Reddit is restricting access to their API to third-party applications and they're charging some apps like Apollo, which is one of the most popular third-party Reddit apps, as much as $20 million per year to use their API. Now for those of you that aren't familiar with APIs, you don't know what it means. It stands for Application Programming Interface and it's basically a set of standards that you create for interacting with some kind of application, often times it's online apps like Reddit, right? So we have a standard for how to see the photo in a post, right? We have a standard for how your app makes a request to get comments and there's a standard for if you're signed into the application and you do an upvote, how that upvote is sent to Reddit servers and then how it's able to show up and there's a standard for how your DMs work. There's every single aspect of the Reddit application that you're using or every single aspect of the Reddit platform that your application is interacting with is going to go through an API. Now, part of the reason that this is happening, well I'll give you the reason that Reddit said. So Reddit claimed that it's really, really expensive for them to let people use these APIs. It's expensive to run Reddit, right? And a lot of these third-party applications are not necessarily generating as much revenue for Reddit as if you were using the actual Reddit application, okay? Now Reddit is also going public, so this is the main reason that they want to start charging for this API because if anyone's going to buy into Reddit stock, they have to prove that they're able to turn a profit somehow. So corralling everybody into a Reddit app or into the official Reddit app where all the ads are going to be official ads that are sent by Reddit and everything like that is going to allow them to better show profits, you know, better show like this is how many people are on our application, this is how many people are interacting with these different subreddits, and it's going to make it easier for them to profit off of it. Now Reddit did concede on some points to allowing people to have access to the API. Like they said that they're going to allow people that need it for accessibility purposes, you know, people that need like larger tech store that need it to be on high contrast settings and stuff like that. Those, you know, apps that are doing that that are for accessibility purposes, they're still going to have access to the Reddit API. But things like NSFW content is no longer going to be available on third-party apps. That's right. To coom to random thoughts on Reddit, you're going to have to use the official app. But you know, Reddit might really be shooting themselves in the foot here. I mean, there's so many different communities that have had these blackouts, you know, basically subreddits that are not going to let people post on them as a way to protest Reddit making this decision to charge for their API. Obviously, the third-party Reddit apps are way better than the actual Reddit app because there's more people using third-party apps than the actual Reddit application. But so many of these third-party apps are going to have to shut down now because they cannot afford to pay that API price. So some people are going to just go ahead and use the Reddit app for all of their Reddit activities, but I think a lot of people are just going to stop using Reddit altogether, you know, especially when it comes to people using Reddit for this NSFW content. I mean, I didn't look into exactly how many people use Reddit specifically for porn, but I suspect it's a very high amount. And also, NSFW doesn't necessarily mean porn. I mean, they're, at least in the past, there used to be just like gore reddits and like some real vile stuff like that. I think that's gone though now. I don't really think gore reddits exist. So yeah, the stuff that's NSFW for the most part is going to be like porn and I guess maybe nature is metal, right? Some stuff from that is probably considered NSFW because it's like animal gore. But the real issue with forcing people to go through the Reddit app to look at NSFW content is they're going to end up restricting it to and they're probably going to end up making it so that you have to sign in. And so that's something that a lot of people aren't going to want to do. OK, like if you're going to go look at your wife who you might want to keep it a secret, OK, you probably don't want to be logged in and have statistics of like all the subreddits you follow and stuff on an account. So this is a really good opportunity for people who scrape Reddit for people who don't actually use API and they're the Chad web scrapers to scrape a lot of NSFW subreddits and then I guess just create their own websites that effectively let you see the content on that subreddit, but you don't have to sign in. And now that means instead of Reddit making a little bit of money through Coomers that are using third party applications, now they're making zero dollars because they're on, you know, Chuck's smut hut instead of Reddit.com. You know, it's really shooting themselves in their foot here.


Marines, my initial planning guidance is now available online. It was developed with feedback from across the Corps. My intent was to focus on those areas most important to our warfighting and combat readiness. I want each of you to read it, discuss it with your fellow Marines, and provide feedback to your leadership. With your help, our Corps will continue to innovate, adapt, and win. Semper Fidelis, Marines.


Well, welcome to this very special Soas Taiwan Studies annual lecture. I'm delighted to welcome Joseph Wong from the University of Toronto. I'm not sure how many talks Joe's given us on the Taiwan programme over the last decade. I think this may be the fourth or fifth one. Rhywbeth ymlaen o'r llinwaddol. Roedd yn y peth sy'n myfydliadau sydd wedi myfydliadau o rhan o'r ffordd. Y cwmpudisiad ymwysigau ei gwybod peth chi wedi gydag ymddir iawn. Ieithas y cwestiwn cymryd ar hyn o'r peth, rydym e'n gwybod finding chi eich plosed. Rydyn nhw'n dda i ddwy'r awn wedi gweld yr awn a'r gynyddu awn, ac mae'r awn yn lleol, a o'r gwmpredigau cymryddol, ac mae'r gwmpredig音asol. Felly, nid amgylch i bwyd yng Nghymru neu ddigon i ymgylch i'r programu tynau Bestiwyd yng Nghymru. Mae hynny'n gweithio at ddechrau'n gyfordd mewn cymdeithas hynny ein gennym. Rwy'n deud peidiw'r rhain cymaint cymrwys yng Nghymru yn ystod y rhagliaeth arall. Felly, mae gennym ni'n gweithio ar y rhagliaeth arall yn y cyfrdd yr oedd yn pethau ymarchfyrdd yng nghy heating. Nowr, ond dyw'r ymgrifordd Cymru ers ond gan weithio arall yn gwneud ein rhagliaeth, Beth ddweud beth yw Ymgrifennu Cymru? Mae beth rydyn ni ddim yn ymddangos i'w gwneudau arfer i'n cyffredinol. Ac gallwn ymddangos hwnnw wedi'n ei gael eich hant gwsta i'r 1b iawn, Cymru i'w unigfyrdd y Llunio ddechrau i Llywodraethau i'r Tauwan i'r Gweithgraethau, a'r llunio i'r llywodraethau i Llywodraethau i'r Llywodraethau i'r Dymoglwys. Mae'n bwysig am hyn o'r unrhyw o'r ddechrau i Llywodraethau i Llywodraethau i'r Cymru i Llywodraethau. Rydyn ni'n gweld y llwstio o wneud ymwybod ar gyfer rhai bwyd. Hynny'n gweithio gyrt Prefoleig, yn oed yn dddangos. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwstio o'r ffryd arill o gynnig i siart mwy yn ddwy honestly o ddwy hynny'n gweithio o ran o'r llwstio ar hynny. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwstio ar y ddiddordebau llwstio ar y ddefnydd, ac mae'r llwstio i ddweud ychydig gan hynny. Rowanatt ychydig ein sgwrs, dyma'r cwmion eich cyfrwyddon yw ddysgu'r ysgolwch ar gyfer y bywyddiad, a dyna'n edrych o'r ystod o'r cyflawn gwyrdd yn hyn yn ymgyrch ar y stêl yng Nghymru. Rydym yn cael ei wneud i'w wneud i'r cwrsau yng Nghymru. Fy oedd yn ymdill wedi'u gwneud i wneud eu cwrs yn cyflawn ar y stêl gyda'r mewn gwirioneddau. Mae'r newid yma ar y tynnu yma yn 2015, mae'n gynllunio y Llyfrgell, yn Yn Ystod Unedol, ac mae'n freithio'r brifwyd. Mae'n bwysig yn digwydd y twp oedol. Felly, mae'n gwneud gyda'r prif, y pethau tynnu yma i gyfnodol ar gyfer Chynau. Felly, os y bydd y gallwn gydag i'r hongkometh, is really topical. I think I'm pretty sure we'll get some Hong Kong questions. Okay, so without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Joe and hopefully we'll have lots of time for Q&A. Thank you very much, David. Let me begin by thanking David for this fantastic opportunity for a couple reasons. First, as David has already mentioned, he and I have known each other for about 20 years now. He still looks the same. Why, on the other hand, do not. But we had an opportunity to know one another when we were graduate students and when we were grappling with what was then still a very young but very vibrant Taiwan studies field. It was the time when folks were writing about Taiwan's economic miracle. It was a time when Taiwan was the archetypal case for democratic transitions. So it was a really forgotten moment in Taiwan studies and it was a real pleasure to get to know David then and certainly over the years. It's also a real pleasure for me to speak at SOAS and speak at SOAS repeatedly. It's because at the University of Toronto we have 70,000 students. Let's give you some sense of the scale of that. For the last five years I've taught introduction to politics, Paul 101, to 1200 students at the same time. So it's a room with ten balconies, you have to wear a microphone. So anytime I have an opportunity to speak in front of an audience of less than 500 people, it feels like a very intimate setting. So this is a fantastic opportunity to be able to share some ideas in what is frankly an intimate setting for me. And I look forward to exchanging ideas and discussion with you after the talk. What I'm presenting to you today is a paper that I've written with Professor Dan Slater at the University of Chicago. Some of you might know him. He's a specialist in Southeast Asian politics. And we wrote this paper and we are now under contract to turn this paper into a book over the next couple of years. But let me give you some sense of the inspiration for this book. This was really in many ways a side project for me. You really look at some of the work that I've been doing over the last four or five years. I've been really looking at issues of poverty reduction and I find myself more often than not in places like India, certainly in China and places in Africa as well. But the inspiration for this book first emerged in the 2008 book, The Death Reference, Learning to Lose. And when we came out with that book we had a conference at the University of Toronto. And one of the guests at the conference was a very famous political scientist and anthropologist James Scott. And he used a phrase which I thought was so pointed and it's something that I stuck with me. And he said really what this conference is about is what he called quote unquote the inconvenience of losing. And it really stuck with me, right? But you know after all democracy is not so much about winning. Democracy really is about losing. And what motivated that book was a series of events that happened in Taiwan in 2004. And so that book really was a book even though it involves cases from the Congress Party in India, Dupri and Mexico. It was a book really aimed at the Kuomintang in Taiwan. And the title Learning to Lose was really a tract if you will regarding the KMT in Taiwan. What motivates this book however and what we have in our sights in this book is China. And the article version of this came out in Perspectives on Politics. And we don't actually talk about China until the last two or three paragraphs. But you can see that the entire article is a slow build to put China in our sights and to put in many ways the Chinese Communist Party at tax. Essentially what we ask in this paper and what I'm interested in is why does a party, a dominant party concede democracy? Why would a dominant party concede the quote unquote inconvenience of losing? So what motivates this then is really two questions. Why do some dominant parties choose democracy and survive? And what I think is even more puzzling is why do some dominant parties choose democracy when they don't have to? It's actually a very compelling question, right? Why do you choose democracy when you don't have to? Why would a party concede the possibility of losing when it doesn't have to in many ways? This seems counterintuitive. Certainly if one looks at how we think about democracy today and one points to things like the Arab Spring and so on, we often times think about democracy as being a concession when you have no other choice. But what we're suggesting actually is what seems to be a counterintuitive logic is that you can actually concede democracy when you don't have to. Now I say it's counterintuitive from the outset, but I want to argue that in fact it's not counterintuitive at all. For us democracy is about choosing democracy. It is after all a choice. Our article really is a response to modernization theory, which has continued to have tremendous influence on how we think about development and so on. Modernization theory would suggest to you that societies modernize over time, economically develop over time, you have people moving from the countryside in the cities, industrialization, literacy of middle class, and boom, you have democracy. It's as though you go to bed one night and living in a dictatorship in the next morning, you have democracy. It's basically as far as modernization theory takes it. What we want to argue is that in the end you may have all those structural prerequisites, but what matters in the end is that democracy has to be chosen. It is a decision to democratize. Modernization theory we argue does not answer how. Now Barbara Getty is a very influential political scientist who works largely on Latin America based in the United States. She does try to explain how, and she does try to explain why democracies emerge when they do. Her body of work basically makes the following argument, that dominant parties negotiate their extrication. That's what dominant parties do. When they democratize, it is under the conditions under which they are negotiating their extrication. Here she writes in 1999 in a seminal piece, and I want to read to this quote. She writes, the preferences of party cadres are much simpler than those of military officers. Like democratic politicians, they, meaning party cadres, simply want to hold office. Now there are a couple of implications with respect to this quote. The first is, the argument she's making here is that the military, or military regimes, are different from dominant party regimes in the sense that generals can always return to the barracks. They can launch a coup, they can say they're a caretaker government, but they can always return to their barracks and say that their work is done, and they can do so relatively, at least in most cases, on the scale. Hence in her theory, military regimes are more likely to conceive. But in her theory, and the second point she makes here, is that parties want to hold power. Thus forget these, democracy is not a choice. Dominant parties hang on to power until the very end. They hang on until they have effectively no choice. And her theory feeds into them the conventional wisdom surrounding things like the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring is a perfect example of dictatorships that hung on to the very end. And they hung on to the very end because those dictators wanted to hold power. Now, we partly agree with Barbara Gettys. She's never responded to her article so we don't know if she appreciates the article or not. But we do partly agree with Barbara Gettys in the sense that we do agree that dominant parties want to hold on to power. Let's not fool ourselves here, right? The perks of power holding are just too overwhelming. Everybody wants to, at least in the case of politics and high politics, hold on to power. But whereas Barbara Gettys argues that dominant parties will hang on to the bitter end, where she argues that parties will only conceive democracy by negotiating their extrication, i.e. they don't want their head on a pike, and they'll negotiate their immunity concession. We say that this is not always true empirically. As a matter of fact, sometimes dominant parties will conceive democracy before the bitter end. They will conceive democracy. They will hasten democratic reforms before they have reached what Barbara Gettys refers to as the bitter end. A good example is the Indonesia. And it's a good example because it's really the weakest example. In May of 1998, of course, the Suharto regime is overthrown. To most observers around the world, this looked like the end of Goldcar, which of course was the ruling party. So you have Suharto, who was the head of the regime. You have Goldcar, which was the ruling party. Habibi takes over the leadership of Goldcar, and by every measure he is a weak president. He is inheriting a political economy that has just suffered through the throes of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. In other words, he really is hanging on by a threat.  You will repress to the end because you want to hang on to power for as long as you possibly can. What we actually see happening in Indonesia is very interesting. Rather than repress, Habibi expedites the election. The elections were supposed to happen in 2002, and in fact he holds them in 1999. The puzzling question is why would he do that? Why would he move the elections forward when he himself is a weak president? Now, by every measure he is a weak president, but the party remains strong. It's weakening. It's certainly not as strong as it was in 1996, but the party remains strong. There is still a developmental state legacy, this after all, is Indonesia, which had grown its economy over the last few decades. The Goldcar party was extremely powerful in the sense that it had a sort of territorial advantage. It was a national party, and it had legislative reforms for decentralization, which allowed it to spread as a political machinery and its tentacles even further. And indeed, Goldcar appealed to the periphery. So in other words, the 1999 elections actually wasn't a bad choice. It was a bad choice for Habibi. It wasn't a bad choice for Goldcar. Habibi, of course, loses the elections, but Goldcar comes in second. In other words, he concedes democratic reforms at a time when he didn't have to. In fact, we would have expected him to hang on, but he concedes at a time when the party is strong enough to win a plurality of votes in 1999, and in fact, by 2004, Goldcar comes in first place again. To the point here is that Goldcar was spiraling downwards. Getties would predict that the party would hang on, but instead the leader of the party chooses democracy. He saves the party by institutionalizing democracy. In other words, he conceded to minimally survive. And by 2004, it was clear that he had conceded and thrived. Korea, I think, is in many ways an even better case. You will all recall that Park Chan-hee was, of course, assassinated in 1979. This was seen as a potential democratic opening. A new leader comes in, a new general, Chun Doo-hwan, comes in, and immediately unleashes what is now known as the infamous Gwangju massacre. Chun Doo-hwan clamps down on this potential democratic opening. Now, Getties would predict, again, that this was a party that was in battle. This was a ruling regime that was in battle, and that it would hang on to the very bitter end. And it would use every repressive measure that it possibly could. And there is good reason to think this. In 1985, for instance, in the National Assembly elections, the ruling party only wins 54% of the seats with one-third of the popular vote. This was a party in decline. The only reason why one of 54% of the seats was because of the jerry-rape electoral system, which gave it a massive seat belt. In June of 1987, the anointed successor to Chun Doo-hwan, anointed continued authoritarian dictator successor to Chun Doo-hwan, is, of course, No Te Woon. And he announces in June of 1987 in response to a massive movement, which is called the Minto movement, a massive movement of students, unions, the church, the middle class. He concedes. In June of 1987, he concedes and announces presidential elections for later that year, full presidential elections, releases political prisoners, and has full national legislative elections in the spring of 1998. The question is, why would you do that? And this actually is an important empirical question in depth in our time about this. We don't have enough evidence just yet. But the question is, why would No Te Woon concede when theory would tell us, and certainly logic in a way would tell us, that he would repress and hang on to the very end? Why would he subject himself to the inconvenience of losing? When he didn't have to. Part of it was, again, the developmental state legacy. The fact of the matter, and Heather and Cawtham talk about this, what is distinctive about Korea's democratization is that they chose democracy in economically good times. This was not a country with an economy that was spiraling downwards. This was actually a good time in Korea's economy. The ruling party had legislated of limited elections. This gave the ruling party some sense of feedback. It also assured No Te Woon that they had candidates. They had experience. They could run an election. So, yeah, we're going to concede democracy. We're going to have elections. But we have the best candidates. We have the most experienced candidates out there. And most importantly, No Te Woon gambled. He gambled that the opposition would split. He gambled that the mingdo movement would split. And he gambled that the opposition leaders would split. The opposition leaders being Kim Dae Jong and Kim Jong-un 7 at the time. And he was right. The mingjo movement quickly falls apart after the summer of 1987. Kim Jong-un 7, Kim Dae Jong, despite overtures of working together, eventually split as well. And we see a split vote. No Te Woon says in 1988, however, there is a strong wind of change blowing over the country. The day when freedoms and human rights could be slighted and economic growth and national security has ended, he's basically slapping punch on the inch under one in the face. The day when repressive force and torture and secret chambers were tolerated, are, I should say, are over. This was a huge gamble by No Te Woon. This was a huge gamble, but the incumbent regime gets away with it. The ruling regime gets away with it. Instead of hanging on by authoritarian means, he instead concedes democracy. Now, don't get me wrong. This was a huge risk. He gambled that the opposition was split, and they did. But in the end, at least from his vantage point in the June of 1987, the gains from democracy outweighed the continued cost of repression. The best example of this, the logic, of course, and indeed where we inductively generate this theory of conceding the thrive, really is Taiwan. And this, of course, is a very famous quote by Tim Te Woon, which he says, the times are changing, the environment is changing, the tide is also changing. This was uttered right before the DPP forums in 1986. Of course, most Taiwan launchers at the time expected the KMT to clamp down on the DPP, and we do have evidence to suggest that this was an option that CCK was entertaining, but instead decided to allow the DPP to form in the Grand Hotel. Marshal law was lifted shortly thereafter, and full legislative elections were held in 1992. In other words, the government done concedes democracy when it didn't have to. After all, the times may have been changing, but the KMT was still by far in the way the most powerful bloat of black or in Taiwan. The second is that it not only concedes democracy to survive, but of course the electoral record, and that is the expert on this, the electoral record shows that the KMT is continuing to buy a large fraud. So the key point here is that Gettys expects democracy to emerge from positions of weakness. She expects that dominant parties will concede democracy when they have no other choice during crisis moments, when they have been weakened to the point that they have no other choice but to give it up, hence the Arab Spring. We argue on the other hand that democracy in fact can come from a position of strength. In other words, we assume as those Gettys that dominant parties do want to remain in power, they want power, they want to stay in office, but this does not necessarily mean by hanging on to authoritarian means. In other words, the desire to remain in power could also incentivize the dominant party to concede. So, as Dan and I write in our 2013 article, dominant parties can be incentivized to concede democratization from a position of exceptional strength to the KMT, and not only from a position of extreme weakness, which is what Gettys would predict. In other words, to borrow from the language of political science and economics, democracy is incentive compatible for strong authoritarian parties. What I want to tell you now is a story not of great men. I'm not going to suggest to you that, jumping on, I'll tell you who are these people, were great men and they were men. Rather, we want to make the argument that they were strategically rational. So, our theory really unfolds in three parts. The first part of our theory argues that you have to have antecedent strength. It's far more likely that a dominant party will conceive to thrive when it has antecedent strength. In the other way, antecedent strength increases the probability of a concedent to thrive logic. When ruling parties are confident, neither of their defeat nor of instability. So, we basically argue that antecedent strength gives parties confidence. And it gives them two kinds of confidence. It gives them stability confidence and stability confidence comes out of state power. I don't like the developmental state, political stability, economic growth, a thickened conservative middle class. Anna Shizmali-Wusi and her work on post-Soviet transitions talks about a usable past and so on. So, there is stability confidence and there is also victory confidence. That even by conceding democracy, they're fairly confident that they will win. That their party appeals. That they enjoy, for instance, cross-fetting of fear.  That they have a national party narrative. And probably most importantly that they have electoral experience. They know how to win elections. So, the point here is that you have antecedent strength which gives you confidence. Stability confidence and victory confidence. The key point we want to make here therefore then, and this is very distinct from what Geddy would argue, conceding democracy does not equal conceding defeat. She's absolutely right. Dominant parties want to hang on to power. So, to concede democracy does not mean conceding the loss of power. Conceding democracy may in fact, if you have confidence, may in fact lead to quite the opposite. It may in fact lead to pulling on to power. So, you want to have a situation in which there's little chance of instability, and indeed little chance of the inconvenience of losing. There's always a chance, but in the eyes of the rulers, it's so remote that the risk is worth taking. The second part of our theory is that you still nonetheless have to receive an ominous signal. After all, democratic transitions and conceding democracy is a risk proposition. On the one hand you may have all the antecedent strengths in the world to be confident. The fact of the matter is when you concede democracy, you are conceding the probability or the possibility that you might lose. In other words, you have to have some sense that your full-on power is waning. You need, so it's not just a signal, it has to be an ominous signal. So, what we argue is that you're most likely to concede and thrive when you've passed your apex of power, parties that have passed their apex of power. They're still powerful enough that they can win a majority, but that their power is nonetheless in steady decline. So, these signals matter. The most important, I think, or the clearest signal we argue for are electoral signals. Electoral signals aren't the clearest signal that your party power is in decline. We see this playing an important role in Korea in 1985. We see this playing an important role in Taiwan. We see this playing an important role arguably in Singapore. We don't see this playing an important role to foreshadow my argument in China because they don't exist. Other signals matter as well, public protest, and not just selective public protest, but cross cutting public protest. That's why the Minjong movement in Korea was so critical. It's not a worker's movement, as we saw in 1980, but the Kongju uprising. This was a cross class, cross cleavage, encompassing national protest movement. Geopolitical signals matter. Losing a super power of patron means a great deal. Losing the support, for instance, of the United States at the ending of the Cold War meant a big deal to these authoritarian regimes. Of course, economic signals matter. These are a little more contestant. An economic shock can be interpreted as an indirect shock. Nonetheless, it may transform itself into a narrative that begins to weaken the ruling party's full-on power. We argue basically that when a ruling party has passed its apex of power, it is now in what we call the bitter sweet spot. It's a sweet spot in the sense that it's the best time to concede and thrive. It's bitter sweet for the ruling party because, well, they have to make a concession. So we don't actually have this in our article, but we use this slide in our talks. We came up with this. We wrote this article actually on Starbucks and Madison, just outside the city across from one another.  And we came up with this chart, and basically it's very simple. It's a stylized image. Basically, what we have here is a curve illustrating party power. So a party can be accumulating sources of power and antecedent strengths, but at some point it passes its apex of power and it begins its decline. We argue there in that top-right quadrant that's the bitter sweet spot. That's the time in which it's most likely that you can concede and thrive. The corollary, of course, is that once you've passed that dot in line, you hang on to the bitter end. It's too late. You've hurtled through the bitter sweet spot. And that's when Getty's logic kicks in. You have no other choice.  This is when you start capital flight. This is when you start making all of the arrangements that you necessarily have to make as you're about to face the bitter end. But the bitter sweet spot is the part on the curve that we're most interested in. And again, it's the part on the curve in which it is most likely that a concedent to thrive scenario will unfold. So we have antecedent strengths. We have ominous signals. And what this then suggests to the ruling party is that they need a re-legitimation strategy. Clearly the old way of doing business has begun to wang. Clearly the old way of winning support has begun to wang. Clearly the old narrative is beginning to lose resonance with people living in your country. Now we expect that this isn't just an automatic transformation, right?  It's also the case that you don't go to bed one day thinking that the best way to legitimate your regime is through authoritarian means in the next day to say what you should do. We expect there to be inter-party struggle. We expect there to be conflict. And this is where good qualitative work matters. You need to understand these struggles. You need to really get in the arcogs. You need to interview the right people. You need to marshal the evidence to document these struggles. And indeed in these struggles people may misread the situation. They may miscalculate. They may make misperceptions and so on. What's most important to us in our analysis is the struggle. And indeed the choices that are made after the struggle. We don't report to be able to read people's minds. We don't really know what John Jean Gwyl was thinking, despite all the jokes that one might hear about him. We don't really know what Nolte Gwyl was thinking. We have since had the opportunity to interview some dictators in parts of Africa to get a sense of what they're thinking. We don't know what they were thinking. And we don't really care. What matters to us was documenting the struggle and then looking at the choices and decisions and the public decisions that were made after. And in the cases that we study, at least the positive cases, the decisions that were made after what we call decisive reforms. These were serious reforms. You had, for instance, the institutionalization of free elections. You had the institutionalization, I will say, of fairer elections. I would never say fairer elections. Free and unfair elections, I think, is a fair way to characterize Taiwan's legislative elections early on. We see the creation of electoral commissions. We see the releasing of political prisoners. We see not so much in Taiwan, but in other cases media reform. In other words, we see decisive reforms by which the possibility of defeats of the ruling party becomes real, no matter how unlikely. And we're confident in saying that we see these reforms in Taiwan, South Korea, and even Indonesia. So this gives us evidence of that legitimation strategy. Now again, the best case, of course, is Taiwan. The KMT has enjoyed tremendous antecedent strengths. Of course, we know the developmental state legacy in Taiwan. We also know how much credit the KMT claims for it. We know the positive effects of land reform, no matter how violent they were. We know that the state played a role in the commanding eyes of the economy, as our colleague TJ Chang talks about. We know that the developmental state was grafted upon a Leninist party state regime in which civil society was co-opted and industry was organized through corporate means. And we know that the party in the state refused. In other words, the party had tremendous antecedent strength. We also know that the party had tremendous strength in terms of its limited elections. These were unfair and not free elections. But it gave the KMT a hell of a lot of experience. Anyone who studies electoral processes in Taiwan knows that the KMT was masterful and remains masterful at electoral mobilization at the local level. Masterful at blackhole politics and mobilizing their voters at the local level. Limited elections gave the KMT confidence. And it gave them tremendous victory confidence. We also know, however, that the KMT, beginning in around the 1980s, began to experience ominous signals. The downline opposition in legislative elections in 1980, again unfree and unfair, won 8% of the popular vote. In supplementary elections in 1983, the downline candidates, they were never a party. The downline candidates win 16% of the vote. In 1986, the downline candidates win 22% of the popular vote. By this time, the KMT's share of the popular vote had declined to 69%. Now, I'm not talking about seat share. Seat share in a jerry rake situation doesn't make a difference. I'm interested here in popular vote. The downline movement was also a rise of an opposition. It was an opposition movement in which we see cross-cutting cleavages. And we see a downline movement that is built around the politics of identity, which in many ways cut to the legitimation formula of the KMT. It really cut to the core of the KMT in terms of the raison d'ethrone on being in Taiwan in the first place. And of course also the KMT experienced its geopolitical pressure. This was the time in which, there was a time in which in Congress, Taiwan and the KMT was viewed as the guardian of free China, and this language had turned into those KMT thugs. We begin to see this not only in the calls of Congress, but we also begin to see this in editorials and American newspapers. In other words, the KMT had antecedent strength, but it had passed its apex of power. And we do see, and there is evidence of struggle within the KMT, that one view is to potentially concede and thrive. So Dan and I write in our article, the KMT ultimately chose to concede democracy because the party was in a position not of desperation, remember this was still an extremely powerful party and electoral results since then have worn this out. But of fairly strong confidence, a democratic concession would ensure both the KMT's electoral victory and the maintenance of stability. The point I want to stress here is that the KMT concedes democracy when it didn't have to. This was not a party on its last legs. This was not a party hanging by a thread. Zhang Jinguo was not hanging by a thread. He is not the analog to Mabarak. This was still a very strong party it could have hung on. And indeed, and only counterfactual history will ever tell us, it could have even rebounded. But nonetheless at the time had confidence that if it did concede, it would minimally survive and maximally thrive. Again, here it was not just simply the cost of democratic reform, but the potential gains. The KMT had a lot of victory confidence. Let's not kid ourselves here. When the KMT concedes democracy, I use the term free and unfair election. The KMT institutionalized an electoral system in which there were freer rules, but were entirely not fair. The single non-transferable vote multi-member district system was a system that benefited the KMT. The KMT also dragged its feet on media reform. The KMT still as of yet is fully to disclose its assets. It's believed to be one of the richest political parties, if not the richest political party in the world, but we don't really know. The KMT is still fully to disclose its assets. The KMT is still the richest political party in the world, but we don't really know. But nonetheless, it had victory confidence in the sense that it could legitimately portray itself as the party of reform. It glonged on to, quite instrumentally, a democratic narrative. It reappropriated a long deep history of a democratic narrative. It propped up a native Nidolhwey, who would then be able to talk about a Taiwanese Taiwan, four Taiwanese people. It had victory confidence because it had a phenomenal economic record, at least it claimed for itself an economic record. And this would appeal to middle class voters as it did in Korea, and indeed as it's shown in electoral results sense. And indeed the KMT had cross cutting appeal. And not only had victory confidence, it also had stability confidence. Beginning in the 1970s, it began a strategy of localization and talonization. It brought local Taiwanese into the party, into the state apparatus. It negotiated the terms of transitions with the DPP, and there's been some good evidence now about the kinds of meetings that were held prior to democratic concession in which the KMT and what would become the leadership of the DPP actually begin their negotiations. I also argue that the KMT in many ways blunted especially class cleavage. One of the legacies of Taiwan's post-war economic growth was that it was growth with relative equity. So unlike class politics and the destructive class politics that you see for instance in Latin America and indeed in parts of Southeast Asia, you don't see in Taiwan. I've made the argument in other pieces that this also allowed the state the strength in order to redistribute upon democratization. In other words, the key point here is that the KMT was fairly confident. In fact, I'd say very confident. And that's what I was talking about. People would never imagine losing. He was extremely confident that if the KMT were to concede democracy, Taiwan would remain stable and the KMT would win. And so far, the KMT has been right. The typical reading of Taiwan for those of you who are involved in Taiwan studies will know this. The typical reading of Taiwan usually falls in one of two camps. One is that Taiwan is a phenomenal vindication of modernization theory. This is a great story of modernization. The other typical reading of Taiwan is that this is a vindication of Gettys. Parties want power and the KMT had no choice but to concede democracy. Our argument, however, suggests an alternative pathway. Indeed, the KMT wants power. Jiang Jinguo had no intention of giving up power, but they had a choice. And they chose to concede not from the position of weakness but from the position of strength. And I refer to that as the paradox of conceding thrive. When a ruling party enjoys substantial incumbent capacity, in other words, restraint, this not only increases its ability to sustain authoritarian rule but it can lessen its imperative to do so. If you think about that rule, a party with the capacity to continue ruling through a authoritarian means may have every incentive to give up that authoritarian power. And we want to argue that that's what's happened in Taiwan. Taiwan is, I want to argue, an alternative pathway. As I've suggested you, Taiwan is the best-case scenario. In our paper, however, we show that there's an array of cases. Taiwan is the best-case scenario. Korea is less good. Indonesia really almost hurtled through. It's even less good. Our argument, therefore, is that the closer you are to the apex of power, the more likely you are to thrive. Now we have suggested, and indeed the title of the talk suggests, that Taiwan's pathway is an alternative. But when you actually look at the data, perhaps Taiwan's pathway is not so much an alternative. In 1986 there were 83 by one measure and we don't publish this because there are potential coding problems and we asked one of our graduate students to look into this. But anyway, you'll get them in. In 1986 there were, by our count, 83 authoritarian ruling parties. Since that time, 35 have remained authoritarian. 48 have democratized. Of those 48, 18 of them continue to be competitive major parties. 15 of them continue to be competitive minor parties. And only 15 of them have become obsolete or defunct. Whereas 33 of 48 parties conceded democracy and survived. Minimally and maximally and 18 of those 48 cases they have in fact thrived. In other words, then Taiwan may not be so unique. What we try to explore in the book then are what we call candidate cases. Let's look at some other cases and look at the ruling parties and see if the logic that we're describing here holds there as well. We've done some field work in Burma. We've done some field work in Ethiopia as well. Of course, the biggest candidate case is China's Communist Party. Does the CCP have antecedent strengths? Absolutely. But where does the CCP fit on that curve? Is it at the apex of power? Is the party continuing to accumulate power so it's still on the upwards curve? If it is at the apex of power then we would predict no democracy. We won't see any democracy anytime soon. If it's just past the apex of power then we would expect a higher probability of a conceit and thrive scenario that we could imagine the Chinese Communist Party conceiting and thriving. If the party has hurtled through the bitter sweet zone then we should expect the party to hang on to the bitter end and basically repress the hell out of society and hang on for as long as it can. Our sense is that the CCP has just passed the apex of power. Like the case in Singapore we want to make the argument that in many ways the timing is right. That if the CCP were to concede democracy today there is no conceivable way it would lose. And if it were to concede political liberalization today there's no conceivable way that the country would, despite the fears that the CCP might have that the country would fall apart. In other words at least in terms of the theory we're presenting it seems to us that there should be a high likelihood of democratic transition in China. Now let me finish by saying I presented this paper many times in China. I have the privilege of doing a lot of research there. I go to China at least two times a year and I've given this paper across country. I've given this paper to students. I've given this paper to party cadres. I've given this paper to academics. I've given this paper or we have given this paper to a cross section of Chinese society. And we always ask where is the CCP on this curve? Because everybody buys our logic. That logic makes a lot of sense. We said all right, well in your mind then where is the CCP on that curve? Well first of all the first joke that gets out of the way as they say well all week, this is a friend of mine at the university on how he says all I know is that if the CCP were to concede democracy it had better do it before Taiwan comes as he puts it, comes back to China because the KMT would whip the CCP in any election. That's the sort of joke. The KMT would whip in any election that it had to run in and the CCP should work. But more seriously, the reactions to this question where on the curve is the CCP completely mixed? There are some who would argue that the best time was in 1989. Some would argue that 1989 was just a blip. That in fact and indeed empirically it's true that China has continued to rise. Some argue that corruption is a threat to the party now. That this is a signal that has passed its apex of power. Others argue quite intelligently that no actually the CCP in Beijing has done a very good job in localizing corruption of basically saying we the party are not corrupt, the local officials are corrupt. Some will say there are tremendous economic bottlenecks when it arrives. Sustainable economic development, the pollution problem, inequality, job creation, the hard reforms of liberalizing the banking sector, local debt and so on. That these bottlenecks are on the horizon and the CCP would do well to democratize sooner rather than later. Others say that the CCP has demonstrated an enormous capacity to adapt and to manage these economic bottlenecks. Others say that the party has no idea where it is on the curve. Others say that the party has no idea where it is on the curve. Others say that the party completely knows. When I talk to some officials about this they will say and they will make very interesting comments and say Professor Wong, this logic makes a lot of sense but I want to make a distinction for you between long term party interests and short term personal interests. For the long term party it absolutely makes sense to democratize now but in the near term we just wait five years for my son to graduate from Harvard. That's the things I need to take care of. Let me finish by saying our theory is not intended to be predicted at best it predicts struggle. In the end we want to make the point that democracy is not just simply a function of socio-economic transformation but rather it is a function of human choices. There are a whole host of reasons to expect that China will heed Taiwan's lessons and there are an equal number of reasons to expect that the CCP will not. Thank you for your attention. How should we do this? Should we sit down? I think these are still working. Actually I'm not sure. Yeah these are working. Right thanks for that Joe. Thanks my class tomorrow on comparative democratization. It's a lot easier I can just say. What did Joe say? I don't think you want to do that. Okay so we've got about half an hour now for Q&A. I think we should go straight into questions. Who would like to get into a discussion? I don't know that I have many. I'd like to hear what you have to say. Yes. So the paper talks about how Donald Trump can be a choice for China. I wonder if we should entertain the possibility that for a considerable period of time democracy might not be looked by as a choice for China. I'm saying that because the examples you gave are Taiwan, Korea. These are relatively small countries and China is big in many aspects. History's population's minority groups is such a big difference between China and this country's realistic. You should say that democracy is truly a better way for China to do even if it impacts the public. I mean the short answer is not my... I'm not a citizen of China. It's ultimately a decision for Chinese people to make. I've always believed that. I am very sensitive to and sympathetic to reactions when my friends in China say this is just an example, another example. They're kinder to me. They don't really say that to me. But this is just another example of the West trying to impose a particular political system and we hear it all the time. I guess my answer to you would be that at least the empirical evidence suggests that Indonesia is a pretty large place. Ethnically heterogeneous. A lot poorer than Taiwan and Korea were. It has experienced a lot of hiccups along the way. But it made a certain set of choices in 1998 and 1999 that set it on a fundamentally different path. I appreciate the complexity that comes with the country, the size of China. But I also have a tremendous amount of respect for the political leadership that it managed on. I have a follow-up question that crossed my mind to your question was rather than size being a major difference maybe not having tri out electoral experience. If we think about South Korean and Taiwanese cases we've got basically four decades of electoral experience. Do you think that would be a more important variable? Yeah, it's interesting. So when we have frank conversations in China and this is with friends, never in the open. And they will ask, what would you suggest? Is what you're really saying that the CCP should just open this all up tomorrow? One never wants to have the weight of these things on their heads. So as an academic I equivocate in my backpack. But I say one thing that I think is very important. I would do well by actually institutionalizing some form of electoral mechanism. If only so that you can get a better read on society. So that you can get a better read on society so that when I ask the question, where on the curb are you? I don't get complete spiky distribution across four different answers. So that your politicians can gain electoral experience. I really do believe that you would do well with that. And that shouldn't threaten the regime. But you would do well by putting into place some institutions that will actually allow for the party to make a little better sense of its society and also give its political class a different kind of incentive structure. Clearly if we were to be believed that what motivates local party officials right now in China are things like promotion, you would do well by maybe replacing those incentives with things like service delivery and electoral incentives. Yes, David. Thank you, Mr Paul. I have a question about, so in these cases about when those states are being demobilized. So the election starts from a national level or it starts from a local level that is not the best local election experience? Well, in all of these cases, it's a great question. So we've spent some time now in all this, in Ethiopia. And the EPRDF is really important there. I'll tell you, I was telling David, the folks in Ethiopia and Botswana, in Zimbabwe, South Africa, they know Taiwan politics better than people in Taiwan do. They know the story very clearly. And that's one of their big concerns, right? Well, how do we actually manage this? What kind of elections are you talking about? At our point in terms of our work, and again, this is academic work. We're not activists, right, in this academic work. Our work suggests, look, there's a panicly of institutional forms that you can take, but what does matter though is that the reforms have to be decisive. They have to clearly signal to the opposition that this isn't just dragging their feet. So when we're in Ethiopia and we're talking to the leadership of the EPRDF, they say, what do you mean by a decisive reform? We said, well, you know, freeing political prisoners is a decisive reform. Removing seat bonuses for the military, as is the case in Burma, is a decisive reform. They shouldn't threaten the regime, if that's what their concern is. Certainly not in the EPRDF, the USDP in Burma, but not in Ethiopia. But these are decisive reforms. The problem is, when you get an answer back that says, well, we don't have political prisoners in Ethiopia, then you know you're just spinning your wheel. But if you're asking a serious question, you would say, the reform, that's for you to decide. That's fit for your society and your complexities. But it has to be decisive. Okay, you have a quote in Constance. Sorry, one of the reasons for you choosing to put China down is that it's powerful. It's that reason why you think it's on the flight. I hope that you really have heard of it. Why do we think it's past its apex of town? We take seriously the number of protests. We take seriously the efforts that the Chinese state now has to exert and not just the efforts, but the money in terms of the public security, public security, the public peace bureau. These are all on the rise. We take seriously the social economic bottlenecks on the horizon. The levels of inequality are rising. Job growth is slowing. We take very seriously local debt, which is something that the Chinese state had done a very good job of hiding for about a decade. The data started coming out saying this section doesn't make sense. We take very seriously that the difference between the official G&E coefficient and levels of inequality based on household expenditures is vast. China has done a phenomenal job of lifting people out of poverty. It's done a phenomenal job of growing its economy. But we see dark clouds on the horizon. We see a party that, again, as a political scientist, it's just inconceivable that the CCP moves. Will it be there? Yeah, of course it is. I'd like to ask the leaders. Do you think it's more likely that we can do it to take a decision to democratize or is it more likely to speak to to bother people? Yeah, I mean, I think in many ways, we talk about it as an intro party struggle. We're not nearly as precise as the generation before Donald Schmidt or people like that who talk about hardliners, softliners. I mean, I think in many ways, that's a post-bacto kind of asignation of who's a softliner, who's a hardliner. You know, I think Jiangdinguo now is known as a softliner, but who would have thought that in 1983? We just expect struggle. We expect that there will be, as there should be any rational person who says, I don't want to let go because I've got too many interests pinned down in this particular regime order, but we also expect there will be some who say, you know, in the long run, your interests will be better served if we were to make a political transformation. So we expect struggle. We don't assume that the party will just overnight transform its strategic thinking. But we don't go beyond assigning hardliners, softliners, reformers, non-reformers.  And it's true. I don't want to in any way suggest to you that KMT was nice that Jiangdinguo was a nice liberal democrat. Just as in my earlier work, I don't want to suggest that KMT is a social democratic party, just as they legislated the universal decision of health to win votes. The same reason why we seek political concession to secure the power. Great Denny's is right. Who wants to give up power? OK, I've got a question. I'll go back in the purple shirt. And then Ed after that. Oh, I had a mic. We've got at least three questions there. Yeah, with China in mind, why China's had such a sort of tumultuous history since 1949? I don't realise these things are a timeline. But what makes the problems that you said you see in the future now different problems that they face when Shen and Mao died? And the timeline between Mao and Deng Xiaoping? Why would it happen in the future instead of then? Yeah, I mean, some people, there are some brave souls who will point to the 1978 democracy wall movement, basically the end of the Mao era as being a potential democratic open. We've used these historical moments as evidence that Chinese people are actually capable of thinking about democracy. But we don't really think of them as choice apex moments. And one of the differences is because I think people's expectations in China are a lot higher today than they were in 1978.  I buy all that as well. But I just think of people's expectations or fundamentally different today than they were then. There was a belief, we spent time in the countryside. There was a belief a decade ago when you'd ask people, you know, you're in the countryside and even in the province or something like that, you'd say, look at Shanghai, don't you feel kind of ripped off? And they'd say, no, this is good for China, this is good for the nation, it will trickle down. You're hearing that less and less. People's expectations are different now. Yeah, Ed. Or Ed and then Ryan. Maybe we should actually take a few questions. Yeah, should we do that? Yeah, it's obviously very difficult to argue with the logic of your hypotheses. But I was wondering, do you not feel that in terms of thriving after conceiving that Taiwan and the Guangmendong were in a very unique position with their electoral experience, which is certainly not the case in a lot of places that would be conceiving. They don't have that electoral ground base in the experience of fighting elections. Yeah, Ryan. Yeah, very interesting. I really like your theoretical approach that is a sweet spot, I think it's got a lot to, a really new tool to understand how things are developing and how health from authoritarian to democratic and shipped. Now my question is going to be about some of the sunflower movements, the umbrella movements, and how we could look at these two cases in order to get some, to measure how China might be able to somehow react in the way Hong Kong is currently challenging the Beijing. So I would just do, if you could just give me some clarification on that. So how China commenting on this? Yeah, sunflower movement, which is a case, the students in Taiwan and how you look at how you observe that compared to the umbrella movement in Hong Kong and also, I think my second question is how do you think China is going to react to the protest really demanding for real democracy in Hong Kong? Maybe better take those two. Is that one? Well, these are all very challenging questions. One more historically rooted one that looks to the future. Is Taiwan a unique case? Absolutely, it's the best case. It is the case upon, I mean this is a very, relatively generated theory, if you will, which Taiwan is the best case. And we have an array of cases, right? So we say Taiwan is the best case. We say Indonesia is the worst best case. And for the and for the empirical reasons I just describe, I mean, GAMT continuing with the legislative majority, Golcar, Windsor Pluraldy and these are very different fates to the party, certainly Indonesia's democracy has suffered some elements whereas the GAMT doesn't seem to be, despite its own protestations about its sufferings that really hasn't suffered. So Taiwan I think is very unique. But having said that we were just as surprised when we began to comb through the data and begin to see actually that Taiwan's experience that is a regime that concedes and minimally survives or in this case thrives is actually a much bigger universe of cases than we expected, right? And it really is and we have to a lot of work and we're not going to do a haggard and a coplin where we're going to look at every case in the world or anything like that. But suffice it to say, I think we have glued enough empirical starting point to say that what happened in Taiwan was a perfect storm for the GAMT but the logic that we're using where we're inductively generated and a lot. And I've actually even made the argument I'm on sabbatical this year and based enough of the college in Oxford and Bob Coughman instead haggard with there and Bob is a specialist in Latin American politics and I try out the argument with Imon Chile. And his first reaction was that it makes no sense at all what you're talking about. I said, no, no, just think about it for a moment. When Pinochet launches the plebiscite in 1980 there was no way he thought he would lose. So I can't explain why he concedes in 1988 or we know why he concedes in 1980 because he basically negotiates his education and makes sure that he's stacked the tradition, he's stacked the senate and stacked the military. But how do you explain his decision in 1980 to lodge the plebiscite? He expected all the democratic gains that the GAMT eventually saw but he thought he would win. And frankly in 1980 before the debt crisis before the war or the debt crisis before all the other things that rats Latin America he had every reason to believe you would win. So the logic we're not trying to fit where it is in the round the logic actually I think explains a lot more even if it's not the beautiful case of time. With respect to the sunflower movement and the umbrella movement I mean the sun there are many ways let me do my say this I mean I think that Taiwan is a democracy. Is it a flawed democracy of course. So their perfect democracy is absolutely not. But it's a democracy. So I think fundamentally the way in which people mobilize, the way in which people's expectations are shaped as a result of the mobilization maybe this is what led to even more disappointment in Taiwan than we see in Hong Kong I think are fundamentally different in Taiwan than in the case of Hong Kong. The question then is how will the PRC react? I can't tell the future I can assure you that the PRC has reacted to things quite differently than I would have ever predicted in the past so I can't say with any sort of thing but I'll say with complete uncertainty as to what the PRC will do to react. I can't say however there's no indication that they're going to concede. And we begin to see arguments about what time is on their side absolutely time is on their side. And partly because of the domestic political discourse which is legitimating the CCP by and large partly because of editorialists like that of Martin Jutz who says that you know Hong Kong is just jealous of China's material gain which makes no sense to me to you know to the argument that look authoritarianism is good for near-term economic development and the authoritarian advantage should endure. I mean these are very powerful arguments and very difficult to defeat and so I don't see any reason why the CCP would concede any time soon irrespective of what our theory would say is more or less likely. Mike. You want to push that one? Yeah. Okay. I don't know how to formulate this but looking at the beautiful curve which I thought was schematic I know but one of the variables driving that process which you present really as a statistical or a number logical thing that must be mechanism kind of systems theory mechanism behind that with feedback analysis and so on. Also can you take more account of discontinuities and historical things and it does mean that there must be highly perturbational things going on as you see in other cases so what has been said about the kind of variables that are driving that curve given that rather spiritual form? Right. You're absolutely right. The curve is a stylized curve schematic intended to be illustrative more than anything else and it certainly isn't smooth. Right. I'm gathering that's what you're pushing on is that the curve itself is subject to tremendous fluctuation. We agree with that 100%. There's no reason to assume and indeed as I said there are some who will say that CCP has passed the curve and there are some who will say it's like a dip in 91 and beginning in 93 with structural reforms it begins to rise again. We have the benefit of history to know that that is by and large right at least in terms of economic development but what we're most interested therefore is not the fact of having passed the curve but rather the political struggle within the party and how they understand and so in that respect we have a very open ended view of what constitutes anti-seed and strength and power. A lot of this is again inductively generated from the examples that we have but there are a whole host of different kinds of anti-seed and strength we could imagine for instance one of the things that one could point out for instance in the case of Korea is this is a relatively no this is not relatively this is a completely homogesness society so there are different kinds of cleavages that can translate into different sources of strength what matters to us most and this is why again I would encourage despite having been trained in the US and my colleagues in the American Political Science Association good qualitative work about those particular moments of struggle will tell a lot in terms of what's actually going on inside the party and how they're proceeding whether it's empirically true or not that they passed the effects actually by the managers it's what the people inside are saying Remember what is the correlation between popularity and power Yeah we use popularity and we use the popular vote as an indicator of strength now we're not actually it's a very good question we don't use electoral shocks as an indicator of absolute strength but rather it's the change over time that's why it's a precipitous decline over time that really mattered for instance for the Kennedy and what we want to argue is that it really matters for the PAP in Singapore that it's actually suffered it's PAP still wins handily but it's beginning to suffer and so it's beginning to see a decline over time By the way, you mentioned the response to your theory and talks in China what about in Singapore because in many ways in many ways in many ways the PAP would probably do far better in the city of England if we would have completely free elections I think that the reaction I haven't given this paper in Singapore if any of you have read my last book on biotech why the Singaporean Government is not inviting me back to Singapore so I haven't given this paper in Singapore but Dan has given this paper in Singapore and his reactions that he's shared with me is that most folks that really agree with the logic they find the logic compelling there is much less variation in terms of where the PAP sits on the curve there is much more consensus that the PAP is extremely powerful but that it's passing its apex but again, in fact the matter is democracy doesn't just happen when you go to sleep it has to be chosen and most people are saying that that it really is going to depend on ok, we've got a couple of questions in the middle how does the CCP initiate political reformation and what do you expect that people will get after the political reformation and will the CCP achieve those goals without political reformation I'm sorry, say that again if the CCP initiate the political reformation what will it bring to the people in spite of the CCP party what would it bring what would people get from the political reformation and if the CCP would not initiate the political reformation could it achieve the same and to get the people the same sure, that's why it's not my business it's not my business to tell Chinese people what they want it's if the CCP can deliver what Chinese people want then absolutely so again, I don't want you to misinterpret this theory as infusing content into what people's preferences are I'm not at all saying what people's preferences are all I'm saying is that if the party begins to perceive that it's only legitimacy and frankly, there are lots of the party there are lots of the party who believe the party is actually her own way through and there are people who say seriously they're like totally serious the party is gone and is hanging on, these are party people so it's not me to put content into the preferences of what people want or what citizens want all I'm saying is that if the CCP can deliver the goods with such confidence and people want the political choice then there's no conceivable way they could lose it but if people don't want the choice that's their choice, I mean again I'm just the Canadian Hi, it's fine if I'm a decision maker in the CCP and I'm being told Taiwan's best case to look at the best case scenario and and then I see that even within like 10 years of Taiwan like starting elections they had lost presidential elections of the DPP already and Chen Shuo again became president then won't I just think oh well even in the best case scenario the strongest party is still lost so if we assume that and people want to hold power then why would I even look at the best case which lost power I'm sure we just want to stay here and kind of even if I know it's a bit of a spot Before Joe responds I mean my immediate thought on that question is it seems to me in many ways that the DPP coming to power actually strengthens the KMT the KMT actually comes back much stronger after being power power that would be but you want to come back many people in Taiwan don't really think that about President Ma anyway but he was elected though he was elected but there has been especially in the past couple he was in the past sure and on an individual level I don't understand why you're talking about the KMT on a party level why would I as an individual decision maker want to give up my own person the power you mentioned about the individual level wanting your son to go through harder before you give up it's the same kind of question why would you a individual level why would you not everyone cares about the KMT it's a great question and I intimate my concerns about that by bringing up in a half joking way although you picked up on exactly the flaw and the theory is the difference of short run preferences for survival preferences and that's one of the real problems is that if we are in the end saying that democracy is a choice that this is a function of human agency then there are two sets of preferences that a individual decision maker who would be struggling within the party has to contact with is a short run preferences versus a long run preferences and that's something that we have to it's an important point but the larger issue it's a very it's a very it's a good point but you know when we contact with a dictator and you can say to them as as we have and you say to them look do you believe that this authoritarian regime will last forever if they are being truthful they will send off forever is a long time and then you say okay well there are two fates that you as a authoritarian party can entertain you have two routes you can take you can go the camp T route or you can go the Mubarak route which would you prefer right and if they believe in the first instance that nothing is forever then it depends on how near term they think the threat is but if you are rational you choose the camp T route so when we did some research in Ethiopia and we are interviewing as it happens everyone right up to the prime minister the elephant in the room was look around your neighbor way is that how you want to end up and they were keenly aware that's what is motivating them to even engage with this idea that there is this route out there that is unequilically undesirable so in that respect then you know these folks in Africa they have a tremendous amount of respect for the camp T they really think that man you know if we could go that route that's pretty good I mean you know to death's point when my angel was elected the amount of power that he had in the executive and the legislature was much less constrained I would say than the waning days of CCK and certainly in the early days of the year so the camp T loses a couple of presidential elections it always maintained control of the legislature and it came back even more powerful now my angel is not so popular but I don't know our vetting person I wouldn't rule out the camp to play up a candidate for the next election okay I'm sorry this is your question so do you title studies and not maybe visible but doesn't it but I I was wondering sort of how maybe China suit about the apex there how maybe the fact that sort of there seems to be a lot of information failing for the China itself so things that are going wrong on social economic things that you very well are hiding their debt they were so for example they're building the their massive water shortage problem and that's like the geography of China and how do you think they want to play into the fact that they can mask things essentially and maybe more so than countries like Indonesia which are smaller even if the population is a bit like Indonesia that sort of remote aspect of the remote things yeah that's right and you know the cynical the the anti-China scholar would say you know it's a it's a fool's game eventually and I'm not a cynical anti-China scholar I think they're extremely adaptive and they're going to be able to continue to figure this out for a while but what we're learning about and frankly what people are learning about in China now are things that you know frankly 10 years ago they just didn't know about and so for the corruption issue for instance I mean this is a really really fascinating set of developments how Xi Jinping is now thinking about the corruption issue and the position of the central state it's an issue it's always been an issue right I mean if you look back to Mao era politics and you look at how fertilizer was distributed it was it's just a different kind of rent but those kinds of practices existed back then the fact of the matter is that the CCP center has done a phenomenal job of localizing it now that's that's a political tactic that's a game and there will be some I presume who might end up saying I don't believe that story yes with other information and you could say also when they so when they're getting a lot of power and they're doing a lot of things like a league game poverty you could almost say because they were in such a pre-developed state before that it was quite easy almost to see how you would implement things that would create a great increase in people's welfare but now they've got a more complicated economy and they've opened it up and they try and how do you so in terms of adaptability harder to adapt quicker because they're more vulnerable and also it's not quite clear enough I mean look at the state we're in the west we don't really know how to impact our economy and so it's less straightforward to have people adapt to it as well because it's easy yes it's going to be a lot more challenging you're absolutely right and you make very good argument as to why CCP should concede sooner rather than later no I don't so I went to China I went to Beijing in the summer and actually I thought maybe it was the last time I went to Germany and then you go there it's really quite content absolutely as they should be I mean it's a phenomenal, phenomenal story it's a phenomenal developmental trajectory and you want to kind of keep going absolutely you want to have a keep going I guess for me I just don't know how democracy would stand there okay I think on that point then we should give joy a big thank you very much


Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Nice. Happy to welcome back to the program, Sunil Poti, fresh off the keynote here. 2200 in attendance here at the second annual European show. Sunil's the chief product and development officer. And, Sunil, your team's been busy. You know, product development, you know, five dot five, ton of new features, in development, a lot of things going on. So, let's step back for a second, though. And, you know, it's a year after the IPO.  You know, you kind of step back, it's, you know, I liked it, it was, you know, the simplicity takes real genius, and then you're like, to try to appeal to the European cloud, it was more T, less clicks. So, you know, what's the kind of, is people think of Nutanix, when do we think of you, why do we think of you?  Yeah, I think there's a bunch of moving parts there, but I think our core TCs hasn't changed from where it was, even pre-IPO, post-IPO, multiple conferences. I think the core thesis, as you know, is that we fundamentally think folks talk about hybrid cloud, hybrid cloud, the first step is we know public clouds exist, true private clouds haven't been built yet, and they have to be first standardized, commoditized, and then harmonized with the public cloud. So, I think, from our perspective, the core thesis of the fact that if you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there'll be a ton of workloads that stay inside. But with the right experience for the right costs, right? And essentially, that journey hasn't veiled from our perspective, right? So we're still on that. Yeah, absolutely. At Wikibon, we said, you know, cloud isn't a destination, it's really more of an operational model. So, you know, we can capture that, you say true private cloud, we said, we're starting to get there, and we actually, we credit Nutanix, so you know, of course the messaging of Enterprise Cloud was probably a little bit aspirational at the beginning, but you're filling in the pieces, you've got the partnerships, you've got the products rolling out. So, you know, let's talk about your bread and butter, as to, you know, what's new, what's launching now. I like to hear, you know, as a software company, it's, you show a little bit more, but you know, here's, when we test some things out, it's that balance of, for the Enterprise, it's like, wait, are you going to, is this going to work the way I think it is? You put stuff out, like the community edition first, let people play with it, and then you GA it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think we talked a little bit about it. Essentially, rather than me list out a whole series of functionality, I think, you know, the way we are also looking at it, as well as building it, as well as rolling it out, is in the form of what a customer can consume. So we are investing in Nutanix-like capabilities across the life cycle, right? So we have, you know, we're investing in ensuring that community edition gets a lot more emphasis, because we think this paradigm of one-click data centers is something that people need the ubiquity to kind of play around with, right? So you'll see community edition from a learning side, then we're looking for capabilities for people to actually say, look and compare, look, Nutanix is one architecture, BX-ray is another architecture, three tiers another architecture, maybe public cloud, and at some point in time, people need the flexibility to actually have, in the old world of TPC benchmarks, the new world of what I would call production benchmarks, right? So we add, you know, a whole bunch of tools such as X-ray coming out, then rather than leave it to professional services and so forth, rather than just worry about reducing the number of clicks, once you have Nutanix, even before you get to Nutanix, how do you reduce the number of clicks to get to Nutanix, right? That's where, you know, Extract, which is a very popular tool for us. Again, that has been shipping for a month, for now, where you can actually click at a certain VMware environment, a certain database environment, and essentially, literally, without a whole bunch of lift and shift, move into a private cloud environment, right? And Extract is, I could take my VMs really from VMware to an HV environment, and it also works on databases as well, like SQL databases and so forth, right? Yeah, absolutely. That migration is something that, you know, it's like a four-letter word for most people in IT. One of the things that we were early on kind of beating the drum on is traditional three-tier architectures with storage. Your migration cost was at least 30% of the total cost of ownership, because you had to bring data on, eventually you had to take data off, as opposed to if they really have more like a pool, which is what HCI does. You know, that first, once I get onto it, that's the last time you need to do a migration, because now, I can move and add, remove nodes, and then we just kind of manage it there.  And it's almost like for us, with the public cloud, at least you have a genuine sort of big hop and lift and shift, you know, just because of the boundaries. It's a shame if we can't solve that problem without what we call make lift and shift invisible inside the data center, at least, right? So that's why we've invested in things like extract, so that people can, look, we're still less than 1% of the market. So we expect a whole lot of migration to happen over the next few years. So anything that we can do to kind of accelerate customers to the point of ensuring that their architectural integrity is preserved with the Nutanix-like environment, I think it's a big focus for us. So you're going to see us emphasize extract, not just for, therefore, for VMs or databases to Nutanix on-prem, but you're also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility. Because imagine Calm as a construct that you're able to go in, provision workloads, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, but at some point in time, you want to move them back and forth. You know, the thing that we used to always say, app mobility, it's slowly coming to fruition with some of these constructs. Yeah, and Calm's a centerpiece of really your multi-cloud strategy. Talked to, you know, some customers, some of the early folks, pretty excited about it. A lot of the others have been like, okay, well, I've seen some slides in a demo, kind of squintin' looking at it. Reminds me of the early days. Well, I bet it can't really do what they say it does. So I think they've tasted the wine. You know what I mean? Just like everything else. I think there were a bunch of early believers who saw the product, you used the product, which we used as an early access program. But we took a step back when we acquired the Comma year ago, we had the choice of releasing a reasonably big product to Main Street. They had spent seven years building that product. They had read it in two times. So they had already done a read out or two. But we took the time to ensure that it was burned into the Nutanix fabric, right? It had to fit into Prism. It had to fit into our Lifecycle Manager. It had to fit into our one click upgrade. You know, it needs to look and feel like a natural extension, versus a power-sucking alien, right? Which is what we've seen with many of our competitors products, where you just buy some things and you put it in there. And the more successful it is, the harder it is to homogenize, right? So we took our time and that's what you're going to see in 5.5. I think customers can now actually genuinely use the product. On day one, it'll have AHV support, AWS support. Very quickly it'll have ESX and GCP and Azure. And it's a separate code train, by the way, in the sense that the same code base, but it's being delivered as a service. And you're going to see more and more of that paradigm where Nutanix is no longer going to be this blob of capabilities that in itself comes out fast, but there's a bunch of microservices now that are going to be released, not just on the cloud, but also on-prem. So AFS is a good example. Extract is a good example. Calm is a good example. And now with 5.5, even Prism Central is going to be detached so that you can consume that at a different velocity than the core. Yeah, how do you make sure you balance that with the simplicity that really is a core piece of your business proposition? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is where we just have to be measured in ensuring that it's still one single code base, for example. Well, we can't afford to have like 18 different branches, right? So simple things like that actually go a long way to make sure that somebody can still go to a console and say upgrade, it checks the right revisions. It's a little bit invisible, sort of like the version mismatch and all of that is our problem, not a customer problem, right? Yeah, absolutely. All right, so lot in 5.5, which we haven't touched there, but also really unveiling some of the kind of the next step in the journey, what you're working on for the next six months. Yeah. What's the focus there? Cloud is, I think you talked about, invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. So it looks like kind of expanding out and building out some of those cloud services. Take us through some of that. So I think the general team is continue to fulfill our ambition around making infrastructure more invisible. And then at the same time in parallel, try to make clouds invisible. And I'll break it down into three kinds of products, capabilities, right? The first one is we still have a journey, things got out to actually fulfill what I would call the A block, the Amazon-like block for the enterprise. And you can call it the Azure block, you can call it the Alphabet block, now that we support multiple clouds. But the point being that, simple things such as look, we've done a great job of compute storage and visualization. What about networking, right? And we've always said, look, the problem is not in the data plan of networking, top of the rack switches are pretty commodity, they work, I just, okay, whatever you name it. The issue is always in the control plan. When something goes wrong, what do you do? So that's one of the big things coming in 5.5, is built-in network visualization, provisioning, and one-click microsegmentation. And again, the point being, rather than by very expensive products such as NSX or some other overlay products where you're virtualizing the network to secure the network.  You take 10 VMs, put it in a security group, you're off to the races, right? And the same paradigm basically moves to us. So in that vein of fulfilling that stack is one dimension and a couple of key things that are new there that are in the, if I can call it the next six months timeframe, not in 5.5, is the fact that, well, with everything said and done, we've got file services, we've got blocks, we've got containers, everything else, but what about object storage? Sounds obvious, right? So we've taken our time to kind of build a next-generation object storage service, not a first-generation one, that can scale obviously to the levels of web scale that these days customers want, but it's deployed with Gen2 requirements. An example of a Gen2 requirement is you can't build an object storage service that is simply on-prem or simply off-prem anymore, right? It has to be hybrid from day one. My primary needs to be data locality, quote-unquote has to be invisible under the cover, so my primary stuff is closer to my compute, whereas my secondary and backup can be moved out into the cloud. And the same thing applies on even something much more simpler, which is EC2. What about EC2 for the enterprise, right? And that's where I think we were inspired to actually go build this Acropolis compute cloud, AC2, which essentially says you can take my Neutronics cluster, compute storage and all that, but then only have compute-only nodes, and you could have SAP HANA with scale-up requirements, you could have IBM Power, you could have Oracle running on those, but they're essentially being managed with that single pane of glasses. So this is the first time where you're seeing, based on a customer demand, now AHE is now almost one out of three nodes being shipped, is an AHE node. We've come a long way in the last two years, right? So people covered that simple virtualization, especially if you can be extended from a compute-only fabric to the hyperconverter fabric. So I think that's one dimension, which is, it is interesting, just happenstance that in the news recently, Amazon just announced that they're switching from Zen to KVM-based, so similar. Come on, you couldn't get Amazon to just sign on for AHE. No, see, I think what it is, is that frankly AHE, again, from our perspective, was all about just ruggedizing KVM, right? To make it, you know, storage, IOPS work well, the management plane work well, and in fact, the fact that AWS is doing that actually is a good sign for us to go deeper with them, frankly, just as a tangent is, rather than just go deeper with, say, a XI or with GCP and so forth, just natively as well now, with CIFI instances, there's an opportunity for Nutanix Fabric to kind of seamlessly leverage that because the core constructs are similar with KVM, right? So you're going to see some interesting stuff come up there, maybe that's for the next cube, for the next conference.  Yeah, it is. And you know, trying to fit where Nutanix is, you know, on that cloud, because right, if they're buying SaaS from a lot of pieces, it's like, well, you're not going to be as critical as it's supposed to somebody that's like, well, hey, my data center is really my temple and you know, you can help there, so. Yeah, I mean, I think the philosophy that we use in terms of our product strategy and roadmap there too, just maybe to give some color on it is, it's the curse of the platform, right, the wealth of the platform, which is like, we are a platform company and we've internalized that. You know, not a simple product company. So a lot of this comes down to what do we not do as well, right, versus what do we just do? And one simple filter that we use is, is it directionally in a secular motion for enterprises or not? So a simple example is, look, a lot of customers, and we would have had probably quite a bit of sales if we simply said, look, I can take my existing Nutanix cluster, I've just bought a three-part array, I've bought a NetApp box, just why don't you guys just coexist with that? But then if you really think about it, it's like AWS coming to you and saying, oh, by the way, take my service environment, put my AWS software on it, right? It's like Apple coming out and saying, here's iOS, run it on BlackBerry, right? So one-click upgrades won't work, right? You know, it's just not the right thing. So there are things like that that we've stayed away from that allows us to, even if we are stretched, lean in on the forward-looking secular motion, such as, look, let's continue to finish the job inside, then harmonize inside and outside, and then go provide specialized services like Zai in addition to what we're doing with GCP or Amazon and others. All right, last question I have for you. What's exciting you in the marketplace today, getting your engineers kind of fired up as kind of this next wave? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think some of the biggest thing is around how apps are now being re-platformed themselves, not just infrastructure, right? And people use the word pass and all that other stuff, but essentially, I think we're now getting into the golden era or the initial golden era where IAS re-platforming is more or less known. Now, of course it's going to take you five, 10 years to do it, but I don't think people are debating the way to do that. It's no longer open stack inside, it's no longer, you know, hosted clouds and all that crap, right? Through clouds, right? I think that wave has to emerge on the application side as well. You're starting to see some of that with Kubernetes, now becoming a de facto for one sliver of it, but there's so many other services that are up for grabs, right? So I think you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months, and you're going to obviously see Nutanix play a role there, is what does it mean to not hybridize my data center, but what does it mean to hybridize my app? And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity and interesting inspirational stuff there from an innovation perspective that keeps our guys going. Absolutely, well, Sunil, always a pleasure to chat with you, look forward to catching up with you at the next time, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix.next conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.