inside the in the indoor buildings or inside the buildings was even hotter right uh um and it was crowded and was
Up on the mountain so outside was a bit fresh inside the buildings we thought was fantastic they had pw’s letter to ma was framed with all the handwritten notes we were looking at it tring to Fig what did he actually write in all the margins and they had all the meeting
Rooms set up exactly as they were during the Congress and see who sat where and all none of the young people were interested in that they’re all congregating outside playing with phones yeah yeah yeah absolutely and this is it like can we go back to the hotel now you know the
Buffet is going to start at 5 and it’s a good Buffet at the whatever hotel is staying at all of that Rings completely true but on in terms of questions let me just Poe two small questions here and then we’ll open it up to everybody else
You don’t have to answer them now if you want don’t want if it’s too long but one was uh in these different periods as you laid it out there’s an interesting sort of interregnum period that you say you know could go all the way to 81 or 82 or
Could be shorter but it is basically this era of guagua fang and people often pass over that in other areas of politics too but actually when it comes to firms and in that period we’re talking about state owned firms almost exclusively but guagua Fong really does
Try to come up with a new framework for how the state should relate to firms right when he talks about the the super comprehensive 10e plan right because huagang is about ma but bigger right the the two whatevers and you know let let’s go even bigger than the 5-year plan with
The 10year plan and you know study daing and all of these kind of new campaign that he was putting into place and and trying to reinvigorate that time between State and firm and redefine what the firm was in this new kind of economic reality long after the great new forward
Long after first 5year plan after all of these things have changed what do we do uh and so I wonder how does that fit in with the periods and also with with other things the second question just really quickly is on this issue of consumerism versus Corporate right
Consumerism so and people like Carl girth um have talked a lot about consumer culture and the development of consumerism in China spanning into a socialist period from pre-socialist and then as you’ve also highlighted these aspects of consumerism in Conformity with things like the core socialist values and and state policies and the
Way that the state tries to shape consumer behavior in the way that people sort of engage in political performance through consumer behavior and then you talked about some of that with corporations with the adverted pyramid and also with the ad advertisements that that that you played can you just entangle that a
Little bit is there a difference between individual behavior and corporate behavior is there a way that the state treats individual consumers and corporate uh citizens differently are is there a different dynamic or is it really sort of of a piece with the same idea yeah so I right so that that second
Question so the sorry the first question h I have to be quite honest with you I’m one of these people that is absolutely guilty as charged of of of not looking at that that period it’s it’s missing from the slide I mean I I do point out
The interman but I don’t mention huagong as the um I know some some friends of mine who uh phds in Chinese politics were obsessed with hangang and I think it’s what is the most fascinating and we’ll tell anybody that it’s you’ve got to go and sort of look at this in more
Detail but it’s it’s just not something that that that I really looked at but given what you’ve told me there I think I’m going to have to um I think the other thing is what I will say is that is that there see there is a general tendency to sort of look at
That opening reform that comes afterwards and say right this is suddenly economic shock therapy and it and and it was incredibly gradual and it was you know we had the DU Town Village Township Village Enterprises we had dual track pricing systems and there was this sort of uh release and really it’s from
200 2001 afterward do WTO session that we see real break break economic growth so I have to be honest it’s not something that I’ve I’ve I’ve looked at but I I think I’m going to have to if that’s been at some point a debate on party private sector or party
Corporation relations the second point is something that I’ve had a bit of an issue with so my arrival at looking at consumerism was through looking at uh advertising through these types of adverts that I’ve just that I’ve I’ve shown a couple of examples here um
And the the sort of CSR stuff has become a sort of later interest it’s sort of expanded out from that and I it is it is entangled but I think consumerism on its own is such a massive massive area that it it would benefit from being sort of studied
Separate to that CSR however what I will say is that the the the the relationship seems to me to be that the reason the corporate sector and what companies do is important is because that then frames that consumers they if they how they how the legislation affects what they do and
It seems to me that and I’ve said this a couple of times in in conversations with colleagues and sort of dismissed it well what are you on about it’s communist China xiin ping and I said they’re not trying to control what people think they trying to control what people do and
That that’s it’s a very different thing I mean I have private conversations with so many friends incredibly critical of the regime but these are people I’ve known for 10 15 years or family um that might just give some off the cuff remark at dinner or something like that um you
Don’t hear that as sort of more sort of open um sort of social Encounters in in in in China people are very careful what they say but what they think and how they conduct themselves in in public it’s often very different you know I mean that that’s that’s a survival skill
In that system um and I think by controlling companies they control people what people do a lot more so if you look at football for example I gave that example where you’re not going to see a lot of Rowdy Hooligans drinking logger and this type of thing but what
Do you see if you you see you see people doing coordinate you know lots of sort of coordinated claps this type of thing they develop their own culture that’s pecul to the football club but when you support a football club what do you also do is you also support the national team
And there’s this kind of there’s this kind of way that that feeds into the establishment of people’s identity you know I’m you know I’m I’m am I am I a scouser I don’t think I am I support Everton football club um I support Scotland because of my family sort of
History if for Scotland versus England definitely supporting Scotland um you know but I don’t think I’m I so am I do I look at myself in a as a good citizen no I don’t but that’s my identity and there’s a sort of national identity and
A sort of thing tied in with it that that’s seems to me what’s going on with this um what what this does is the way that you know if you if you fight at a football match that is not going to be put on CCTV News it’s not going to be
Reported anywhere right it’s going to be censored but what will be reported and what is allowed to be seen is this sort of examples of good citizenship of good fandom of this type of thing and that is is more it’s very important when it comes to di chronic change over a long
Period of time because it becomes normalized what people what young kids are growing up seeing now is they’re seeing these sort of consensual and and sort of uh sort of state approved displays of citizenship um through you know going to concerts going to sports games going on red tourism and touring around jingan
And all this types of stuff and what they’re doing in schools and other things as well so I think it’s it’s it’s complex but that that’s I I think that the relationship is if you can control the companies through CSR you’re likely going to shape the consumerism that
Emerges out of it maybe maybe that’s the way of thinking about it oh sorry I wonder if we get distracted a little bit by using something like consumerism because in both cases um consumptions going on okay and what the state has done is incredibly artfully used the affordances
Of um advertising media and so on for the purposes of the state to consume a particular kind of identity you see that very clearly in that first uh clip that you kind of showed us there so what you’re doing is you’re consuming a way of performing The Nation um just as you
Do through football stuff just as you do here and there’s a big literature on nation building and Sport and that that kind of stuff um but what I think the dis the potential kind of distraction is is that you you don’t expect the artfulness of the advertising Style
Which is actually being used um which we shouldn’t be surprised by either because actually you’re talking to Ay Young Generation that actually does understand that world that deep mediatization kind of space and what the state’s actually doing is using that in order to secure
The nation in in that kind of s so I think you can kind of work I actually feel that the corporate social responsibility interest um is is interesting but maybe it’s a kind of consumption social responsibility that’s that was the original term that I came up with was consumer social respons
Because you to consum State apparatus consumption State apparatus and I would I’d take the ism off um and I’d keep it on the process of consuming and the question is what do you consume yes so what work is being asked of you yeah and once you back out that way you it seems
To me that you you don’t get glued to you know which weighs the pyramid yeah yeah sure sure sure um and you actually might say that you know okay the West does Corporate social responsibility um try not to use those lenses or maybe use it as a kind of an opening Gambit but
Maybe land somewhere else with a slightly different conceptual grammar for yourself that actually opens it up in interesting ways but that’s just my thought that’s thank thank you that’s really interesting because there was a similar comment from a colleague um who said the just something
That seems to be a bit missing and it’s more about finding conceptualizing it yourself rather than trying to sort of force it into a pigeon hole of CSR or this type of thing yeah rather than look at does it match it or not it’s what
Does it open up and then you begin to see where the differences lay and then maybe the cons the language itself you begin to develop from itself that doesn’t fit the cookie cutting kind of right okay okay we can definitely have a further conversation on that it’s very
Interesting thank you yeah thank you so much for your presentation I mean I I really enjoyed it I mean I come in not exactly sure where you’re going to you know to lead us to with your title but then you completely wowed me okay and
Won me over I thought this is this is brilliant like really fun and like you know theoretical empirical you know you nailed it and like um you know really going down into grassroot China as well so I really appreciate your presentation all right thank you very much very nice
To hear was thank you very much um couple of questions for you so you you outlined the you know repressive apparatus ideological apparatus and the consumer apparatus so my first question is how these three things actually interact and Link together so one possibility is really how you know ideological
Indoctrination you know bring it all all weave them all together and the other thing I was thinking and I haven’t heard as much much from you but I know this is just you know a snapshot of your project is the whole idea of National Security
Which Shi Jin Pang is so big on you know how does it fit inside you know like he said you know securitization is across the policy Spectrum across everything the government does so presumably you know um in you know morality traditional Chinese socialist values or traditional Chinese value that now become socialist
How does National Security fit in right now and another thing you know like coming in from this part of the world when we look at you know propaganda um video that you know make you feel a bit touchy and like you know teary and so I’ve had people crying to these videos
I’ve shown a few in the row and uh yeah and um they don’t realize that they’re propaganda I mean they’re very effective yeah they’re very very effective this but you see the thing is then I was thinking look this is the same propaganda Department that would be producing videos of weer people dancing
In the Square that look extremely forced yes but but this is the same Department that would produce really effective video that make people want to cry C so how do we put together you know the two phases of Chinese propaganda one of it being you know very heavy-handed coercive and clearly is political
Messaging you have to listen or like don’t don’t ask question and the other being a lot more relatable you know how do you put these two phases together in your research but I think that that is the massively important question is that when you know something is coming to you
From the propaganda Department it’s very difficult to not be cynical about it right so even and that that’s why I love this particular series of of for the Taiwanese reunion one there’s a series about I think it’s about four or five of them and they’re just wonderfully
Effective and each one of them targets a different subsection so you got migrant workers you’ve got the elderly separated by the sort of uh you the the uh the Civil War you’ve got um this sort of middle class entrepreneurs you’ve got these different groups that are represented but all of the messages are
Very very sort of similar and they all resonate to a certain level with very sort of key sort of values of you know family and and this type of thing right um but if you know that that’s coming from the propaganda Department you can be cynical about it and this is what I
Think is so effective about this mechanism is that when you see it coming through Coca-Cola commercials or you know advertising or you know events um uh marketing or experiential marketing that we see a lot of in China now you don’t question it because it’s not from the propaganda
Department the messages are so very similar and what it seems to me that the the the CCP propaganda department is doing is it’s not really um what it’s doing is it’s laying out the doctrine but that Doctrine has been expanded to incorporate the types of messages we see in commercial
Advertising because those those those advertisers are trying to send messages that resonate with their customer base right so by expanding out that sort of range of interest to talk about what it means to be Chinese about moral values about being a good citizen this type of thing they’ve actually sort of co-opted
A a a sort of channel of getting these messages to people without them knowing they’re coming that they’re sort of coming from the government so it’s it’s a really interesting sort of dynamic so um but I agree with with you most of it’s very clumsy you get a lot of stuff
That very clumsy the other thing that I have a particular be in my Bonnet about is that a lot of the time in in Western scholarship on China the word propaganda is just literally a catchall term to specifically uh a catch all term to to say any communication that comes out of
China that we disagree with whether it’s from the government or not um whether it’s from you know somebody else you’re talking to or somebody online um and I tried to do this in this piece on consuming the party history is make this distinction that that that we do still
Get a lot of propaganda that is very clearly thought out arguments that talk to a single person and try to persuade them with that sort of reason and logic but what we’re seeing a much more extensively is more agitation and and very sophisticated agit prop and when I
When we say agitation it’s about getting an emotional response it’s not necessarily making people angry but making people sad making people laugh making people feel like they’re part of something big know it’s about that emotional response and it’s about targeting a mass audience and this is
Where we’ve seen a huge sort of change over the last last sort of few years um and that’s what I mean by that sort of sophistication of propaganda it’s um the I mean these terms came from penov right um that sort of Distinction it was in in
In um it was was Lenin and he talks about penov saying that these are the distinctions of between propaganda and agitation you’re talking to one person with propaganda you’re talking to many with agitation trying to get a rouse a ra Ravel rousing sort of reaction from them make them
Angry but the other fascinating thing here is that the state here is not trying to overthrow a government a tarist regime it’s trying to reinforce and Galvanize its own its own position so it’s been used for a very different purpose so the emotions that we see are
Generally not anger or rage or you know um despondency but a much more sort of positive that’s what we tend to see through these propaganda campaigns so it’s really really um really interesting to look at and that’s that’s really what I originally got interested in was looking at these commercials I just
Thinking what’s going on here this why are the messages so similar my original sort of Suspicion was is that the markting executives are are sort of taking a lead from the propaganda campaigns but I don’t think that’s the case at all really um the advertising hasn’t changed the propaganda has and
It’s become quite quite uh a sort of powerful thing but but I think that’s the main thing is when it comes to the propaganda Department we recognize it and we can dismiss it but when it comes through advertising we we’re less quick to dismiss that we
Sort of just the idea of it dismissing it doesn’t even sort of occur to us because it comes from a I wouldn’t say a trusted Source but a source that we think we know better about yeah in the interest of time maybe what we should do is take a Bank of like
Three questions and then give him a chance to respond so they uh I want to ask you about this football since you mentioned it um so certainly that’s something that um it’s um not really working in China right so and so what can you tell us about right so okay
So do a bank of questions okay so we got football plan football yeah questions that people have perhaps that’s the only question from the Flor okay so okay I can say does that mean I can have more time because that’s quite a difficult one to answer yeah three
Questions of time yeah so so what we see is in it’s is in the early part of the first um administration of sh so 2012 to 2017 um we see this plan emerge for the medium to long-term football development plan um which is aims to build CH into a
World footballing power by 2050 that’s when cin ping went on TV and played football well get there’s this photo that goes around always gets sort of sh ping lost football and that’s a picture of him kicking a football in the air but that was he was actually in Ireland it’s
GIC football it’s not even it wasn’t even football he was playing with that that sort of picture so when he came to the UK famously went to Man City with David Cameron and there was a selfie with Sergio Aguero the Argentinian player and this type of thing does Shen
Ping like football I don’t know I don’t really care I don’t think he probably does I think what the what what they see is is that Sport and team sports a particularly strong way to see very vibrant displays of national sovereignty and this is why they want it
In in this article here where was it um this one I wrote with John and and Simon um so they came to me with a project and so we’re looking at analyzing this sort of football development that’s going on in China I said okay but I think they sent me a
Draft of stuff and I said I don’t know if how I can get involved in some of this because it’s more talking about the outward International Acquisitions of companies like Wanda buying Atletico Madrid I don’t really know anything about that but on the domestic front I think you could do a detailed analysis
Of this plan so that’s what I that was my sort of contribution to it and we introduced a sort of key concept here was B’s concept of um symbolic capital and symbolic violence which kind of monopolized by the state so the ability of the state to to um to consecrate groups according to
Their qualities so if you want to be considered um so if if you I’m trying to think of an example here so if you want to be considered a woman you have to in in in any given Society there are C different societies have different sort of benchmarks of what’s the correct
Behavior for being with if you step outside of those you might be sort of ostracized or or or what have you and what they’re doing with sport is they’re kind of sort of setting down this this consecration of of what it means to be a good citizen somebody that supports
Their local team somebody goes there but behaves in a way that we want to see them behave but also supports the national team and this idea that you know it’s difficult with sports that China’s traditionally been good at lots of people watch the Olympics but it’s not this kind of boisterous kind of
Nation versus Nation power dynamics that are going on there either um so it seems to me that that’s really what it’s what it’s about it’s about consens trying to get people to perform this sort of way and and to buy into that but it’s divided into three clear strategies and
This is where a lot of the reporting in the common press I think gets it wrong is you know saying China wants to win a World Cup by 2050 that’s not in the they don’t want to they may want to win a World Cup but they don’t clearly state
That and it’s not an objective of the plan what they want is a developed football industry the first part is about laying the groundwork by setting up associations these types of things um the second middle part is really about expanding massively pitches campus football leagues um it’s about and
They’re trying to get the sort of organic Grassroots stuff going up and then the third part is really about developing the the elite and the Men’s National Team and getting them to perform on the world stage so the professional sports part according to the plan isn’t even going to kick into
Place for another 10 years they’re not even concerning themselves with these things until 2035 so so we have 2016 to 2020 basic planning uh 2020 to 2035 and then 2035 to 2050 that’s roughly the the the short medium and long-term the plan um what’s the what’s going bad at the moment is
Concentrated at the top of China’s General Sports Administration the Chinese fa and the Men’s National Team the other thing that we’ve seen um is the bankruptcy of a lot of football clubs in the Chinese Super league and then who have been relegated down and then gone into they’ve been dissolved
And they’re liquidated now that has been very embarrassing because that’s the most visible element but what’s happened there what seems to have happened there is that a lot of these entrepreneurs we’re talking about people like is it um the Wanda chairman from Dien um we’re talking about donga who’s in all sorts
Of problems with Reading Football Club at the moment here in the UK um even um and and hunga so sort of shuay in in in guango they piled loads of money into this stuff but then once their companies have started running into money it looks to me like their wealth has sort of
Evaporated and they are now unable to put that money in or unwilling to put that money in suing janga suing went bankrupt shortly after the CEO of that company I believe is now in prison um put lots of Sun’s money into into prop up everg Grand in about
2020 um other people that put money in in 2020 Jack Mah uh Pony Mah uh it’s like 14 investors that put five is it um 23.5 billion Hong Kong dollarss into ever Grand now if that money is all going into ever Grand to keep it propped
Up it’s not going into football and this is seems to me what the problem is so this is maybe not a problem with football per se it’s symptomatic of The Wider malays in the in the Chinese property Market that seems to be a big big problem um for the for the shei
Administration at the moment actually about the football uh two other questions immediately sprung to mind as you were just talking about it uh one is what ever happened to basketball right basketball was the big thing sport yeah 15 20 30 years ago even and and that
Seems to have have had a huge run for a long time and now be petering out because you know football is replacing it but the second question is uh China like the United States actually has long been much more competitive internationally in women’s football than men’s football at is that being
Completely neglected uh or is is that an area where they might actually have women’s football is all part of this medium longterm football plan it’s not neglected at all um it’s it’s it’s always historically been much further ahead the Chinese Women’s National team has had some incredibly successful
Periods um throughout history but in terms of the in terms of the amateur game in terms of Campus leagues that’s all being developed at the same time but women’s professional football in China doesn’t have the same profile as the as the CSL come back to your just your your
Question on on basketball there was so this was one of the things we going to talk about foreign Brands so we’ve got we’ve got Gap we’ve got Mercedes we’ve got the Houston Rockets So the Houston Rockets got into a lot of hot water um the other the uh about two three years
Ago three just before Co I think it was and there was a there was a tour went out and the the chairman of the Houston Rockets um defended an NBA player who had criticized uh China’s treatment of Wagers in shinjang Province I think that’s something something to do with
That anyway and then but there was this tour going on at the time and so was LeBron James this is an interesting P we’ve got LeBron James sort of cow Towing we’ve got Tim Cook and this is Christian Dior all cow Towing to the Chinese regime and we’ve seen a lot of
These scandals where they’re not these companies are not required to adhere to the core socialist values but if they want to access this Market they have got to make sure that they do not hurt the feelings of the Chinese people according to the according to the PRC authorities
So this was a big Scandal Gap this this shirt wasn’t even sold in China but because it did not include Taiwan everybody uh went absolutely ballistic and they had to remove this and GAP had to apologize um Mercedes quoting the Dalai Lama did not go down too well in
Their marketing campaign even though this marketing campaign wasn’t even seen in in on the mainland um but it was something that usually it’s not it’s not the authorities that pick this stuff up it’s it’s neens go ballistic at this stuff and then they have to sort of step
In and and there was another issue with marott and the marott hotels and the free toet Society um and this was um this was the Houston Rockets that that that had to climb down but what happened here was um basically overnight the the um the authorities just shut off all
Coverage of the NBA you couldn’t access any games that was were drew them for TV and put on alternative programming and this type of thing so this is a bit of an issue and this is that sort of last part I didn’t cover today is that there
Seems to be a bit of a there’s a bit of a difficulty um for foreign firms operating in China somewhere they are going to be compromised either on the money that they can make on whether they are operating legally or whether they are breaking their own ethical code back
Home their own ethical commitments back home um it seems to me that you can have two of these but risks are going to emerge in the third and that’s what the trimmer is so um so this this is another part of the argument that I need to
Think about a bit more careful carefully it’s it’s but it’s a kind of it’s kind of a side dish to the to the stuff I’m really more interested in um so so yeah so I I don’t know it’s still massively popular um but it is the NBA that’s
Popular there’s no National plan to build they were good 25 years ago the Chinese National leagues and then they’ve in basketball but yeah I’m not sure I think it it’s maybe something to do with scale and it’s maybe something to do with the fact that there is no
World Cup for basketball this is an American sport that that does not put China on a world stage and does not show you know hordes of if you also think that football stadium are huge infrastructures and so if you want to kind of deal over production of infrastructure you know which you know
Less likely bu Road stuff then if you’re thinking and there’s a limited number of airports you can kind of then actually infastructure yeah the stadium the five star hotels I mean and this is exactly the the all the entrepreneurs that came in and bought of these football clubs did it for exactly
That reason and you look at so even if you even in in Madrid Wanda Plaza the the Atletico Madrid is named the Chinese company that bought out and and not only Built the stadium but all the sort of commercial infrastructure that around that is all owned by these and that’s
What we when I where I was living in sujo they built massive huge Sports Stadium about 500 M from from from our apartment block wasn’t finished by the time I left but it’s you know ice Rings hockey Rings five star two or three four five star hotels shopping malls um just
Tons of stuff to go on um and that’s what they that’s what you know that’s how do they get planning permission for that well they’ve got to buy the football team that allows them to get the rights granted from the the local government and this type of thing so
That political Capital by buying into these projects allows them to do what they’re really after which is you know building these very um profit maybe not profitable but inflating land values and then speculating flipping them and making the money that way so thank you thank you all very much uh
Thank you Mike thank you everyone uh for coming and for excellent talk and excellent questions [Applause]