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Can China Establish a Political Democracy? A Critique of Current Analyses of Chinese Political Capabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Maurice T. Price
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

Is the immaturity of Western social and political sciences one of the factors responsible for China's fortunes during the past generation and a half? Is this condition thus responsible in part for the unrealized dreams of various “modern intellectuals” for immediate representative government in China? Or, to reverse the approach so as to look toward the future, do China's misfortunes and do the thwarted schemes of various Chinese intellectuals, imply the need of certain developments in social and political science? Might such developments in turn permit the social and political sciences to be of greater use in China's further ventures and experiments in the direction of political democracy?—These questions, both practical and theoretical, both retrospective and predictive, call for consideration together.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1942

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References

1 As will be made clear later, there is no intention here to depreciate the excellent work accomplished in recent years by sinologists, by historians (working chiefly in the field of government and politics), by a few economists, and by sociologists surveying limited social problems at first-hand.

2 This will be amplified in a study of the students of modern China which the writer is preparing.

3 Ching-wei, Wang, China's problems and their solution (Shanghai, 1934), p. 74.Google Scholar

4 “A sheet of loose sand,” Frank Price translates it; “a stretch of scattering sand,” Lyon Sharman puts it. See Hsu, Leonard S., San Yat-sen (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1933), pp. 164Google Scholar, 168; and Price, Frank W., Trans., San Min chu-i (Shanghai, 1927), pp. 5, 12.Google Scholar

5 As of June 12, 1941.

6 Elaborated with special reference to the political and cultural analysis of China in the writer's article, “Sinology and social study,” Pacific affairs, 12 (December, 1932), 1038–46.

7 Hermann Heller, “Political science,” Encyclopedia of social science.

8 MacLeod, William C., Origin end history of politics (New York, 1931).Google Scholar

9 Italics mine.

10 MacLeod, , op. cit., pp. 5758Google Scholar, 21–22, 127–28.

11 MacLeod's discussion has been singled out for special comment because it has been given such superlative commendation in a recent survey of the literature of “Political sociology,” in the generally authoritative Contemporary social theory by H. E. Barnes, Howard Becker and F. E. Becker (New York, 1940), p. 654. The present writer's estimate, reached when he first read the book in 1933, is much more qualified.

12 MacLeod, , op. cit., p. 206.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 468–69.

14 Oppenheimer, Franz, The state (Indianapolis, 1914)Google Scholar; MacLeod, William C., The origin of the state (Philadelphia, 1924)Google Scholar; Lowie, Robert H., The origin of the state (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

15 Lowie, , op. cit., p. 116Google Scholar; Ku, Pan, The history of the former Han dynasty, translated by Dubs, Homer H. (Baltimore, 1938), vol. 1, p. 50Google Scholar, footnote 3.

16 Wissler, Clark, Introduction to social anthropology (New York, 1929), p. 131.Google Scholar