“Win support from the people,” Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, repeated the words from one of Xi Jinping’s speeches that was given to justify China’s massive anti-corruption campaign. The exact scope and motivations for President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is, as yet, unknowable, Wang stated; but clearly, a major public aim of CCP Chairman Xi Jinping was to build regime support by cracking down on bad actors in the government.

Prof. Yuhua Wang gave a talk titled “Why Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Campaign has Undermined Chinese Citizens’ Regime Support?” at the Stanford China Program on November 12^th, 2018, based on a national-level survey analysis that he had conducted with his co-author, Prof. Bruce Dickson at George Washington University. Rather than focusing on Xi’s motivations for undertaking his crackdown, however, Wang and Dickson tried to measure the impact of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign on public perception of the central government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Did the campaign, in other words, shore up public support for China’s central government and Party, as Xi hoped it would – or did it, in fact, undermine regime support?

Professor Wang first offered some background on how this anti-corruption campaign got started around 2012-2013, shortly after Xi Jinping became Chairman of the CCP. A staggering 261 vice-ministerial officials and 350,000 officials had been investigated to date; and, even those at the highest levels of China’s leadership – former Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee members, for instance –were not immune from scrutiny. And, equally unprecedented, media coverage of these corruption cases – from Bo Xilai to Zhou Yongkang and Xu Caihou – were extensive, exposing their lavish lifestyles and illicit dalliances on social and traditional media. Wang speculated that such lurid publicity most likely shocked the public, potentially turning citizens against even the central government, which consistently enjoys significantly higher levels of public trust than local governments in China. He decided, therefore, to explore with his co-author what the effects of such exposés might be on public perception of the central regime.

Replicating the same questionnaire and sampling design, Wang and his co-author took a national random sample in two waves – one before the anti-corruption campaign in 2010 and a second one during the campaign in 2014. They interviewed approximately 4,000 people across 25 provinces in China in order to measure potential shifts in people’s attitudes towards the regime over those four years. The findings were, indeed, illuminating:

First, Wang stated, increasing frequency of corruption investigations in a locality was correlated with a greater drop in popular regime support (defined as trust in central government or support for the CCP) in that locality. Higher volume of corruption investigations in a locality was also negatively correlated with people’s perception that government officials were generally honest and clean. The corrosive effects of the campaign, furthermore, proved strongest on those who had initially believed in the integrity of government officials; but for those who were already cynical about official corruption, the campaign had a smaller effect. Lastly, higher the survey respondent’s use of social media like WeChat, stronger the negative effects on his/her support for the regime. The authors also took into account how the chilling effects of the campaign may be negatively impacting local economies and how that slowing economy may actually be the primary cause behind decreasing public regime support. To account for this potentially confounding effect, Wang looked for evidence as to whether the campaign had contributed to a slowdown in China’s economy by 2014. Perhaps because 2014 was still early on in the campaign, he stated that they found no evidence of slower GDP growth rate, growth rate per capita GDP, etc., in the regions where they had undertaken their surveys.

Overall, Wang’s research calls into question whether Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is, in fact, advancing one of his main goals– i.e., to increase people’s faith in the central regime – or whether it is actually proving counterproductive to his aim. In fact, Wang’s research seems to indicate that the more Chinese citizens are exposed to evidence of government corruption, the more the central regime appears to suffer a loss in credibility. Wang was careful to point out, however, that they were barred, due to political sensitivity, from asking any questions regarding respondents’ attitudes towards Xi Jinping himself. Thus, it is still an open question whether popular support for Xi Jinping himself is increasing even though public trust in the regime might be decreasing.

The recording and transcript are available below.  

Armed conflict continues its brutal march in Syria, Yemen, Southeast Asia and South Sudan — to name a few of the international hotspots that contributed to an 11% increase in political violence around the world in 2018.

Nearly 10 million Yemenis are facing famine this year; Syria was the deadliest place on earth for civilians last year, with more than 7,100 fatalities.

Many of those killed — and even more who face starvation — are children. And that’s when Stanford professor of pediatrics Paul Wise finds it hard to stand on the sidelines. Wise, who has traveled to Guatemala annually for the last 40 years to treat children in rural communities, also travels to the frontlines of global calamities.

As part of a small team of physicians, Wise went to Mosul, the northern city in Iraq once controlled by ISIS, in 2017 to evaluate the World Health Organization-led system to treat civilians injured in the brutal battle for the city. 

Working with colleagues at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Wise has collaborated with the U.S. military, non-governmental organizations and the United Nations on the interaction of humanitarian and security challenges.

So, it should come as no surprise that the American Academy of Arts & Sciences — of which he is a member — recently appointed him and two other global health experts to lead a new initiative to develop new strategies to protect civilians, health care and cultural heritage in areas of extreme violence. 

The initiative, Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violence Conflict, will be a collaboration among political scientists, international human rights lawyers, physicians, academics and even the curators of major museums. They will develop strategies to prevent civilian harm and deliver critical health services in areas plagued by violent conflict, most notably in the Middle East, central and north Africa and parts of Asia. 

“We also want to address the humanitarian and protective frameworks that operate in areas that are extremely violent but wouldn’t necessarily be defined as being in armed conflict, like in the northern triangle of Central America. The human toll in these areas is at least as great as some of these other more traditionally defined areas,” Wise said.

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Another of those areas is Myanmar, where nearly 700,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring Bangladesh amid sectarian violence in the northern Rakhine province, in what the United Nations calls a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Rethinking is also headed up by global health expert Jaime Sepulvedaof the University of California, San Francisco, and Jennifer M. Welsh, a global governance and security expert at   McGill University in Canada. Their work will result in a series of publications, blog posts, videos, podcasts and op-eds as a means to reach not only a general audience but also local and field-based humanitarian health providers. The initiative will also seek the engagement of those directly victimized by violence in the areas of greatest concern. 

“We will come up with new strategies to protect civilians and deal with their needs when protection fails in the real world,” Wise said. “The goal is to make a difference in the real world. That’s a much more ambitious goal of course, but it’s the only goal that’s worthy of this kind of initiative.” 

A professor of pediatrics in the Medical School and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, Wise is also appointed in several international security programs at Stanford, including the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law,and the Center for International Security and Cooperation,and is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Wise said he is particularly excited about the prospect of working with those who curate and protect cultural heritage sites and objects.

“The other thing about the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that we are not just academics, but artists, musicians, novelists — and we expect to take full advantage of breaking out into these disciplines that aren’t normally part of these conversations,” Wise said.

When fire nearly toppled Notre Dame in Paris three months ago, Parisians gathered near the French Gothic cathedral to pray and to sing. When al-Qaida seized control of the North African country of Mali in 2012, a band of librarians undertook a dangerous mission to protect 350,000 centuries-old Arabic texts and smuggled them out of the library in Timbuktu.

At a recent meeting at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Wise met with museum directors, archeologists and political scientists about the preservation of cultural heritage.

“It was very clear that there were enormous areas of overlap between the efforts to protect cultural heritage and the efforts to protect people,” he said. “They’re just pragmatically connected because when you start destroying things of cultural importance, it tends to be associated ultimately with atrocities against people.”