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Abstract
Francis Fukuyama’s recent works have rekindled interest in the larger questions of political development and have been discussed widely, including in China. This essay argues, first, that his theoretical perspective is squarely rooted in the classical modernization paradigm which is inherently teleological, but it develops its tenets and adds new insights to this body of theory. This qualifies Fukuyama’s theoretical perspective as ‘Modernization Theory 1.5’—a significant and important update on earlier versions, but not quite a fully relaunched research program. Second, the essay exemplifies what is problematic about this enhanced perspective by focusing on the role of the middle class for political development as envisaged by Fukuyama. His argument about the central role of the middle class for democratization is critiqued because the concept is underspecified in Fukuyama’s framework and, arguably, will remain an essentially contested concept and as such unhelpful in shedding light on political development. Moreover, his treatment of the Chinese middle class, in particular, is unconvincing because he fails to explicate how a collective ‘middle-class consciousness’ is to arise in a society undergoing rapid and multifaceted social re-stratification and mobilization. Social identity is the ‘missing link’ in his argumentation. Given these criticisms, the essay calls for a fundamental overhaul of the modernization debate in political science that should take into account more refined arguments advanced by sociologists studying the subject.
Notes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Birgit Herrmann and Katja Yang for comments on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.
Funding
This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant number 01UC1011A and 01UC1411A].
Notes on contributor
Björn Alpermann is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies, Sinology, Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Germany.
Notes
1 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, and Political Order and Decay.
2 Fukuyama, ‘Reflections on Chinese Governance’.
3 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 522.
4 Here, I only draw on the conceptual part of my research. The empirical study included more than one hundred qualitative interviews with members of different social strata and a standardized questionnaire survey (n = 1.200), both conducted in the three cities of Beijing, Xi’an and Wenzhou.
5 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 7; Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
6 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 526.
7 Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’.
8 Ibid., 15, emphasis added.
9 Ibid., 335.
10 Ibid., 526, emphasis added.
11 Cf. Peyer, Zur Aktualität von Eisenstadt.
12 For instance regulation theory; in the context of China cf. Aglietta and Bai, China’s Development.
13 See Beck, Erfindung des Politischen; Giddens, Consequences of Modernity.
14 Beck and Grande, ‘Varieties of Second Modernity’. For application of this thought on China cf. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, ‘Chinesische Bastelbiographie?’; Yan, ‘Chinese Path to Individualization’; Alpermann, ‘Class, Citizenship and Individualization’.
15 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 526.
16 Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
17 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 419.
18 Bellin, ‘Contingent Democrats’.
19 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 420.
20 Ibid., 382.
21 Goodman, Class in Contemporary China.
22 Guo, ‘Classes without Consciousness’, 739.
23 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 418.
24 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 421. In fact, he even mixes two different income-based definitions in one paragraph (a relative and an absolute one) without clarifying their differences.
25 Chen, Middle Class without Democracy; Dickson, Red Capitalists, Dickson, Wealth into Power; Goodman, Class in Contemporary China; Tang, ‘Political Behavior of Chinese Middle Class’; Tang, Woods and Zhao, ‘Attitudes of Chinese Middle Class’; Tsai, ‘Capitalists without a Class’, Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy; Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism Given the importance that Fukuyama himself attaches to the case of China and its middle class it is striking that virtually none of the authors working on China’s middle class cited here and the next sections is quoted in Political Order and Decay.
26 Chen, Middle Class without Democracy; Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism.
27 Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, 163.
28 Whyte, Myth of Social Volcano.
29 Guo, ‘Classes without Class Consciousness’, 737.
30 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 509.
31 Ibid., 383.
32 This debate is best understood when taking the Chinese political-ideological context into account, see Guo, ‘Classes without Class Consciousness’. It needs to be reemphasized that defining a concept and operationalizing it through concrete indicators are two different endeavors. As Mahoney and Goertz, ‘A Tale of Two Cultures’, 244-5, show, qualitative researchers typically spend more effort on the first, while quantitative researchers are more concerned with the latter, for instance see Banerjee and Duflo, ‘What is Middle Class’. Since the discussion on the Chinese middle class is dominated by quantitative research, most of the debate revolves around operationalization rather than any comprehensive definition of the concept.
33 Li, ‘Characterizing China’s Middle Class’.
34 Kharas and Gertz, ‘New Global Middle Class’, 34-35, use an absolute approach and define middle-class households as those with 10 to 100 USD daily expenditures, measured in purchasing power parity. In contrast, Man, ‘China’s Housing Reform’, 182-184, compares two relative definitions based on household income distribution (those households in the mid-quintile versus those receiving 75 to 125% of median per capita income).
35 Zhou and Chen, ‘Globalization, Social Transformation’.
36 Tomba, ‘The Housing Effect’; Zhang, In Search of Paradise; Tang, ‘Urban Housing Status Groups’.
37 Man, ‘China’s Housing Reform’, 190; Tomba, ‘The Housing Effect’, 193.
38 Li, ‘Characterizing China’s Middle Class’, 149, reports that only 10% of respondents in a survey among the Beijing middle class (objectively defined) actively self-identified as such.
39 Shen, Dangdai Zhongguo Zhongjian Jieceng, 135-136.
40 Shen, Dangdai Zhongguo Zhongjian Jieceng, chapter 2. While the survey was designed to be representative of the general population, the 89 qualitative follow-up interviews were conducted only among people who qualified for middle class status objectively defined.
41 Guo, ‘Classes without Class Consciousness’, 733. Some authors would count education as a separate criterion, but others argue that it is so closely linked with occupation that it need not be treated separately. In any case, there is also no common standard for educational credentials of the middle class: access to higher education has expanded so dramatically over the past one and a half decades that it now makes sense to distinguish according to the type of higher-education institution; see Lin and Sun, ‘Higher Education Expansion’.
42 Good overviews of the Chinese debates are provided by Li, ‘The Rise of the Middle Class’, Shen, Dangdai Zhongguo Zhongjian Jieceng: chapter 1.
43 Lu Xueyi et al., Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Jieceng, 7-23.
44 Cf. Hsiao, ‘Placing China’s Middle Class’, 248; Guo, ‘Classes without Class Consciousness’, 733-5; Goodman, Class in Contemporary China. However, the most recent follow-up study maintains this approach; Lu Xueyi et al., Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Jiegou, 402. The lack of a definition is compounded by the fact that chart 9-4 on the same page is using a strikingly different model with only three categories: lower class (the unemployed), lower middle class (agricultural laborers, industrial workers, commercial service workers) and upper middle class (everyone else). We can arrive at a figure close to 23%, when we add the shares of all those occupations in what here is called ‘upper middle class’; see Lu Xueyi et al., Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Jiegou, 394. But it remains unclear whether this is actually how the figure is derived.
45 Lu et al., Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Jiegou, 402-407.
46 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 420.
47 Goodman, ‘Locating China’s Middle Classes’, 4.
48 Lu, ‘The Chinese Middle Class’, 116-120.
49 Apart from any particular number of employees, one could have just as well taken a certain amount of revenue or fixed capital to draw a distinction between big and small enterprises.
50 Li, ‘Characterizing China’s Middle Class’, 144-147. Even the moniker ‘new’ relating to this part of the middle class has to be questioned. The precursors of today’s modern professionals (intellectuals) existed throughout the Mao era, whereas the ‘old’ middle class (business-owners) was wiped out and only re-emerged in the reform era. As Evers and Schiel, Strategische Gruppen, demonstrate the sequence in which social groups emerge does have a huge bearing on their strategic positions in society.
51 Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 171-172.
52 Ibid., 169.
53 Li, ‘The Rise of the Middle Class’, 12-22.
54 Han, ‘Middle-Class Grassroots Identity’, 265.
55 Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 180.
56 For instance, among German sociologists there is a long-standing and intense debate over the use and meaning of class which has special relevance for the middle class; see Berger and Hitzler, Individualisierungen.
57 Tang, ‘Political Behavior of Chinese Middle Class’, 377.
58 Gallie,‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 172.
59 Fukuyama, Political Order and Decay, 522.
60 Beck and Grande, ‘Varieties of Second Modernity’, 409-43; Han and Shim, ‘Redefining Second Modernity’, 471-474.
61 Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism.
62 Cf. Chen and Goodman, Middle Class China.