Discipline and power: knowledge of China in political science

ABSTRACT

Mainstream political science treats China as an anomaly that has not followed the “right” path of development, that is, a path that confirms the worldview, normative values, knowledge, and expectations of a Euromodern origin. This essay identifies inherent biases in the discipline and shows how the dominant disciplinary approach to Chinese politics has largely remained focused on validating questionable political-scientific tenets. A tentative proposal is offered for intellectual steps toward more openness and efficacy in disciplinary knowledge production and consumption. The argument is not about overcoming Eurocentrism by promoting Chinese exceptionalism. On the contrary, it is political, and challenges the power of current organizing principles of knowledge in search of a more accurate and cogent understanding of Chinese and global politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Political science
• disciplinary norms
• knowledge and power
• study of Chinese politics
• counter-hegemonic scholarship

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers of CAS for their critical and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Chun Lin is an Associate Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics and author of The British New Left (1993), The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (2006), China and Global Capitalism (2013) and, in Chinese, Reflections on China’s Reform Trajectory (2008).

Notes

1 T. B. Macaulay quoted in Collini, Winds, and Burrow 1983, v.

2 While political science cannot be free of theory and value-laden observations and interpretations, we have a desire, nonetheless, to mitigate their effect and pursue “a unified critical judgment” based on “unified logic of causal inference” (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 3–7).

3 Bailey and Llobera 1981, 8.

4 As noted by Brook and Blue, “Almost all our categories – politics and economy, state and society, feudalism and capitalism – have been conceptualized primarily on the basis of Western historical experience.” Brook and Blue 1999, 1.

5 Wallerstein 1991, 97.

6 Adcock, Bevir and Stimson 2009, ch.1.

7 Haldane quoted in White 1962; Ross 1991, 390, 393–407; Sanders 2002; Oakeshott 2004, 45.

8 Gilman 2003, 59, 115.

9 See especially critiques of “possessive individualism” by Macpherson 1962 and, by extension, “exclusive private property” in Hann 1998.

10 The shift was marked by a self-critical presidential address at the 1969 American Political Science Association convention. It denounced pretensions of neutrality and uniformity, and positivist empiricism as “an ideology of social conservatism” (Easton 1969, 1052). Later and more bluntly, another former president of APSA admitted that political science was “itself a political phenomenon” and as such “a product of the state” (Lowi 1992, 1). Soon after, Albert Hirschman in an influential review compared “behavioral determinism” unfavorably with narrative depth and interpretative plasticity (1970).

11 “Orientalism” in relation to “cultural imperialism,” refers to what Edward Said saw as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction” between East and West, by which “European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.” Said 1978, 2−3.

12 Condorcet 1955, 39.

13 Dawson 1964, ch.1. Worth noting is Marx’s intuition of looming revolutionary changes in China and Asia ahead of Europe, which negated the gist of his own “Asiatic mode of production” in line with the Orientalist imagination.

14 Ward 1975, 33. To build a “national program for area studies” was to “penetrate” those socio-psychologically distant countries so as to “give direction to their leaders” and gain control over their conformity. See Robert Hall's 1948 report quoted in Barlow 1997, 224. See also Peck 2006.

15 At the same time a number of leading “China Hands” were persecuted in the McCarthyist hysteria. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) oversaw the Committee on World Area Research, the Committee on Comparative Politics, and the Far Eastern Association – now the Association for Asian Studies. The first area studies organization in the US was founded in 1943. The Joint Committee on Contemporary China was formed in 1959 under the SSRC and the American Council of Learned Societies. Also involved were big private foundations.

16 Quoted in Marquis 2000, 79. Political scientists from elite U.S. universities and think tanks were involved with counterinsurgency techniques in southern Vietnam, which failed miserably. Meanwhile, liberal-minded specialists advocated agrarian reforms which resembled American rural reconstruction projects in China in the 1930s in the hope of “modernization without revolution.” Marquis 2000, 80, 84−94.

17 Marquis 2000, 104.

18 See a case study of the U.S. National Security Education Act 1991 and its implementation through a federal program, which shows how the U.S.-led global order continued to impact Asian studies. Cited in Selden and Boyce 1992.

19 O’Brien 2011, 535. See Perry 1999; Walder 2004; Baum 2007; Carlsen et al. 2010.

20 Cumings 1997, 5.

21 Ward 1975, 36.

22 Dittmer 1983, 51.

23 In China studies, “when the Chinese case does not fit prevailing theories, the tendency is to treat China as a unique outlier rather than adjust the theories to accommodate it … ” (Dickson 2016, 320).

24 See, for example, Barry Sautman’s critiques in 1999 and 2006.

25 Nuanced observations stress also the dynamics of economic globalization which allowed blending of religious and market values when monsteries became profit making nodes along horizontal networks linking local communities and identities to transnational capital (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, 242). See also Wang 2010; Mackerras 2010; Zang 2012; and Leibold 2013.

26 Wallerstein 1991, 97.

27 See the original introduction of the concept in Verba 1965, 518, 526−543. Polling and survey techniques developed in sociology were borrowed to make political culture aggregately measurable.

28 MacIntyre 1973, 172−175. See also Bevir and Rhodes 2006, 70−71.

29 They are twins because comparative political culture assumes “a lead in analyzing, distinguishing, and classifying various types of politics” at various stages of political development (Verba 1965, 5). See also Huntington 1975, 63−65.

30 Pye 1962, vii; 1966, 35−36. For a summary of academic critiques of the political culture approach, see Almond and Roselle 1990, 144−145. Additional problems occur whenever the concept, already biased with unspoken presumptions, is taken as an independent variable and monocausal.

31 Bauman 2000, 9.

32 Landes 1998, 345.

33 Tipps 1973, 213. As such, a stark contrast appears between political culture and its radical negations in the cultural studies crystallized around the same time in the early 1960s and subsequently expanded into subaltern studies and postcolonial critiques.

34 Conviniently forgotten here are how imperialist and colonialist first developers rendered development elsewhere difficult. It was against this background that the modern Chinese nation emerged by acquiring a class-national consciousness, in the sense that “only when a nation became a class … did it become politically conscious and activist … as a nation-for-itself” (Gellner 1983, 121). See also Duara 1995, 12–14.

35 Wasserstrom and Perry 1992.

36 Perry 1994, 2–5. Lampton 1987 on the Chinese communist system as a “bargaining treadmill” is a different and useful description.

37 Among the best known examples, Samuel Huntington stressed state capacity of communist regimes which compared favorably with countries trapped by “ungovernability” (1968, 8, 266); Theda Skocpol demonstrated how non-western social revolutions had “given birth to nations whose power and autonomy markedly surpassed their own pre-revolutionary pasts and outstripped other countries in similar circumstances” (1979, 3). They confirmed the Machiavellian insight on revolutionary creativity and state power in transforming large, agrarian, illiterate and patriarchal societies.

38 For Lindblom, the Chinese “mass line” ought to be acknowledged in the liberal world as “a form of democracy” (1977, 262). By extension, Macpherson considered those non-liberal systems which prioritized public welfare and enjoyed popular support to “have a genuine historical claim to the title democracy” (1966, 3). So much so that formal democracy theorists were earnestly baffled, see, for example, Giovanni Sartori 1987, 183–184.

39 See, in particular, Tilly 1975.

40 Olson 1982, 42–47. See also Harding 1981; Rose-Ackerman 2003.

41 Schurmann 1966; Selden 1971; White 1983; Womack 1991, 54; Blecher 1997, 220.

42 Angle 2005, 518, 541.

43 Among others, Esherick 1995 argued for “the need of breaking the 1949 barrier” (41); Cohen (2003) perceived the “diminishing significance of 1949.”

44 This dimension is of course essential and an intellectual battlefield. For example, although evidence shows that the Cultural Revolution was a period of productive and scientific growth after a couple of chaotic years (Kraus, 2012, 63–83, using statistics from the political economists Carl Riskin and Barry Naughton), it is insisted in both official Chinese accounts and relevant scholarship that China was brought to the “brink of economic collapse” during this period.

45 Lee 2007, xi.

46 Earlier explanations are widely considered outdated because of Xi Jinping's moves since 2012. Andrew Nathan (2003), for example, explained regime resilience by citing reformed “input institutions,” succession procedures, local elections, more meritocratic incentives, and a bolder critical media. More recently, Minxin Pei wrote that the regime’s post-Tiananmen survival strategy is exhausted as the “autocratic crony capitalist development model is dead,” depicting the “signs of intense elite power struggle, endemic corruption, loss of economic dynamism, and an assertive, high-risk foreign policy” (2015).

47 Shambaugh 2009, 2015, 2016.

48 Shambaugh 2016, 36–39, 99. For most China watchers, “Maoist conservative” also sounds like a contradiction in terms.

49 Dickson 2016, 312.

50 Nathan, Diamond, and Plattner 2013.

51 Dickson and his collaborators’ fieldwork yielded similar results (2016) and they addressed certain doubts raised by skeptics, but the reliability and interpretation of such polling data remain questionable.

52 Tang 2016, 17, 99, 102–103, 160. Reinventing political culture, he seemed to not care if it was once “a dirty word in contemporary Chinese studies” (Cheek 1998, 231). He even revived the notorious notion of “civic culture” (161, 166) intended to promote a “right mix” of participation, passivity, and deference.

53 See Saich 1994, 261 on leaders playing on fear of chaos; Zhao 2009 on “performance legitimacy;” Shue 2010 on a central-local bifurcation of the state in Chinese perception; and Levitsky and Way 2013 on connections between regime cohesion and repression.

54 Anderson 2010, 59.

55 Dirlik 2007, 1−2, 6. Globalization has revamped modernizationist claims in social sciences as “both a continuation and a disavowal” (Dirlik 2011, 16).

56 Relevant here is the articulation of Sinified Marxism in line with the classical Marxist thesis of uneven and compressed development, recognizing both anticipated “privilege” and predestined anguish of backwardness.

57 Social scientists are empowered by their disciplinary training, like nineteenth century neurological doctors by their medical training, in exerting specialized and institutionalized authority over the abnormality of either a category of subject matter or a group of restrained patients. Such treatment involves selections of what to preserve, eliminate, or invent as a matter of “scientific” rules. See Durkheim 1938, ch. 3; Foucault 1965; Canguilhem 1978. Also detectable in such exercises is naked racism.

58 Dirlik and Meisner 1989, 16−18.

59 Pye 1966, 115.

60 Lee 2007; Chen 2007. See also O’Brien and Li 2006; Friedman and Lee 2010; Pun and Chan 2012.

61 O’Brien and Li 2006.

62 Particularly stimulating is the Gramscian insight on a civil society buttressing political society as the state. See Cheek 1998, 236–238. For China’s phenomenal bureaucratic capitalism and interpenetration of state and society, governments and businesses, see Solinger 1992; Dickson 2003; Huang 2008; and Au 2013.

63 Goodman 1984, Introduction. Communist totalitarianism has been regularly taken as indistinguishable from Nazism and Fascism. Furet, for example, typically read into Hannah Arendt this conflation. He nevertheless admits that the concept “tells us nothing of what those communist regimes owed to the circumstances of their development” (1997, 137, 161).

64 As Wang points out, if very different political regimes in Chinese history, including dynastic courts, warlords, the Nationalist regime, the Maoist revolutionary party, and the Dengist reformsist state are all “authoritarian,” the category loses its analytical use (2011, 302). Such added adjectives as “fragmented and decentralized,” “negotiated or bargained,” “adaptive,” “responsive,” “consultative,” “deliberative,” “populist” and “resilient” mitigate but do not resolve the problem.

65 Tsou 2000. See also Meisner 1996, ch. 11 on the revival of “bureaucratic capitalism” (a characterization in the Chinese revolutionary vocabulary) in today’s China as a peculiar variant of state capitalism.

66 Portrayals of a despotic, fanatical, criminal, and murderous Mao era in Chinese, English, and other languages have surpassed even the worst Cold War propaganda (Gao 2008). Globally, even on the Left, conversations about historical communism often begin with the pretext, “although socialism has failed   … ”

67 Callahan 2016; Nolan 2017, chs 1 and 2.

68 Mills 1959. See Todd Gitlin in Mills 1959, 234. See also a critical case study by Johnson 1997. The most radical proposal from the prominent historian and political scientist Bruce Cumings in rethinking the boundaries of area and discipline is to “abolish the social sciences and group them under one heading: political economy” (1997, 26).

69 In Cumings’ astute critique, the “new Orientalist craze” of nativist self-othering is only superficially resistant as “another hyperactive spasm” of Western hopes and fears about the East (2011, 185). Vukovich shows how in a twist of Orientalism, the logic of difference is shifted to one of sameness (2012, 23−24).

70 See the debate carried in the Journal of Chinese Political Science special issues on “the state of the field: political science and Chinese political studies,” 14 (3), 14 (4) and 16 (3), 2009–2011. The essays are collected in Guo 2014. Representatively, the debate is characterized in part between “scientification” or Westernization and “indigenization” of Chinese political studies. An inspiration for the latter is “theoretical autonomy” (Huang 1991, 335).

71 Breuilly 1993, 2.

72 Geertz 2005, 37−38. Similarly, Weiner’s contextualist “is sensitized to look at a wider range of relationships than the political scientist who is not an area expert.” If he has problem applying theory, “it is not because he is perversely committed to the uniqueness of his region, but because he often finds the general theories do not work or are at a level of generalization that makes them trivial” (1975, 148).

73 Harding 1994, 701; Little 1989, 3. See also Perry on the hope of turning the China field from a “consumption domain” (relying on external concepts and theories) into a “production domain” (1999, 253). Speaking for political scientists in China, Wang argues “for the day when we become the producers and exporters of ideas, theories, and methods” (2011, 314).

74 An influential advocate of institutional innovation in China, from property rights regime to a mixed constitution, is the political scientist Cui Zhiyuan, who draws inspiration from the Brazilian thinker Roberto Unger among others. See Cui 1997.

75 Lee 2014; Sautman and Yan 2015; Brautigam 2015.

76 Heilmann 2017. See also Nathan 2003; Heilmann and Perry 2011; Saich 2016; and Tsai’s study of China’s market enabling “adaptive informal institutions” (2007).

77 China’s collective ownership and management of land differs from either state/national landholding or customary/communal land regimes. In sharp contrast with developmental hurdles caused by unequal land relations and landlessness elsewhere in the global south, the Chinese system has played a pivotal role in development. Research in this area is growing in response to rapid land commodification as a threat to food security and the livelihood of the world’s “last peasantry.”

78 For Foucault, each society has its own regime or general politics of truth, referring to the types of discourse such a regime accepts and makes “true.” Such a regime of truth is “not merely ideological or superstructural,” but a condition of social formation (1980, 111−113, 131−133). This point is best exemplified by modernization theory. As Theodore Lowi, former APSA President admitted, every regime seeks to establish a political science discipline consonant with its own interests and thus there cannot be any single truth or one science of politics (1992, 1).

79 Worth mentioning is the Maoist “revolution in education” which went a great deal farther than the Fucaultian formula of power/knowledge.