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Is Chinese Culture Distinctive?—A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Andrew J. Nathan
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Anyone Who Works in the Field of Area Studies knows from experience that cultures are different. Indeed, the effort to understand the distinctiveness of cultures in comparative perspective is a central undertaking of the modern humanities and social sciences, not only in Asian studies but in studies of other parts of the world. But works on the subject seldom discuss the conceptual and methodological issues involved. What do we mean by culture in the context of comparative statements? How can a culture's distinctiveness be conceptualized? What is required to demonstrate that such distinctiveness exists, what it consists of, and what influence it has on the performance of societies? In the case of Chinese studies, how far have we come in establishing that Chinese culture is distinctive, in what ways, and with what consequences?

It is helpful to discuss these issues in terms of two bodies of literature with different ways of conceptualizing culture and its distinctiveness, although I intend to blur the distinction at the end. Following Ying-shih Yü, I will label the two approaches hermeneutic and positivistic. I do not argue that one of the approaches is better than the other; each achieves goals that the other does not. The real problem is lack of clarity about the different logical statuses of the kinds of findings that typically emerge from the two approaches. This can lead to problems when insights are transposed from the hermeneutic approach into positivistic language or vice versa.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 1993 , pp. 923 - 936
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1993

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References

This article is a contribution to the Forum on Universalism and Relativism in Asian Studies initiated in JAS 50.1 (Feburary 1991):29–83.

For comments, the author wishes to thank Roger Ames, Lili Armstrong, Myron L. Cohen, Michael Gasster, Charles W. Hayford, Daniel W. Y. Kwok, Margot Landman, Jeremy Paltiel, Randall P. Peerenboom, Andrew G. Walder, John R. Watt, and other participants in a seminar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa on January 20, 1993, and in the Modern China Seminar, Columbia University, on May 13, 1993, as well as two anonymous reviewers for the JAS.

Xiaotong, Fei. 1992. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. A Translation of Fei Xiaotong's Xiangtu Zhongguo, trans. Hamilton, Gary G. and Zheng, Wang. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar

Pye, Lucian W. 1992. The Spirit of Chinese Politics. New Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Schwartz, Benjamin. 1985. China's Cultural Values. Occasional Paper No. 18, Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.Google Scholar

Wei-Ming, Tu, ed. 1991. “The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today.” Daedalus, Spring. Scheduled for publication as a book by Stanford University Press, late 1993.Google Scholar

Gungwu, Wang. 1991. The Chineseness of China: Selected Essays. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Wilson, Richard W. 1992. Compliance Ideologies: Rethinking Political Culture. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

1 I am concerned with culture as a pattern of values, attitudes, beliefs, and affects, not as a pattern of behavior. The anthropologists' view of culture as including both values and behavior has its uses. But when one wants to use culture as an explanation for behavior, one must define culture as a pattern of mental attitudes separate from the pattern of behaviors that such attitudes are thought to explain.

2 “Clio's New Cultural Turn and the Rediscovery of Tradition in Asia,” keynote address by Yii, Ying-Shih at the Twelfth Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, University of Hong Kong, June 24–28, 1991Google Scholar, published as a pamphlet by that group. The distinction does not entirely correspond to that between humanistic and social scientific approaches, because many practicing social scientists use hermeneutic methods and there is occasional use of positivistic methods in humanistic research. Nor do the hermeneutic and positivistic approaches exhaust the list of approaches available in social sciences and humanities; Rabinow and Sullivan, for example, also refer to structuralist and neo-Marxist positions: Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., “The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an Approach,” in Rabinow, and Sullivan, , eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979): 1Google Scholar. The present discussion, however, has neither the need nor the space to complicate the problem.

3 Geertz, , The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973):89Google Scholar; Schwartz, Benjamin I., The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985):3Google Scholar, 413. Schwartz rightly points to important differences between his approach and Geertz's, but these are not relevant here.

4 Schwartz developed some of the themes of his 1982 lectures in The World of Thought in Ancient China. I have chosen to review the shorter and earlier of the two books because it makes more explicit comparative statements, and because it has had influence among social scientists seeking concise statements about what makes Chinese culture distinctive. I do not criticize what Schwartz says, but attempt to point out how he can be misread.

5 The Mandarin and the Cadre: China's Political Cultures (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1988):8Google Scholar.

6 Sartori, Giovanni, ed., Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1984):44–46Google Scholar; Sartori, , “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review LXIV:4 (December 1970): 1,033–53Google Scholar.

7 “Among the wise,” states Pye in The Mandarin and the Cadre, “it is unnecessary, indeed somewhat insulting, to clutter up analysis with the obvious qualification that such collectivities are not homogeneous entities” (p. 28).

8 See Stinchecombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968): 101–29Google Scholar. Thanks to Andrew Walder for the citation.

9 Taylor, Rodney L., The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), Ch. III.Google Scholar

10 The comparison is limited to urban populations of the two societies. Ruan Danqing [elsewhere Danching], Zhou, Lu, Blau, Peter M., and Walder, Andrew G., “A Preliminary Analysis of the Social Network of Residents in Tianjin with a Comparison to Social Networks in America,” Social Sciences in China XI.3 (September 1990):68–89Google Scholar.

11 This point is developed in Danching, Ruan, “Interpersonal Networks and Workplace Controls in Urban China,” Australian Journal of Chinese Studies 29 (January 1993):89–105Google Scholar.

12 One finding of the research project described here is that “The similarity between the microstructures of interpersonal relations in the P.R.C. and the U.S. is impressive, considering the differences in culture and tradition.” From Blau, Peter M., Ruan, Danching, and Ardelt, Monika, “Interpersonal Choice and Networks in China,” Social Forces 69.4 (June 1991): 1,049Google Scholar.

13 Siu-kai, Lau and Hsin-chi, Kuan, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988): 101Google Scholar; Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture, abridged ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965): 148Google Scholar. Although Pye may not consider Hong Kong very Chinese culturally, Lau and Kuan make extensive use of Pye's arguments in interpreting their findings. In any case, the point here is to illustrate the types of findings that survey-based comparisons produce, and only secondarily to suggest a test for Pye's hypothesis.

14 Nathan, Andrew J. and Shi, Tianjian, “Cultural Requisites for Democracy in China: Findings From a Survey,” Daedalus 122.2 (Spring 1993):95–123Google Scholar. The present essay elaborates points originally offered in the last few pages of the Daedalus article.

15 The ISSP is a continuing program of cross-national collaboration conducted in Australia, Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Austria, and Italy. See International Social Survey Programme, Role o/Government-1985 Codebook ZA-NO. 1490, Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, University of Michigan. The stimulus posed in the 1985 ISSP survey was, “There are some people whose views are considered extreme by the majority. Consider people who want to overthrow the government by revolution.” It was followed by the same three questions.

16 See Frey, Frederick W., “Cross-Cultural Survey Research in Political Science,” in Holt, Robert T. and Turner, John E., The Methodology of Comparative Research (N.Y.: Free Press, 1970): 173–294Google Scholar; Verba, Sidney, Nie, Norman H. and Kim, Jae-on, Participation and Political Equality: A Seven Nation Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978):32–40Google Scholar.

17 Nathan and Shi in Daedalus, pp. 108–110.

18 Arkush, R. David, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1981):57–103Google Scholar. After 1949, the people living in the Fei team's Yunnan field site were classified as non-Han minority Bais; see David Yen-ho Wu in Tu, p. 169. This gives an ironic twist to the effort to use Fei's insights to prove the distinctiveness of Chinese culture. My thanks to Charles W. Hayford for suggesting this point.

19 Pye, Lucian W., with Pye, Mary W., Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985):viiGoogle Scholar.

20 There is debate about how strong an explanation culture gives of any societal outcome. Pye's analogies of culture to music (in Asian Power and Politics, p. 20) or to grammar (in Mandarin and Cadre, p. 9) seem to me about right. And how much difference has a country's musical tradition or grammar made to its modernization or democratization? The alternative to a cultural explanation is usually an institutional or structural one. See, for example, Elkins, David J. and Simeon, Richard E. B., “A Cause in Search of Its Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?” Comparative Politics 11 (January 1979): 127–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dickson, Bruce J., “What Explains Chinese Political Behavior? The Debate over Structure and Culture,” Comparative Politics 25.1 (October 1992): 103–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pye, however, considers this debate “pointless”; Mandarin, pp 20–22.

21 Metzger, , Escape From Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

22 Mandarin and Cadre, p. 30.

23 Arkush, Fei, p. 144.

24 Although the difference in the prevalence and functions of networks versus organizations in China and the West remains largely an empirical mystery, the two societies are demonstrably different in the self-image that each has about its respective reliance on networks and organizations. For this statement, the Fei and Hamilton essays themselves serve as evidence, because each embodies its own society's self-perception of the difference. Although the difference in self-perception does not prove that there is a difference in social functioning, it reasonably generates the hypothesis that there is. But one cannot test this hypothesis by using separate conceptual categories for separate countries.

25 Schwartz persuasively rebuts such a claim in The World of Thought, pp. 3–7.

26 Ambrose King seems to place himself in the same contradiction when he argues both that guanxi is a uniquely Chinese phenomenon and that for this very reason the word should be incorporated into modern social science as an analytic term. King in Tu, ed., p. 68.