Abstract
Western studies of China have traditionally focused on Chinese culture (whence the term Sinology—implying that the study of China constituted a science or discipline in its own right). This approach became incorporated into the self-conscious movement toward a scientific method in political science, cresting in the generation following World War II, in the concept of political culture. Sinology assumes that China is sufficiently different from the “west” that it cannot be understood in terms assumed in the west. The concept of political culture is more universalistic, the product of an ambition to extend the scientific study of politics to the new political systems taking shape in the wake of decolonization. Political culture was especially a feature of modernization theory, a movement reflecting an intellectual interest in how societies change and develop but also more or less explicitly some of the political concerns of Cold War America (Westad 2005, 33–34).
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Notes
- 1.
For a readable and provocative intellectual history of the discipline during this period, see Crick (1959).
- 2.
O’Donnell (2007), asserts that the political cultural approach served to justify dictatorships for non-western or “less developed” societies, and was used both by western critics and by the dictators themselves. The method can be used in this way, and sometimes perhaps was; but it is not a necessary consequence of the method. And experience may also persuade some that what the Chinese rulers call “western style democracy” is not in fact universally applicable or universally happy in its consequences.
- 3.
Compare Weber (1951). This work is kind of a test of the Protestant ethic thesis. Although China in early modern times was on a technological par with western Europe, it did not develop capitalism (that is, industrial modernity), because of the ethos of the ruling class. On how Chairman Mao supposedly forced the conservative Confucian Chinese people to shape up, see Solomon (1971).
- 4.
Thus, Pye (1962), found members of the Burmese elite to suffer from personal uncertainties, fatalism, and lack of interpersonal trust, all stemming from the way they had been raised by their mothers and exacerbated by Burma’s experience of colonialism and then its transition to independence; and this explained Burma’s failure to develop. Lerner (1958), in a well-turned little “parable” introducing his survey of change in the Middle East, attributed to Turks an inability to imagine that things could be other than they actually are—and a rapid move away from this initial state once change had been introduced. Traditional people are pictured as sharing affinities with the “authoritarian personality,” although that syndrome was developed to explain Germans, whose vices did not include a general inability to operate a modern society, rather than Third World types; and it gave heavy stress to anti-semitism, not always a vivid preoccupation of those in the developing areas (Adorno 1950). David Horton Smith and Alex Inkles (1966) devised an “OM (overall modernity) scale” allowing the ranking of individuals in terms of how modern their attitudes were. In this, modern people belong to lots of organizations, learn about the world from school and books rather than “old people,” trust strangers, want more money than is necessary for comfort, think success in life results from one’s own efforts, and believe it is necessary (rather than wicked) to limit the size of their families. See especially p. 364 for a list of the traits. This kind of analysis, extended to take into account the alleged spread of New Age attitudes in advanced post-industrial societies, has been a lifetime work of Ronald Inglehart. Inglehart and Weitzel (2005, 200).
- 5.
There have, however, been rumors about defects in the collection of the Mexican data.
- 6.
This does not, of course, preclude a countercultural politics, a politics expressing sharp dissent from the society’s hegemonic principles.
- 7.
For an interesting discussion of the term barbarian applied to westerners, see Liu (2005, 93–104).
- 8.
A slightly different argument, one looked upon with some favor by Chinese liberals today, treats the existing system as one incapable of adaptive change. Huang (1981). In the current liberal interpretation, the communist system amounted to a reintegration of this maladaptive imperial system. Fu (1993), Huang (2007).
- 9.
Confucius, however, says a gentleman is he er butong, that he values harmony but not conformity.
- 10.
On guanxi, see Jacobs (1979).
- 11.
A possible problem with Solomon’s thesis is semantic, in that he does not use the terms oral and anal in quite the same ways as they are more commonly used in classical Freudian psychotherapy.
- 12.
Li also discusses the more detailed fieldwork conducted by Ruth L. Bunzel (1932), which formed the basis for Benedict’s interpretations.
- 13.
Perhaps Li’s own generalizations about “western” culture might be open to a similar critique.
- 14.
Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal. Leadership positions in Zuñi are held by men, and authority in the household is not with the wife but with the wife’s parents and brothers.
- 15.
The Chinese tradition also has ample discussion of this pattern (Moody 1975).
- 16.
Tsou (1995), “contends that Chinese politics remains one of winner-take-all.” But this was probably no longer true by the early twenty-first century.
- 17.
The term must be from the Latin adage: “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” if you want peace, prepare for war. According to the Wickipedia, the term parabellum was itself coined by a German weapons company, and refers to a type of cartridge.
- 18.
While this fits with cultural expectations, the enforcement of these expectations also fits with more specific political and organizational objectives.
- 19.
Indeed, in standard rational choice theory, it is a paradox that people should bother to vote at all (Schuessler 2000).
- 20.
The assumption that the structures are always exploitative would seem to be another instance of ethnocentrism, taking the mindset of the contemporary secular western chattering classes as the human norm.
- 21.
There may be a tendency to classify behavior conditioned by formal institutions (or by economic gain) as rational, in contrast to behavior somehow conditioned by culture, and to “privilege” what is considered the rational explanation over the cultural one. Kohno (1992), traces political factionalism in Japan, often treated as a cultural propensity, as a consequence of the former voting system, the single non-transferable vote. Fair enough: any cultural propensity, if it is to be viable, will need some mechanism to express itself, and the institutional and cultural systems may often reinforce each other. On the other hand, the reform of the electoral system did not eliminate LDP factionalism, although it did change the role played by factions and their leaders (Cox et al. 1999). The SNTV also contributed to factionalism in Taiwan politics, but Taiwan factionalism was different in character from that in Japan, the difference probably explainable by both formal institutional differences and differences between Japanese and Chinese political cultures.
- 22.
Particularly the essay “In Praise of Thrasymachus.”
- 23.
Scott (1985), In this work the revolutionary situation comes when objective conditions (pressures of the world market, for example) make it impossible for the elite to act according to custom.
- 24.
Kong (2006), describes a banquet honoring the widow of Liu Shaoqi, one that can be interpreted as the formal reconciliation between the Mao Zedong-Liu Shaoqi clans. The author, a popular writer, is Chairman Mao’s granddaughter.
- 25.
- 26.
It would not do to be overly sentimental about Deng Xiaoping, who was capable of being quite mean; but in a departure from the historic Leninist norm Deng refrained from humiliating or publicly attacking his defeated rivals or ousted subordinates.
- 27.
The post-structuralist paradigm goes beyond Marxism, in that Marxism generally distinguishes between false consciousness and a true perception of one’s interest—a position not without its own difficulties. In the post-structural world, there is only discourse, and nothing behind it: turtles all the way down. If this is so, it may be incoherent to try to apply cultural analysis as a tool in understanding how politics “really is.” Claims of this sort seem not merely nihilistic but self-refuting, and may be coherent only from within the post-structural paradigm. It seems possible for the ordinary person to discover real insights in discourse analysis without making into a full and closed vision of the world.
- 28.
This thesis is also central to the Long Bow television documentary, “Gate of Heavenly Peace” (1996), an account of the 1989 democracy movement and its suppression.
- 29.
And in real life, of course, it is dubious that people are always out for themselves, or that anyone ever really maximizes anything. The simple assumptions are justified insofar as they help make general sense of large areas of human behavior.
- 30.
Badie (2000), comments that in the western “construction,” culture is something that non-modern states have. In the modern west, culture is replaced by “reason”: “the force of cultural explanation fades before an analysis in terms of the universal.”
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Moody, P.R. (2013). Political Culture and the Study of Chinese Politics. In: Guo, S. (eds) Political Science and Chinese Political Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29590-4_3
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