Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T21:56:07.779Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Trends in the Study of Chinese Political Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Extract

A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

Type
State of the Field
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Brint, Michael, A Genealogy of Political Culture (Boulder: Westview, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James (eds.), The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).Google Scholar

3. Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing in the Middle East (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Hagan, Everett E., On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Apter, David, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).Google Scholar

4. Almond, Gabriel, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park: Sage, 1990)Google Scholar, chs. 5, 6; Eckstein, Harry, “A culturalist theory of political change,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (September 1988), pp. 789804CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaenslen, Fritz, “Culture and decision-making in China, Japan, Russia, and the United States,” World Politics, Vol. 39, No. 1 (October 1986), pp. 78103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inglehart, Ronald, “The renaissance of political culture,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 4 (December 1988), pp. 12031230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I think the argument by Huntingdon, Samuel P., “The clash of civilizations,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), pp. 2249Google Scholar, is wrong in many of its implications, but the assertion that cultural differences are becoming more obviously politically relevant seems on the mark.

5. Almond, Gabriel and Powell, G. Bingham, Comparative Politics: System, Process, Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 25.Google Scholar The definition seems not very well thought through. Is culture simply a set of attitudes, or is it a system of attitudes (and other things)? Is every political system a nation, or is the concept relevant only to those which are? Shouldn't culture be continuous over time, and not identified necessarily with opinions which prevail at one given time?

6. Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For later reflections on the methodology and debates on the concept's adequacy as political theory, see Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney (eds.), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).Google Scholar For a recent empirical study of political change using the concept of political study, see Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

7. Adorno, Theodore, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).Google Scholar

8. Smith, David Horton, Inkles, Alex, “The OM scale: a comparative socio-psychological individual modernity,” Sociometry, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1966), pp. 353377.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

9. Popper, Karl R., The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 147.Google Scholar The best known (and most entertaining) systematic application of the concept to political science is probably Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957). For examples of recent influential studies of democratization which take a rational choice approach and which basicially ignore considerations of culture, civic or otherwise, see O'donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe C. and Whitehead, Laurence (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google Scholar For a rational choice interpretation of Chinese politics partly critical of a central emphasis on culture, see Goldstein, Avery, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics: Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949–1978 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

10. Compare Wildavsky, Aaron, “Choosing preferences by constructing institutions: a cultural theory of preference formation,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 81, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Pye, Lucian, The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychological Study of the Crisis in Political Development (Boston: MIT Press, 1968)Google Scholar; The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981); Solomon, Richard, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).Google Scholar

12. See, however, Nathan, Andrew and Shi, Tianjian, “Cultural requisites for democracy in China: findings from a survey,” Daedalus, No. 122 (Spring 1992), pp. 95124.Google Scholar This is also discussed below.

13. Pye, Lucian, The Mandarin and the Cadre: China's Political Cultures (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1988)Google Scholar; something like this theme is pursued with intimidating erudition by Bauer, Wolfgang, China and the Search for Happiness (New York: Seabury, 1976).Google Scholar

14. Solomon, Mao's Revolution, p. 520. A possible objection is that Chairman Mao neglected to legitimate fighting back. To be fair, however, a case can certainly be made that Cultural Revolution-era Rebel ideology evolved into an influence on the democratic ferment of the 1980s. Chan, Anita, “Dispelling misconceptions about the Red Guard Movement,” The Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 1992), pp. 6185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For objections to Solomon's methods and findings from more traditional China scholars, see Mote, F. W., “China's past and the study of China today: some comments on the recent work of Richard Solomon,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (November 1972), pp. 107120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also an Metzger, Thomas A., “On Chinese political culture,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (November 1972), pp. 101105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Pye, The Mandarin and the Cadre, p. 75.

16. Harding, Harry, “The study of Chinese politics: toward a third generation of fir scholarship,” World Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 (January 1984), pp. 284307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Isaacs, Harold, Scratches on Our Mind (Boston: MIT Press, 1958).Google Scholar

18. Compare Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

19. Renmin ribao (overseas edition), 18 June 1993. The point, of course, is not entirely invalid. There is a political tendency to chatter too glibly about human rights, without serious consideration of what constitutes a right and what it means to be human - grave, perhaps even sophomoric, philosophic issues, but relevant to any policy which would have human rights as a component. A more accurate appreciation of the workings of culture might not solve the philosophical issue, but would be relevant to practical policy.

20. Pye's dissertation, Warlord Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Modernization of Republican China (New York: Praeger, 1971) interprets Chinese politics in the same way as his later work (with an emphasis on the logic of the power struggle), but is founded on rational choice assumptions, without much psychologizing. More recently, Pye, Lucian, “China: erratic state, frustrated society,” Foreign Affairs (Fall 1990), pp. 5674Google Scholar, shows how culture helps shape Chinese social structure and state-society relationships, without reference to individual psychological traits.

21. Jacobs, J. Bruce, “A preliminary model of particularistic ties in Chinese political alliances,” The China Quarterly, No. 78 (June 1979), pp. 237273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Walder, Andrew G., Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 187, 251.Google Scholar

23. Moody, Peter R. Jr., Political Opposition in Post-Confucian Society (New York: Praeger, 1988).Google Scholar Pye, “China: erratic state, frustrated society” takes a somewhat similar line.

24. Rowe, William T., Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Modem China, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1993) is devoted to the question of civil society. For the contemporary period, see McCormick, Barrett L., Shaozhi, Su and Xiaoming, Xiao, “The 1989 Democracy Movement: a review of the prospects for civil society in China,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 1992), pp. 182202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Huang, Ray, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

26. Duara, Prasenjit, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

27. Levenson, Joseph R., Confucian China and Its Modem Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).Google Scholar

28. The earlier statement of this theme is Weber, Max, The Religion of China; Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press, 1951).Google Scholar

29. Levenson, Confucian China, Vol. 3, pp. 78–82.

30. See, for example, Schwartz, Benjamin I., The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

31. Rozman, Gilbert (ed.), The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Applications (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

32. This point is made, for example, by both editors and by all contributors to Pye, Lucian W. and Verba, Sidney (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. In American scholarship, the first to make effigies here was John K. Fairbank, although Levenson developed the more profound argument. For a critique see Cohen, Paul A., Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

34. Rudolph, Lloyd I., Rudolph, Susan H., The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar

35. Metzger, Thomas A., Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Historical Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

36. Prusek, Jaroslav, Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ropp, Paul S., Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin Wai-shih and Ch'ing Social Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Hegel, Robert E., The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

37. For examples, see Barmé, Geremie and Minford, John (eds.), Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968).Google Scholar

38. For example, Jin, Guantao, “Socialism and tradition: the formation and development of modern Chinese political culture”, Journal of Contemporary China, No.3 (Summer 1993), pp. 317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Nathan and Shi, “Cultural requisites for democracy”.

40. Ibid. p. 104.

41. Ibid. p. 116.

42. Nathan, Andrew, “Is Chinese culture distinctive: a review article,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4 (November 1993), pp. 923936CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes the converse of this argument.

43. Compare Moody, Peter R. Jr., ”The political culture of Chinese students and intellectuals: a historical examination,” Asian Survey, Vol. 28, No. 11 (November 1988), pp. 11401160.CrossRefGoogle ScholarJianhua, Zhu, “From discontent to sympathy with the student movement? An empirical study of urban workers on the eve of the 1989 democracy movement,” Dangdai Zhongguo Yanjiu Zhongxin Lunwen, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August 1992)Google Scholar analyses survey data indicating that workers most sympathetic with the 1989 democracy movement were also those most unhappy with the economic reforms.

44. Barmé, Geremie and Jaivin, Linda (eds.), New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (New York: Times Books, 1992).Google Scholar

45. Barmé, Geremie, “Wang Shuo and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) culture,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 28 (July 1992), pp. 2364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. See the interesting overview of popular culture by Xiaobo, Liu, “Toward vulgarity and soullessness,” Zhongguo zhi Chun, May 1993, pp. 2834.Google Scholar