Most previous scholarship about the civil service examination system in imperial China has emphasized the degree of social mobility such examinations permitted in a premodern society. In the same vein, historians have evaluated the examination process in late imperial China from the perspective of the modernization process in modern Europe and the United States. They have thereby successfully exposed the failure of the Confucian system to advance the specialization and training in science that are deemed essential for nation-states to progress beyond their premodern institutions and autocratic political traditions. In this article, I caution against such contemporary, ahistorical standards for political, cultural, and social formation. These a priori judgments are often expressed teleologically when tied to the “modernization narrative” that still pervades our historiography of Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911) dynasty China.

How to establish and transmit understanding across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time lies at the very heart of Asian Studies. Ours is a highly refined form of cross-cultural activity, but one that places the highest value on this understanding. To engage in this activity, individuals undergo long periods of training to master other languages, to produce, and then to present their knowledge in certain rigorously defined forms. The scholar works in this way both to establish some particular understanding and then to transmit that understanding to other Asianists, students, various other specialists, and the public at large.

The rational-choice paradigm has been attractive to many area specialists in their efforts to arrive at explanations of social and political behavior in various parts of the world. This model of explanation is simple yet powerful; we attempt to explain a pattern of social behavior or an enduring social arrangement as the aggregate outcome of the goal-directed choices of large numbers of rational agents. Why did the Nian rebellion occur? It was the result of the individual-level survival strategies of north China peasants (Perry 1980). Why did the central places of late imperial Sichuan conform to the hexagonal arrays predicted by central-place theory? Because participants—consumers, merchants, and officials—made rational decisions based on considerations of transport cost (Skinner 1964–65). Why was late imperial Chinese agriculture stagnant? Because none of the actors within the agricultural system had both the incentive and the capacity to invest in agricultural innovation (Lippit 1987).

The concept of political culture was formulated in the postwar period as a way of bringing human motivation more sharply into account in cross-cultural analyses of behavior. A persistent difficulty, however, has involved validating its theoretical premises and methodological criteria. So frustrating has this problem proved to be that many have relegated political culture to a residual category of explanation. Indeed, a major reason for the popularity of the rational-actor paradigm is its effort to circumvent these difficulties by utilizing a value-maximizing dimension for motivation.

Ever since the enlightenment—the dawn of the modern era—historical understanding has been much concerned with the passage to modernity. In our present century, questions and dilemmas of the transition to modernity and the evaluation of “tradition” in the non-Western world have been central to the historical problematique the world over. I have chosen to analyze the modernist understanding of this historical transition in China not only among professional historians in the West, but among Chinese advocates of modernity. Specifically, I will examine the campaigns attacking popular religion during the first three decades of this century. As a movement advocating the establishment of a rational society, these campaigns offer a view of the understanding of this transition, not just in theory and historiography, but in practice.

China's political “opening to the West” in 1979–89 directly affected historical scholarship on Ming and Qing socioeconomic history. Some PRC scholars were able to travel abroad, others met foreign specialists at international conferences held in China, and many more were introduced to foreign scholarship through Chinese translations of articles and books published in Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America. Foreign scholars, also, profited from new access to archival sources for research; a few anthropologists and historians even were able to reside in the countryside and interview villagers. While increased access and scholarly exchange have enriched research, they have not erased national differences in interpretation and approach.