Mr. FANG Shaowei started his presentation by introducing the lack of an argument on how political collapse happens in the neo-institutional economics which is established by theories such as Buchanan’s public choice, Olson’s collective action, Kaplan’s collective faith, De Mesquita’s political loyalty, North’s open opportunity, and Acemoglu’s inclusive system. Mr. FANG’s new book The Logic of Political Collapse aims to explain how political systems collapse whatsoever. Mr. FANG dismissed many traditional theories that tried and failed to illustrate how political systems came into collapse following the evolution of political institutions.

Historial Mr. LEI Yi commented that theories all have limitations, and a certain theoretical framework was not capable of explaining everything. Historian Mr. WU Si commented that if we separate politics into power and polity, it could be seen that the collapse of polity did not necessarily mean the collapse of power. A prominent case is Republic of China. Professor JIA Xijin from Tsinghua University questioned the lecture that more elements and factors could lead to the collapse of a political system, however, the book only touched upon and fixated on two such factors. Professor SHENG Hong pointed out the limitations of human reasoning, especially when it came to complex systems.