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Trends in the Study of Chinese Politics: State-Society Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Elizabeth J. Perry
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Extract

In his survey of the field some years ago, Harry Harding noted that the study of contemporary Chinese politics stood then on the threshold of a third generation of scholarship. While the first generation had been limited by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the second had been overly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Harding held out hope for a third generation able to surpass its predecessors in both substance and theoretical sophistication. Nearly a decade has passed since the publication of Harding's prescient article and in fact such a third generation can now be discerned - distinguished from the first two not only by the prevailing political atmosphere, but also by its theoretical perspective and access to source materials.

Type
State of the Field
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 139 , September 1994 , pp. 704 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1994

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References

1. Harding, Harry, “The study of Chinese politics: toward a third generation of scholarship,” World Politics, No. 36 (January 1984), pp. 284–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Early analyses of the reforms include Perry, Elizabeth J. and Wong, Christine (eds.), The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Harding, Harry, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987).Google Scholar Early treatments of the Tiananmen uprising include Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. and Perry, Elizabeth J. (eds.), Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Unger, Jonathan (ed.), The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1991).Google Scholar

3. See Walder, Andrew, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Shue, Vivienne, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar for trenchant critiques of both totalitarian and pluralist models.

4. An early harbinger of this trend was Nee, Victor and Mozingo, David (eds.), State and Society in Contemporary China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

5. An exception is Shirk, Susan L., The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar, which adopts a neo-institutional approach y to the subject of the post-Mao reforms.

6. Kelliher, Daniel, Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural Reform, 1979–1989 (New le Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

7. Ibid. p. 31.

8. Ibid. p. 103.

9. Yang Dali's work correlating the adoption of new reform policies with the effects of the Great Leap Forward shows substantial regional variation. And Kelliher himself acknowledges such distinctions when he notes that his data come from the south-central rice-growing region, while “in the north, evidence of peasants agitating to break up the communes and push reform was slimmer” (p. x).

10. Ibid. p. 67.

11. White, Gordon, Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Solinger, Dorothy J., China's Transition from Socialism: Statist Legacies and Marketing Reforms (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).Google Scholar

12. White, Riding the Tiger, p. 12.

13. Solinger, China's Transition from Socialism, p. 257.

14. Ibid. p. 197.

15. White, Riding the Tiger, p. 199.

16. Solinger, China's Transition from Socialism, p. 256.

17. Ibid. p. 259.

18. Ibid. p. 270.

19. White, Riding the Tiger, p. 252.

20. Solinger, China's Transition from Socialism, p. 144.

21. Kelliher, Peasant Power in China, p. 31; White, Riding the Tiger, pp. 198–99.

22. Influential works include Tilly, Charles (ed), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jiirgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).Google Scholar Much of the theorizing about peasant politics in general - by Eric Hobsbawm, James Scott, Joel Migdal and Eric Wolf, for example - has also been strongly influenced by the West European literature on state-building and market formation. (Kelliher draws heavily on these theorists.)

23. See Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1993) for a symposium on public sphere and civil society in modern and contemporary China. Other applications of the framework to contemporary Chinese politics include David Strand, “Protest in Beijing: civil society and public sphere in China,” Problems of Communism (May-June 1990), pp. 1–19; Lawrence Sullivan, “The emergence of civil society in China, spring 1989” in Saich, Tony (ed.), The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 126–144Google Scholar; Tsou, Tang, “The Tiananmen tragedy: the state-society relationship, choices and mechanisms in historical perspective,” in Womack, Brantly (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 265–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whyte, Martin K., “Urban China: a civil society in the making?” in Rosenbaum, Arthur (ed.), State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 77–101Google Scholar; and David Kelley, “Emergent civil society and the intellectuals in China,” in Robert Miller (ed.), The Development of Civil Society in Communist Systems (London: Allen and Unwin, forthcoming).

24. Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 17.Google Scholar

25. Marx, Karl, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 57.Google Scholar

26. Gramsci, Antonio, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957), p. 124.Google Scholar

27. An argument for the inapplicability of the concept of civil society to the Third World as a whole can be found in Chatterjee, Partha, “A response to Taylor's ‘Modes of Civil Society’,” Public Culture, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1990), pp. 119–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an attempt to explore las dimensions of a “Chinese-style” civil society, see Perry, Elizabeth J. and Fuller, Ellen V., “China's long march to democracy,” World Policy Journal (Fall 1991), pp. 663–685.Google Scholar

28. A pioneering analysis of both phenomena is Skinner, G. William (ed.). The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar See also Wakeman, Frederic Jr. and Carolyn Grant, (eds.), Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University and of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Tu-Ki, Min, National Polity and Local Power: The ice Transformation of Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. One can perhaps date the start of this important trend with Wakeman's, FredericStrangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: University of and Carolyn Grant 1966) A recent examplar isGoogle ScholarBernhardt, Kathryn, Rents, Taxes and Peasant: se Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

30. Three prizewinning books by senior historians are examples of pathbreaking research based upon sources available only within the PRC (ranging from oral histories to field work to archival materials): Esherick, Joseph W., The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Huang, Philip, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kuhn, Philip A., Soulstealers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

31. The Center for Chinese Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley currently holds more than 400 titles of local gazetteers published since 1985 of which 95% are at the county level. Discussions of the importance of the new gazetteers are Stig Thorgersen and Soren Clausen, “New reflections in the mirror: local Chinese gazetteers (difangzhi) in the 1980s,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 27 (January 1992), pp. 161–184; and Vermeer, Eduard B., “New county histories,” Modern China, Vol. 18, No. 4 (October 1992), pp. 438–467.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Lintong xianzhi (Lintong County Gazetteer) (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Press, 1991), pp. 668–681.

33. Lingbi xianzhi (Lingbi County Gazetteer) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang People's Press, 1991), pp. 166–67. Similarly, the Lintong gazetteer records that 127 secret society believers were forced to undergo re-education as recently as 1981 (Ibid. p. 518).

34. For Shanghai, the relevant volumes are Zhongguo gongchandang Shanghaishi zuzhishi ziliao (Materials on the Organizational History of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Press, 1991); and Shanghaishi zhengguanxitong, difangjunshi xitong, tongyi zhanxian xitong, qunzhong tuanti xitong zuzhishi ziliao (Materials on the Organizational History of Shanghai's Political System, Military System, United Front System and Mass Association System) (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Press, 1991).

35. Anli yu anli pingxi (Cases and Case Evaluations) (Guangzhou: Guangdong People's Press, 1985); Yinan xingshi anjianfenxi (Analysis of Difficult Criminal Cases) (Beijing: Public Security University Press, 1988); Xingshi fanzui anli congshu (Series on Criminal Cases) (Beijing: Supreme People's Procuracy, 1990). The latter series includes separate volumes on ig counter-revolutionary crimes, smuggling, rape, extortion, kidnapping, murder, gangsters, rs illegal making of arms and explosives, railway crimes, military desertions, etc.

36. The explosion of historical fiction dealing with the Cultural Revolution is one example 4 of a whole genre of literature with considerable value for political scientists. See, for instance, Xianfa, Chen, Minzu lei (National Tears) (Shanghai, 1988).Google Scholar

37. Yearbooks of the People's Republic of China: The Holdings of Twelve Research Libraries (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies Library, University of California, 1993) provides a listing of yearbooks available at the major East Asia libraries in the United States as well as at the University Services Centre in Hong Kong.

38. See, for example, the 458-page guide to the Shanghai Municipal Archives, with very helpful introductions to both its pre- and post-1949 holdings to the mid-1960s: Shanghaishi danganguan jianming zhinan (Concise Introduction to the Shanghai Municipal Archives) (Beijing: Archives Publishing House, 1991). A paper based on hundreds of trade union reports from the spring of 1957 now housed in the Shanghai Municipal Archives is Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai's strike wave of 1957,” The China Quarterly (March 1994).

39. For the 1989 uprising, the internal-circulation volume Jingxin dongpade 56tian (A Soul-Stirring 56 Days) (Beijing: Dadi Publishing House, 1989) gives a detailed account, complete with slogans, by region. See also Anthems of Defeat: Crackdown in Hunan Province, 1989–92 (New York: Asia Watch, 1992). I am indebted to Jeffrey Wasserstrom for alerting me to these sources.

40. Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).Google Scholar

41. An illuminating discussion of general versus case-study approaches in the China field can be found in Harding, Harry, “The evolution of American scholarship on contemporary China,” in Shambaugh, David (ed.), American Studies of Contemporary China (Aimonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 14–40Google Scholar See also the chapters by Thomas Gold and Nina Halpern in E the same volume.

42. Again one can look to the history field for validation; detailed local case studies have provided a firm foundation for recent syntheses. See, for example, Esherick, Joseph W. and Backus Rankin, Mary (eds.), Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar