In her compact but dazzling book The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, Iza Ding seeks to not only advance debate about China’s environmental management but also contribute to the comparative study of bureaucracy. At the heart of her analysis is an “admittedly simple yet aspirationally encompassing” (p. 35) claim that two variables—state capacity and public scrutiny—are most salient in determining bureaucracies’ behavior. Ding fleshes out the four combinations of these variables. When the public cares about a particular issue (high public scrutiny) and when the state is well-equipped to deliver on its goals (high capacity), the result is “substantive” governance, which meets public demands. A low-capacity state paired with a public that is not attuned to the issue is “inert.” A high-capacity state facing low scrutiny is “paternalistic,” which in Ding’s telling can take either predatory or developmental forms. But her phenomenon of interest is the combination of low state capacity and high public scrutiny. Under these circumstances, where the state faces high expectations that it simply cannot meet, the result is “performative” governance: Bureaucrats apply themselves not to fixing the source of grievance itself but instead to managing public perceptions of the state’s performance. In other words, the game is “to give citizens the perception they are being heard, and to give them a sense of empowerment vis-à-vis the state” (p. 79) while the actual problem goes unsolved.

Ding’s primary case study is environmental management in response to grassroots pressure in China. Even if the reader is not entirely clear on the essence of the “performative governance” concept by the introductory chapters, the point is brought home in a brilliant third chapter about the realities of day-to-day environmental governance in a big city (“Lakeville”) in China’s prosperous Yangtze River Delta region. Based on her participant observation of day-to-day work in an environmental protection bureau over several months, Ding paints a rich and fascinating picture of Lakeville officials who consistently fail to meet local demands to crack down on polluting factories. The reason they cannot deliver the goods is not corruption or indifference—indeed the bureaucrats she observes are well-motivated, bright, and extremely hard working. Rather, they simply lack the requisite resources and authority to really make polluters pay. Facing an onslaught of public complaints about dirty air and other environmental problems caused by a local industrial park, the officials seek first and foremost to be seen as doing something about problems they cannot fix. They roar up to factories in their SUVs in order to undertake surprise environmental inspections which they hope will be covered by local media. But the visits never actually result in significant punishments for polluters. The officials respond to online complaints instantly and around the clock, and they even submit to lengthy tirades from citizens letting off steam about their personal tragedies. Ding explains the latter behavior: “By lowering itself in front of citizens—sometimes acting as their virtual punching bag—the state gives citizens a sense of power and efficacy, even when it cannot resolve their problems” (p. 131).

Ding’s work is an extremely valuable contribution to the decadelong debate about the pros and cons of China’s brand of environmental authoritarianism. The image Ding paints of basically “good” Lakewood officials working in impossible conditions resonates with what I observed during my own research with local environmental officials in other parts of China at around the same time as her data collection in 2013. One core implication of her argument about “beleaguered bureaucrats” is that China’s status as a one-party state may explain less about the shortcomings of its environmental state than has often been claimed. The central fact in Ding’s account is not that bureaucrats are deaf to citizen demands—quite to the contrary, the authoritarian state in Ding’s account is hyper-attuned to public views—but that they lack both the political authority and resources needed to meaningfully address pollution. This implies that China is more like many democracies facing similar environmental problems than one might initially assume. This point is developed in the final chapter analyzing cases of “performative breakdown” drawn from other countries, including the United States.

While this outstanding book will quite deservedly become required reading for those interested in environmental politics in China and beyond, this reader is ultimately left with the question of exactly how far Ding’s concept of performative governance really travels. While the comparative cases introduced in the final chapter are interesting—especially Wuhan at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and the Flint, Michigan water crisis—they seem to capture something different than what Ding so wonderfully documents in the Lakeville case. In Lakeville, we see officials bending over backwards in order to be seen as effective managers (even though they are not), whereas in Flint and Wuhan, we see bureaucrats who initially bungle their PR in the early phases of a governance crisis and later pay a dear price for it. Thus, one wonders how common the Lakeville scenario is outside of the Chinese setting. Conceivably, the combination of a deeply rooted “serve the people” ideology in political culture and a Leninist party-state both willing and able to punish officials that fall out of line sets China apart from political contexts in which bureaucratic inefficiency and indifference are an accepted (if also resented) fact of life. Thus, the extent to which public pressure directly translates into bureaucratic action (whether substantive or performative) is conceivably mediated by other factors. Whether China is a special case in this regard awaits future research.