China in Comparative Perspective

The following sections are included:

• About the Authors
• Acknowledgement
• Contents

You may read the chapters of this book as a textbook. It is based on 10 years of teaching the core course of a Master’s degree on China in comparative perspective. Each chapter expounds a topic in the study of China, with appropriate comparators, just as we taught it. The book and the course take up the challenge of asking whether there is anything unique or exceptional in the civilisation, cultures, politics, economies, social institutions, legal system, and states to be found in China. We hope it also challenges readers, as it has us and our students, to deepen and question their own ideas about China…

In 1793, the English King George III sent an ambassador, George Macartney, to meet with the Chinese emperor Qianlong. The task Macartney was entrusted with was to establish diplomatic and commercial relations. The encounter, however, ended in a series of ‘misunderstandings’ between the British delegation and the Chinese court: Macartney refused to kowtow in front of the Chinese emperor, and Qianlong refused to accept the presents of the British delegation…

During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), a commercialised economy had developed in China to the extent that a system of legally authorised contracts and sufficient literacy prevailed for scribes to write for ordinary farmers and money lenders letters and agreements for rental, or for sale of land, for mortgages, and for purchase of slaves (Hansen, 2000, pp. 216–219). The Tang was a very open empire, open to Indian Buddhism, Turkish princesses and wives, and Persian luxuries and crafts as well as to foreign merchants…

The ‘demographic transition’ is from couples with many children to couples with few in most of a country’s population. Lower fertility rates are combined with lower rates of mortality, which means people live longer and more of their children survive. It is what economic historians argue occurred either prior to and as a precondition for, or at the same time as, the transition to a reasonably prosperous industrial capitalist economy. It is more than just the breaking out from the kind of demographic growth that produced what Mark Elvin called China’s high-level equilibrium trap because its main condition is security of income for the relatively poor. So it is more than simply the relief of the population pressure on land…

What is ‘religion’? Is there ‘religion’ in China, and if so what is its importance?

To answer these questions, we need to frame them with a discussion of the anthropology and sociology of religion and consider how they provide for an analysis of what is distinctive about religion in China. This will lead us automatically into a number of comparisons between religion and secularity in Europe with religion and secularity in China and indeed into a comparison between civilisations at each end of the Eurasian land mass. This will take us to the way in which the modern state in China, as well as those in Europe, use the categories of 'religion' and 'civilisation'…

What kind of nationalism was created in China and what kind of modern state was created in the course of the republican movement? To answer these questions, we should start from the last dynastic state of China. This will bring into question a comparison with European nationalism, as part of European imperialism. From there, we can fruitfully consider a comparison between Indian and Chinese republican states in modernity.

Aside from the end of the last dynasty in 1911, the Communist revolution is perhaps the most significant event in the twentieth century in China. This chapter will deal first with revolutions in world history, discussing broader frameworks of comparison. The second part deals with the various interpretations and explanations of the Chinese Communist revolution. The third part then deals with specific features of the Communist revolution, namely the personality cult of Mao Zedong and the particularities of guerrilla warfare. Both aspects are set within broader interpretive frameworks dealing with revolutionary struggle in the twentieth century.

This chapter introduces debates in the sociology and political science of socialism, including topics such as the transformations of local society, the relative reach of the central state, and the distinction between ‘reds’ and ‘experts’. These questions are discussed for the case of Maoist China and compared mainly with Stalinism in the Soviet Union.

This chapter discusses the changes Chinese economy and politics underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. The main debates about the transition from socialism deal with China’s relative economic success and the changes in the political regime, including the questions of social pluralism and managed authoritarianism. The main comparator is Russia, but other post-socialist countries are also drawn upon…

One of the conventions of neo-classical economics is that the nearer an economy is to a perfect market system, the better it is for growth and efficiency. At the same time, they recognise that there are what they call ‘externalities’ to markets and admit that there is a possibility of market failure. These include inability to cope with ecological damage. Or dealing with the poverty that comes from being laid off without being able to find another job despite willingness to find work, or supplementing pay that is so low it is below the poverty line. Further, the capitalist imperative to form monopolies in order to seek profits through prices above what would be market rates in ‘free’ competition always creates ‘imperfections’. Innovation can create a temporary monopoly; indeed, the advantage of being able to set a price for a new product or fashion or the raised productivity an innovation allows is part of capitalist competition. Market ideology assumes that competitors would soon reduce that advantage. But monopoly advantages are created without the virtues of innovation, for instance by cartels or for another instance by the privatisation of state monopolies, creating longer term imperfections. Such imperfections are a necessary part of the functioning of a capitalist market economy, the seeking of advantage and profit, even though market perfection is part of the science and the ideology of capitalist economics. So, since the onset of political economy in the work of Adam Smith, economists have acknowledged that the state has vital functions in establishing and maintaining a market economy, whether in liberal or more social democratic economic theories…

China like so many European states on the eve of the industrial revolution was an agrarian empire. But unlike the remaining serfs of Europe in the seventeenth century, and in some places such as Russia even later, Chinese farmers were not tied to their land (the ‘manor’ in England) in the sense that transfers of land were also transfers of those that cultivated it. Land had been a commodity, bought and sold, in China since at least the Tang dynasty, eighth–ninth centuries. Its cultivators had been owners or tenants of owners of land. In a closely linked contrast, the cultivation of land defined the second highest status according to the Confucian ideology, on a par with the freeholding ‘yeomen’ of Britain, whereas the serfs of Britain were the lowest class of commoner. Then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergent social sciences of rural sociology, anthropology and folklore in Europe, China, India, and Latin America, following movements of nationalism and the formation of modern states, the cultivators of the land were called ‘peasants’. In China, this had a striking effect. What had been a category of high status, nong, became a far more ambivalently valued mass of peasants, nongmin. Chinese peasants could be highly valued as the sources of the tradition that nationalists celebrated. But on the other hand, they could also be valued, if that is the right word, as reactionary and, because less educated, backward (Cohen, 1993)…

It was claimed by the famous historian of the working class in England, Thompson (1967) that the chronologically and mechanically disciplined work of the factory replaced the more seasonal and multiple task-oriented temporality of farming. Abstract, chronological and clock time gradually replaced the more local times and times of seasons. In addition, Thompson argued that factory work was increasingly divided from domestic and leisure time. Work as an instrument for wage earning, for income to be spent in leisure time, replaced farming as family labour, that is at once social and instrumental. These contrasts are valid, but they need modification…

It has long been a sociological tenet that with industrial capitalism and urbanisation comes a new sense of self, often described as individualism. The modern individual is self-conscious (or reflexive), nurtured in the intimacy of family relations that are no longer related to production but whose emphatic function is emotional and the nurturing of a sense of identity. Bodily appearance to others is a vital manifestation of this selfidentity. Anthony Giddens’ Modernity and self-identity; self and society in the late modern age (1991) is a classical text summing up these conclusions. And like many sociologists, Giddens’ examples are all based on Europe and North-America…

Since the inventions of writing in various parts of the world, about 5,000 years ago, the ability to write and read was the privilege of a small minority until state nationalism instituted mass schooling only a century ago. In China, mass literacy, the expectation that all children should learn to read and write, has been realised only in the last 60 years. One of the standard institutions is the school system, which is compulsory in most contemporary states…

1989 was the year of civil society, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the year of the most recent grassroots social movement in China. And as it happens, 1989 was also the year of publication of the English translation of Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, possibly the most influential elaboration of the idea of civil society…

These two quotes, from the Analects of Confucius, and from the Law Code of the Qing dynasty, are both about the ‘principle of concealing one’s relatives’. The popular saying ‘The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father’ (fu wei zi yin, zi wei fu yin) is still widely known in China, as is the shorter form ‘relatives mutually conceal their misconduct’ (qin qin xiang yin). These principles of ‘concealing ones relatives’ nicely embodies the potential conflict between Confucian morality and the law in China. In the first section of this chapter, we will deal with the opposition between Confucianism and Legalism. This will be followed by a discussion of the introduction of modern ‘rule of law’ in China, which will be compared with developments in India. The last sections deal with questions of the law in contemporary China and a brief outlook on contemporary and future developments.

In a series of three blog entries posted in late December 2011, the blogger and author Han Han expressed a series of opinions that are common statements to refuse the applicability of Western theories of liberal democracy to China. He wrote that China does not need a revolution, be it a ‘velvet revolution’ (Czech Republic) or a ‘green revolution’ (Egypt). The ‘quality’ (suzhi) of the Chinese people is too low to have a democracy now. The only possibility is small-scale, slow reform. One point to start with is increased freedom in culture, publishing, press and cinema (Han, 2011a–c).

At the same time, there is a long history of democracy (minzhu) in China, which includes numerous engagements with Western theories of democracy. This chapter first sets out different theories and concepts of democracy, and then provides some suggestions about a comparison of Chinese democracy with Indian democracy. Further topics are the historical relationship of democracy and economic development, and how it applies to contemporary China. Theories of liberal democracy are then contrasted with the Maoist theory of 'people's' democracy. The last section deals with the possibilities of procedural democracy, and alternative concepts of democracy in contemporary China.

For every topic in which we put China into comparative perspective, from empire to democracy, we have asked whether China is an exception. And every time, the answer is mainly ‘no’ but also ‘yes’. That is itself no exception. Whichever history and country we might have considered in depth, as we have China, the answer would have been the same. But the ‘yes’ is also what is most interesting because it forces us to review the ways those topics have been treated. It forces us to pay them critical attention. This book has provided the means for a critical review of the various social sciences we have covered and brought Chinese history and current realities to bear on them.

The following section is included:

• Index