The world is suddenly talking about the emergence of “Greater China.” The term has appeared in the headlines of major newspapers and magazines, has been the topic of conferences sponsored by prominent think-tanks, and is now the theme of a special issue of the world's leading journal of Chinese affairs. It thus joins other phrases – “the new world order,” “the end of history,” “the Pacific Century” and the “clash of civilizations” – as part of the trendiest vocabulary used in discussions of contemporary global affairs.
Research on contemporary Chinese politics can be divided into two distinct generations since its initiation in the early 1960s. The first, produced before the Cultural Revolution, was characterized by general description rather than systematic comparison or sophisticated conceptualization. The second generation, which appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, assigned greater attention to describing the variation of Chinese politics over space and time, identifying the informal norms and mechanisms by which Chinese politics operates, and developing general theories of the Chinese political process. In a third generation, which is just now beginning to emerge, we should see efforts to absorb the new sources of information now available about China; to sort, test, and amalgamate the competing models produced by the second generation; to integrate the analysis of Chinese politics with the rest of comparative politics; and to study Chinese politics in an interdisciplinary fashion.
The three articles which follow provide a review of the development of the study of domestic Chinese politics over the last decade. The first, by Elizabeth Perry of the University of California at Berkeley, is on state-society relations. The second, by Avery Goldstein of the University of Pennsylvania, deals with political elites and institutions. The third, by Peter Moody of the University of Notre Dame, addresses the study of political culture. Although the three essays do not claim to provide an exhaustive survey of the analysis of Chinese politics, they do offer a reasonably comprehensive overview of the field in the early 1990s.
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