Science as Charisma: Expert Authority and State-Society Relations in Contemporary China

Abstract

We live in an expert society: citizens and leaders alike depend on scientists and experts to judge, interpret, and frame questions of public importance. Yet we have not fully grappled with how the expanded authority of scientists and experts affects the political authority that underlies the relationship between the state and its citizens. Experts rarely have the formal power to directly make political decisions, but their public authority has expanded to such a degree that they influence politics in myriad ways. In moments of crisis—such as during the COVID-19 pandemic whose after-effects are still impacting global politics—the authority of scientists and experts can even seem to exceed that of political leaders. Understanding the sources and nature of the authority that scientists and experts exercise in society is essential for making sense of contemporary politics. This dissertation addresses questions of scientific authority in politics by reframing classic social theories of science and applying them to a novel set of empirical investigations of China. While most theoretical discussions assume the authority of science is rooted in the impersonal procedures, norms, and institutions associated with Weberian legal-rational bureaucracy, I instead argue that science can be highly charismatic. I use the lens of scientific charisma to analyze how citizens, experts, and the state interact in China. Through a mixed-methods social scientific investigation of public health crises, propaganda campaigns about scientists, and public attitudes toward scientific authority, I detail Party-state efforts to simultaneously promote and limit the potential charisma of scientists in society. I show how the Party increasingly casts contemporary scientists in roles similar to those of Party cadres, which I connect to a longstanding quest to merge political loyalty and technical knowledge—to combine “red” and “expert” in the Party lexicon. To the extent that such a merger is plausible, I argue, it rests on the areas of overlap between scientific charisma and the charismatic core of the Party’s political authority. Taken as a whole, the dissertation contributes both an alternative theoretical approach to thinking about the authority of expertise in contemporary mass politics and new empirical analyses of state-society relations and political authority in China. Chapter 1 lays out a vision for understanding the politics of expertise as a series of overlapping authority relationships between states, scientists, and citizens. Chapter 2 reinterprets the political and sociological theories of Max Weber to identify the possibility of a latent charisma within scientific authority. Chapter 3 applies the concept of scientific charisma to contemporary China through a study of Dr. Zhong Nanshan during the 2003 SARS and 2020 COVID-19 pandemics, highlighting the rise and fall of his heroic public image. Chapter 4 explores the Party’s vision of the ideal Chinese scientist through an analysis of the ongoing “Spirit of Scientists” campaign. Chapter 5 introduces and analyzes a survey experiment to test how the authority of experts—and of claims to science more generally—affect compliance with public health measures among citizens. Chapter 6 extends the scope of the project beyond mainland China through a case study of the politics of scientific advising during the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. It shows how different views of science, rather than partisanship, drove internal cleavages around policy choices. It also adds to the themes analyzed in the preceding chapters by highlighting the unique role of the media and social media in connecting citizens, experts, and the state. Chapter 7 concludes by outlining the study’s overall contributions and potential avenues for future research.