What if social sciences had no homeland? Detour via a a Sociohistory of the Chinese State through its Archives (original) (raw)
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Authoritarianism as a Research Constraint: Political Scientists in China*
Social Science Quarterly, 2016
Objective. This article examines the ways the authoritarian nature of the regime in the People's Republic of China constrains the conduct of political science research. It further seeks to identify ways in which researchers have circumvented authoritarian controls. Methods. The article examines existing scholarly literature and curricula pertaining to Chinese politics to identify methodological and technical tendencies in the research field. It then conducts a deeper, theoretical investigation to show how researchers exploit loopholes and blindspots in the authoritarian system to generate novel research. Results. The study finds a marked propensity in the study of Chinese politics toward qualitative research. Research on local politics is considered less sensitive and thus is more prevalent than studies of the central government. Government restrictions have forced scholars to imperfect data for empirical support. Conclusion. Although it is easier to generate new findings in politically open settings, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime does not necessarily hinder advancement in social science. Quantitative research that relies on government-issued data is useful, but remains liable to government restriction. Qualitative and ethnographic research gives the researcher opportunities to bypass restrictions imposed by the regime. These opportunities depend upon the researcher's ability to immerse herself in the relevant communities, find reliable and context-aware collaborators, and develop creative ways of collecting information about state behavior.
A comparison between the Chinese Social
We argue that the communication structures in the Chinese social sciences have not yet been sufficiently reformed. Citation patterns among Chinese domestic journals in three subject areas-political science and marxism, library and information science, and economics-are compared with their counterparts internationally. Like their colleagues in the natural and life sciences, Chinese scholars in the social sciences provide fewer references to journal publications than their international counterparts; like their international colleagues, social scientists provide fewer references than natural sciences. The resulting citation networks, therefore, are sparse. Nevertheless, the citation structures clearly suggest that the Chinese social sciences are far less specialized in terms of disciplinary delineations than their international counterparts.
Unpublished honours thesis , 2018
Hostility towards the emergent Chinese School [Zhongguo xuepai] of international relations (IR) reflects a Eurocentric view of the ideal relationship between intellectuals and the state that is inconsistent with the Chinese history of thought and culture (sixiang wenhua shi). The Western intellectual division of labour between theory and policy-making has not been a feature of Chinese intellectual life until the early twentieth century, prior to which China’s pre-eminent political theorists, the Confucian shi scholar-official class, were expected to use their insights in the formation of public policy. While the scholar-official lineage ended with the fall of the Qing dynasty and concurrent rise of the Republican movement around 1912, there are signs that it is beginning to re-emerge in the figure of the IR scholar Qin Yaqing. Throughout his career, Qin has consistently demonstrated the core competencies of the traditional Confucian scholar-official - a generalist approach to theory-building, combined with an intellectual curiosity about, and even an admiration for, Western culture and values. The parallels between Qin Yaqing and the scholar-official are most apparent in the methods utilised by the former to construct a ‘Chinese School’ of international relations: a selective appropriation of the radical reformist ideas of citizen intellectuals. Qin’s engagement with the controversial Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang and his tianxia tixi thesis recalls the engagement of the late-Qing era scholar-officials with the reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. It is on this basis that a historical analogy between Qin Yaqing’s ‘Chinese School’ and the Neo-Confucian ‘Chinese learning school’ may be drawn.
Seeing for the State: The Role of Social Scientists in China’s Ethnic Classification Project
This article proposes a new understanding of the Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie) undertaken in China's southwesternmost province of Yunnan in 1954 - a project in which social scientists and Communist Party cadres set out to determine which of the dozens, if not hundreds, of minority communities in the province would be officially recognized by the state. Specifically, this article argues that ethnologists and linguists played a far greater role in the Classification and early Chinese Communist governmentality than is typically assumed. The Chinese Communists did not teach themselves how to 'see like a state,' to use James Scott's formulation, at least not when it came to the fundamentally important problem of ethnic categorization. To the contrary, the history of the Classification project is one of an inexperienced Chinese state that was able to orient itself only by observing the world through the eyes of its social scientific advisors. The 'mentality' within early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 'governmentality' was, in the case of the 1954 Ethnic Classification, in large part the mentality of the comparative social sciences.
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Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of continuous imperial assault on Chinese sovereignty. As China integrated into the capitalist world-system, neo-Confucian structures of knowledge came into question. Intellectuals took up sociology to guide China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state. Through his studies on labor, migration, and population, Chen Da contributed to the institutionalization of sociology in China. Chen sought to craft a theory of Chinese development that followed universal trajectories of progress but was also attuned to the complexity of Chinese society on the ground. Through his efforts to indigenize sociology, Chen developed a non-Marxist historical materialism, a deterritorialized and pluralistic conceptualization of China as a nation, and a theory of eugenic transformation centered on the concept of “mode of living.” The questions which Chen Da confronted are emblematic of the predicament faced by Chinese social scientists today, who again struggle with the dynamics of a deterritorialzied “Greater China,” rising social fragmentation, and refigured eugenic discourses and policies that aim to craft the Chinese people into ideal national subjects fit for post-socialist development.