Transcriber: Clement Fu Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Authoritarian governments seem to have a thing for grand construction projects.
As far as I can tell,
the general principle behind these is
the bigger and more elaborate, the better.
Americans have a tendency to get jealous of these things.
We look at these projects, and we see, or we think we see,
the power of benevolent dictators to transform their societies for the good
in a way that our bickering elected officials supposedly can't.
What we miss in our jealousy, though,
is how often these projects fail.
Last year, for example,
James Traub, a journalist, wrote an article for Foreign Policy magazine,
arguing that the United States could learn a lot
from all the shiny, new infrastructure
China has built in its cities in the last few years.
The same day Traub's essay appeared in Foreign Policy,
the New York Times ran a story
about a 330-foot section of a bridge in the Chinese city of Harbin
that had collapsed just nine months after it was built.
That collapse killed three people and injured five more,
and at the time,
it was the sixth major bridge collapse in China just in the past year.
Back in May 2008,
when a huge earthquake hit China's Sichuan province,
hundreds of school buildings in the region just crumbled,
often while buildings nearby remained standing.
The Chinese government had built those schools,
and thousands of children died when they collapsed.
Of course,
one of the worst and most spectacular failures of infrastructure in modern times
happened not that far from here, in Ukraine, back in April 1986.
That's when the atomic energy plant at Chernobyl
suffered this catastrophic meltdown,
spewing radioactive particles
over a large swath of what was then the Soviet Union, in Europe.
One UN report described Chernobyl
as the worst environmental disaster in human history.
So what's going on here?
If dictators are supposed to be so good at building things,
then why do so many of the things they build
end up failing so terribly?
I think we can start to answer this question
by looking for flaws in the mental models many of us have
about how authoritarian regimes survive.
Theories of political change from the 1950s and '60s
have led us to expect countries to become more democratic
as they become richer, more industrialized, more urbanized
and get better educated.
This whole cluster of social and economic changes
was dubbed "modernization,"
and this modernization process
was supposed to change citizens' values and interests
in a more liberal direction
while also making it easier
for them to organize against their authoritarian rulers.
So, in other words, modernization
is supposed to both encourage and enable people to demand democracy.
But as countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore,
and now China and Vietnam, showed,
this doesn't always happen.
So, in a kind of addendum to modernization theory,
we're told that transitions to democracy in these cases have been delayed
by an implicit social contract between rulers and their people,
and under this contract,
the regime is supposed to supply an improving standard of living,
and in return, citizens supply their loyalty to the regime.
So now, instead of producing pressures for political reform,
economic growth is said to lend performance legitimacy
to the autocrats who are able to supply it,
at least while it lasts.
Then, as a result, the transition to democracy is delayed
until economic growth finally slows down,
performance legitimacy evaporates with it
and this supposed social contract is finally broken.
But here again,
if performance legitimacy is the foundation these regimes stand on,
then these collapsing bridges and schools
and exploding power plants
are big screw-ups
and they really shouldn't happen.
If dictators were serious
about upholding some kind of social contract with their citizens,
you'd think they would buy the best materials
and hire the best builders
and conduct really good inspections
to make sure - partly to protect their investments in these projects,
but more importantly, to protect the lives of the people who use them.
But clearly, that's not what happens.
So, why not?
[What if I told you I never signed the social contract]
Well, here's the thing: this supposed social contract isn't real.
It's really a philosopher's device
for deducing why government ought to exist,
not a historian's description of how states have actually come to be.
In fact, as the great sociologist Charles Tilly liked to point out,
states in the real world
have traditionally looked more like protection rackets
than public services.
Leaders and their entourages are much more concerned
with protecting their own wealth and privileges
than the welfare of the people they rule.
And when those leaders aren't competitively elected,
their wealth and privileges
don't depend much on how most people feel about them.
Instead, they depend a lot more
on the loyalty of a much smaller coalition of people
with especially important skills and assets:
things like guns and land and big bank accounts
and the right social connections.
Once we recognize that authoritarian regimes
are really just organizations of people basically looking out for themselves,
it's easier to see
that these big construction projects aren't just about producing public goods
to help grow the economy and make citizens happy.
They're also, and maybe more so,
an important way for cronies to cash out their political capital.
Elites offer their loyalty to the regime in exchange for privileged access
to things like state controlled loans, licenses and construction tenders.
The projects that come out of this can have some public benefit, for sure,
but at the same time,
they're physical manifestations of this deeper political economy
in which citizens aren't so much constituents, or even customers really,
of the authoritarian regime
as they are resources and potentially threats.
In this version of the world,
dictators don't bother to buy the best materials
and hire the best builders, and all that.
Instead, they're more likely to invest whatever spare resources they have
in instruments of monitoring and repression
to keep people from getting organized against them.
These guys aren't benevolent modernizers building a better future for their people.
They're more like mafia bosses,
building the political machinery
that's meant to help them get and stay rich and powerful.
Political machinery generally works better
when those leaders don't spend a lot of time
looking over their cronies' shoulders,
bugging them about how the physical machinery is getting made.
We can see this dynamic pretty clearly
in the aftermath of that 2008 earthquake in Sichuan.
In hindsight, it was evident
that the flaw that caused so many schools to collapse there
wasn't in the building codes,
which in this case were actually pretty stringent.
Instead, the flaw was in the failure to follow those codes,
and the root cause of that failure was corruption.
According to parents who organized and investigated
after the disaster happened,
local officials and builders had cut lots of corners
in the construction of those school buildings
and then bribed inspectors
to ignore all the flaws in the work they'd done.
In short,
dictators build things that fall apart
because those things weren't just built to keep citizens happy.
They were also built to keep the dictators' friends happy,
and as it turns out,
those friends aren't always so interested
in making sure the things they build actually work.
These projects aren't gifts
from benevolent dictators to their grateful people;
they're more like the packaging left over
from gifts the dictators give to their loyal friends and themselves.
Now, there are a couple of ironies here.
The first
is that we can only really understand why dictators build things that fall apart
by thinking about what holds the regimes themselves together.
These failures, in a sense,
are a direct consequence of the design of authoritarian rule:
the corruption that's like a glue for the regime
is like a solvent for the things it builds.
The second irony, and the idea I'd like to close with this afternoon,
is that the aggressive development
we often credit with helping sustain these regimes
actually carries some of the most fertile seeds of their destruction.
While we're busy admiring the booming industry
and the shiny infrastructure,
local residents are often suffering through forced evictions,
train crashes, bridge collapses, polluted air and water.
These problems aren't just nuisances on the way to a bigger bank account;
they're often matters of life and death.
The real human costs of these public failures
often motivate people to organize and demand reform,
even while their economies are still growing briskly.
China, for example,
has reportedly experienced tens of thousands of "mass incidents" -
as the government calls them -
every year for at least the past several years.
These incidents -
including this one in Qidong last summer
over plans to construct a new sewage pipeline at a plant there -
these incidents have mushroomed
even while China's economy
has been growing at rates most of the world can only envy.
According to a recently retired senior party official,
pollution is now the chief cause of that unrest.
I'm sure that Chinese officials are painfully aware
that many of the nationalist uprisings
that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union
actually started out as environmental movements
and the disaster at Chernobyl played an important role
in catalyzing those early protests.
Russia also saw a new wave of political activism start in late 2011.
And again, contrary to this performance legitimacy model,
this new activism got started
after a couple of years of solid economic growth.
Lots of the participants in this activism have been middle-class urbanites,
the very people who are supposed to be benefiting most
from Russia's economic rebound.
Now, election fraud was clearly the immediate trigger
to this new wave of activism in Russia,
but long-standing frustrations over things like shoddy healthcare,
aggressive urban development,
and even simple stuff like this pothole in Yekaterinburg,
have helped to motivate and sustain that activism.
The fact is authoritarian regimes survive in spite of unrest,
not because unrest is absent.
The chief obstacle to reform in these cases
isn't citizen satisfaction with their rulers' performance.
It's state repression -
which makes it really hard
for people who aren't satisfied with their rulers' performance,
with people who are being harmed by these public failures,
to organize and do something about it.
These protests over these threats to public health and safety
seem to worry state officials
in a way that protests over more abstract issues,
like free speech and free elections,
don't always.
I actually think they have their priorities right on this one.
If my point about the nature of authoritarian rule is correct,
then the popular uprisings it's going to take
to finally push countries like China and Russia
toward more democratic politics
probably aren't going to be led by citizens frustrated
because their paychecks aren't growing as fast anymore.
Instead, I think they're more likely to happen
when the swirl of smaller outbursts
over things like smoggy air or collapsing bridges or tainted milk
finally coalesce into a sustained attempt to throw the bums out.
I'm not going to try to predict when those uprisings are going to happen.
When they do, though,
I suspect we'll be able to trace their origins,
at least in part,
right back to the failure
of some of the very projects we're so busy admiring now.
Thank you.
(Applause)