CHINA

China

China

Introduction

Since late 1976, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended, the People's Republic of China has undergone a series of profound political changes, which had reached a turning point during the Democracy movement of 1989. These changes have challenged Western scholars to update and refine their knowledge and understanding of contemporary Chinese politics. Confronted by these challenges, however, students of Chinese politics in the West have not yet developed a theoretically complete and in-depth explanation of these ongoing changes, except for some narrative observations on the Democracy movement of 1989. Moreover, it seems even more academically frustrating that previous theoretical approaches to the study of Chinese politics, despite their sophistication, fail to provide a conceptual framework in which the nature and pattern of sociopolitical changes occurring since the Cultural Revolution can be systematically analyzed and the future of the Chinese polity can be predicted. (Bickers, 1999)

Society, Governmental, Economic and Social Politics

Political change in China since the Cultural Revolution, and especially the commencement of the post-Mao reform, has inspired many studies in the West. Among many approaches, two stand out as most central in contributing to our understanding of recent political changes in China. Both have their limitations as well as merits. One of these approaches argues that the unique and deeply rooted Chinese culture (or tradition) has long fostered totalitarian rules of any Chinese national governments and their official ideologies; let us call this argument the totalitarian approach. As C. P. Fitzgerald pointed out, this approach treats the Communist regime as a contemporary incarnation of Chinese totalitarian tradition:

The Chinese Communists, embracing a world authoritarian doctrine in place of one local to China, have enlarged the arena in which old Chinese ideas can once more be put into practice, in more modern guise, expanded to the new scale, but fundamentally the same ideas which inspired the builders of the Han Empire and the restorers of the T'ang. (Fitzgerald 1964, p.42)

According to this approach, any drastic or qualitative political change is unlikely to happen in China unless the orientation of the Chinese culture can be shifted away from the preference for totalitarianism.

This approach, which is derived from a sinological tradition that underscored the uniqueness of Chinese culture, firmly embraces two major analytical propositions: (1) Chinese political culture inherently has a strong and popular preference for totalitarian rule, or "wise-and-able" monarchy (xianming junzhu), and (2) this culture, as the sociopolitical and psychological ...