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Policy Oscillations in the People's Republic of China: A Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Edwin A. Winckler
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Extract

Professor Nathan's pungent essay raises important issues for the politics of development in general and for drawing comparative conclusions from the Chinese case in particular. His cleansing scepticism demolishes some positions which may be held by authors in the China field and reminds others that the unstated assumptions in their models need better articulation. However he goes too far. What needs to be re-established is that clear and modest formulations of short-term recurrence, interdependence among policies, and two-sided policy disagreement are not avoidable errors but indispensable heuristic devices in the conceptual repertoire of China watchers. In fact it would be a great disservice to stùdies of contemporary China and to comparative study of the Chinese case if Professor Nathan were allowed to succeed in his attempt to identify all such analyses with his reductio ad absurdum of some of them. Let us try to rescue the possibility of constructive social science modelling of the three principal issues Professor Nathan raises.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 68 , December 1976 , pp. 734 - 750
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1976

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References

* This article is a spin-off from joint research conducted by Professor G. William Skinner and myself under National Science Foundation Grant GS-33955. I thank Professor Skinner, and members of the Contemporary China Seminar at Columbia University, for comments on the original draft.

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2. Possibly the clearest example in the literature so far is Richard Suttmeier, “ Science policy shifts, organizational change and China's development,” China Quarterly (CQ), No. 62 (1975), pp. 207–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Thus Alexander Eckstein, who Nathan quotes in conjunction with Skinner and Winckler as a cyclical theorist, has written probably the best short linear overview of Chinese economic development: “ Economic growth and change in China: A twenty-year perspective,” CQ No. 54 (1973), pp. 211–41.

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8. Ibid. p. 416.

9. In 1974, for example, the change in emphasis from mobilization to consolidation is reflected in the difference in tone between Wang Hung-wen's report at a central study class in January 1974 and Central Committee Document Number Twenty-one of July 1974. See Issues and Studies, Vol. XI, No. 1 (February 1975), pp. 94–105 and Vol. XI, No. 2 (January 1975), pp. 101–104, respectively.

10. The three “technical links” parallel the three forms of technology presented in Thompson, 1967.

11. Thompson, Organizations in Action, pp. 54–56.

12. Ibid. pp. 54–56.

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25. Ibid. p. 701, footnote 28.

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