'The Social Sources of Chinese Power', Chinese Sociological Review 51(1) 2019: 76-83. (original) (raw)
China's Rise to Power: Conceptions of State Governance
International Planning Studies, 2014
China has undergone rapid social transformations since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1945. Under a series of social transformations, China has encountered different types of tensions and conflicts; internal unrests and diplomatic challenges, conflicts from the legacy of Maoism, and pro-growth pragmatism. These tensions and conflicts are expressed in the state's projects, techniques of rule, and everyday life in China. To capture the political and socio-economic dynamics, the writers employ dialectical thinking to elucidate the contractions and dynamics between the Maoist past and reformist present through Confucianism's ideological building, history and memory reproduction, mass media control, ethnic conflict, health-care reform, and food security issues. This book is divided into 10 chapters. In Chapter 1, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Lida V. Nedilsky establish their analytical lens by using a governance perspective to understand China's historical and structural changes. The writers introduce four major analytical periods to ponder China's rise to power: (1) the influences of Mao's revolutionary idealism towards China and other parts of the world, (2) the economic revolution under Deng Xiao Ping's pragmatism and Four Modernizations, (3) the Tiananmen square crackdown in 1989, which marked the watershed for the persistence of authoritarianism, and (4) the re-integration of Confucianism to construct China's harmonious society and peaceful rise towards diplomatic relationships. In Chapter 2, Kelvin C.K. Cheung elucidates how Mainland and Taiwanese governments use Confucianism as a tool to shape the ideological landscapes, to legitimize the hierarchical order of the state, and to utilize its instrumental values to tackle internal and external problems. For Mainland China, the new ideologies of building a harmonious society inside china and peaceful rise in diplomatic affairs become a new rhetoric to rebrand China's position in the twenty-first century. By reviewing Taiwan's governance, the critiques of Confucianism by the Democratic Progressive Party became another way of de-sinification in Taiwan and reinvented restrictions in local politics. This is an interesting point for further consideration concerning how the state promotes Confucianism as a project to imbue citizens with patriotism and obedience.
The issue of (in)compatibility between Confucianism and modern democracy, particularly in China, has attracted much debate over the decade. This article singles out the particular notion of Minben民本, which is at the center of the argument for a “Confucian democracy,” and argues that it is fundamentally different from modern democracy. However, this does not mean that Confucianism could not be connected with modern democracy. The important question is: what exactly does it mean to “connect” Confucianism to modern society? The author argues that only by being disconnected with political power could there be meaningful “Confucian democracy” today in China.
East Asia, 2022
Chinese cultural conservatism used to participate in shaping the course of modernization to a large extent. In this paper, I aim to describe a hidden lineage of Chinese cultural conservatism of the twentieth century that is still alive and appears to be more and more influential in mainland China. Relying on several ideas developed by Neo-Confucians of the early twentieth century, Gan Yang's paper in 2007 represented a contemporary revival of Chinese cultural conservatism. More importantly, in recent years, this kind of revival of conservative discourse went through another big change, which not only matters to the self-underpinning of the legitimate basis of the current regime, but also combined with the political conservations related to the Hong Kong protest of 2019-2020 explains why this country is so ideologically different from the West.
The Rise of the Social and the Chinese State
China Information, 2003
The systematic straddlings between political and economic spheres that the Chinese society is witnessing does not seem to impede economic growth. Does that mean that China has to be considered an exception in the apparent convergence of different modernizing countries towards the Weberian model of the state? In this article I suggest another way of solving the apparent contradiction between the two faces of Chinese society. When Chinese society is compared with modern societies as they really function the contradiction disappears. Indeed, according to numerous authors, modern societies are not characterized by a clear distinction between public and private spheres, economic and political relations but by the blurring of these distinctions under the influence of a societalization of the state. In other words, political life is more and more centered on “domestic” problems (income, investment, employment, etc.) while the control of the state on society is gradually increasing. As we c...