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State and Society in Contemporary China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Elizabeth J. Perry
Elizabeth J. Perry
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

Recent works on contemporary China stress the importance of the nonmarket economy in shaping a pattern of state-society relations quite unlike those found in capitalist economies. Nevertheless, these studies present strikingly different pictures of the Chinese case: a new, party-dominated, divided, yet compliant network society on the one hand; and an enduring, localistic, solidary, and resistant cellular society on the other. The author suggests that such divergent images may be partially reconciled if local variation (by region and social sector) is systematically incorporated into our models of Chinese politics. Calling for a nuanced and dynamic approach to state-society relations, the article argues for the importance of historically grounded research.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , July 1989 , pp. 579 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1989

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References

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5 In the first quarter of 1988, the number of workers in state enterprises declined by 680,000 (Wen Hui Bao, May 10, 1988).

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8 For a discussion of “factory artisan” radicalism in France, see Hanagan, Michael P., The Logic of Solidarity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980)Google Scholar. The sources listed in the previous footnote concur in the importance of factory artisans, especially skilled metalworkers, in the Bolshevik Revolution. For a discussion of the role of Shanghai factory artisans in the communist labor movement, see Elizabeth J. Perry, “Work and Politics in the Making of a Chinese Proletariat” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, March 1988).

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11 Nathan's, Andrew J.Chinese Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar offers a good illustration of the insights to be gained by a historically grounded study of Chinese politics that crosses the 1949 divide.

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