"Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts," with Jeremy Wallace

This week on China Corner Office, Chris Marquis discusses information control with Jeremy Wallace, associate professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Jeremy is the author of the new book Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarian Rule in China. Jeremy discusses how a communist party came to justify itself through GDP statistics and why they have shifted away from this focus recently. Also discussed is how and why cadres falsify data and the techniques researchers use to identify manipulated statistics. Jeremy also reflects on the centralization and personalization of Xi’s power and the recent COVID protests, connecting the contemporary issues he studies with a rich set of historical cases including the Great Leap Forward, the Democracy Wall Movement and the Tian’anmen protests.

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