CHINA STUDIES

The sociological study of China has a complex history. It could be argued that Confucian thought embodied a native tradition of sociological thinking about such things as the family, bureaucracy, and deviant behavior. However, modern Chinese sociology initially had foreign origins and inspiration. The appearance of the field in China might be dated from the translation of parts of Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology into Chinese in 1897. The earliest sociology courses and departments in China were established in private, missionary colleges, and Western sociologists such as D. H. Kulp, J. S. Burgess, and Sidney Gamble played central roles in initiating sociology courses and research programs within China (see Wong 1979).

The Chinese Sociological Association was established in 1930, and in the following two decades a process of Sinification progressed. Chinese sociologists, trained both at home and in the West, emerged. Sociology courses and departments began to proliferate in government-run, public colleges. Increasingly, texts using material from Chinese towns and villages displaced ones that focused on Chicago gangs and the assimilation of Polish immigrants into America. As this process of setting down domestic roots continued, Chinese sociology developed some distinctive contours. Inspiration for the field came as much from British social anthropology as from sociology. The crisis atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s fostered a strong emphasis on applied, problem-solving research. As a result of these developments, Chinese sociology in those years came to include what in the United States might be considered social anthropology and social work. Within these broad contours, Chinese sociologists/anthropologists produced some of the finest early ethnographies of "nonprimitive" communities—Chinese peasant villages (see Fei 1939; Yang 1944; Lin 1948).

Although many of the earliest leaders in establishing Chinese sociology were foreigners, by the time of the Chinese communist victory in 1949, its leading practitioners were Chinese. There were only a small number of Western sociologists who concentrated their research on Chinese society (see Lang 1946; Levy 1949), and their methods, problems, and data were not distinctive from those being employed by their Chinese counterparts. Originally a foreign transplant, Chinese sociology had become a thriving enterprise with increasingly strong domestic roots.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) swept to national power in 1949, some Chinese sociologists left the country but most remained. (The development of sociology in the Republic of China on Taiwan after 1949 will not be dealt with here.) Initially, those who remained were optimistic that their skills would be useful to the new government. Experience in community fieldwork and an orientation toward studying social problems seemed to make Chinese sociologists natural allies of those constructing a planned social order. These hopes were dashed in 1952 when the CCP abolished the field of sociology. That decision was motivated by the CCP's desire to follow the Soviet model. Joseph Stalin had earlier denounced sociology as a "bourgeois pseudo-science" and banned the field from Soviet academe. More to the point, there was no room in the People's Republic of China (PRC) for two rival sciences of society, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and sociology. The CCP argued that it had developed its own methods of "social investigations" during the revolutionary process, with Mao Zedong playing a leading role in this development (see Mao [1927] 1971; Thompson 1990). This approach stressed grass roots investigations designed to further official revolutionary or economic goals of the CCP rather than any sort of attempted value-free search for objective truth. Chinese sociologists, trained in a different tradition and able to use professional claims to raise questions about CCP policies, were seen as a threat to the ideological hegemony of the new regime.

The ban on sociology in China was to last twenty-seven years, until 1979. One major attempt was made by Chinese sociologists in 1956 and 1957 to get the ban lifted. In the more relaxed political atmosphere prevailing at that time, ushered in by the CCP's slogan "let 100 flowers bloom and 100 schools of thought contend" and encouraged by the revival of sociology in the Soviet Union, leading figures such as Fei Xiaotong, Pan Guangdan, Wu Jingchao, and Chen Da wrote articles and made speeches arguing that sociology could be useful to socialist China in the study of social change and social problems—precisely the same rationale used prior to 1952. When the political atmosphere turned harsh again in the latter part of 1957, with the launching of the "antirightist campaign," Fei and many of the other leaders of this revival effort were branded "rightist elements" and disappeared from view.

From 1952 to 1979 some of those trained in sociology were assigned to work that had some links to their abolished field. Throughout this period ethnology remained an established discipline, devoted to the study of China's various ethnic minorities. When Fei Xiaotong emerged from his political purgatory in 1972, it was as a leading figure in ethnology. But Fei and others could not do research on the 94 percent of the population that is Han Chinese, and they also had to renounce publicly all their former work and ideas as "bourgeois." Psychology survived better than sociology by becoming defined as a natural, rather than a social, science. Some areas of social psychology (for example, educational psychology) remained at least somewhat active through the 1960s and 1970s (see Chin and Chin 1969). Other components of sociology disappeared in 1952 but reappeared prior to 1979. Demography was established as a separate field in the early 1970s and remains a separate discipline in Chinese academe today. With these partial exceptions, however, Chinese sociology ceased to exist for these twenty-seven years.

While sociology was banned in China, the sociological study of that society developed gradually in the West. Starting in the late 1950s, American foundations and government agencies, and to some extent their European and Japanese counterparts, provided funds for the development of the study of contemporary China—for fellowships, research centers, journals, language training facilities, and other basic infrastructure for the field. Within this developmental effort, sociology was targeted as an underdeveloped discipline (compared to, say, history, literature, and political science) deserving of special priority. Stimulated by this developmental effort, during the 1960s and 1970s the number of Western sociologists active in the study of China increased from a handful to perhaps two dozen.

Prior to the early 1970s, with a few minor exceptions (e.g., Geddes 1963), it was impossible for foreign sociologists to travel to China, much less to do research there. Even when such travel became possible during the 1970s, it was initially restricted to very superficial "academic tourism." In this highly constrained situation, foreign sociologists studying China developed distinctive research methods.

Much research was based on detailed culling of Chinese mass media reports. Special translation series of Chinese newspapers and magazines and of monitored radio broadcasts developed in the 1950s and became the mainstays of such research. The Chinese media provided fairly clear statements about official policy and social change campaigns. By conveying details about local "positive and negative models" in the implementation of official goals, the media also provided some clues about the difficulties and resistance being encountered in introducing social change. In a few instances the media even yielded apparently "hard" statistical data about social trends. A minor industry developed around scanning local press and radio reports for population totals, and these were pieced together to yield national population estimates (typically plus or minus 100 million).

Some researchers developed elaborate schemes to code and subject to content analysis such media reports (see, for example, Andors 1977; Cell 1977). However, this reliance on media reports to study Chinese social trends had severe limits. Such reports revealed much more about official goals than they did about social reality, and the researcher might erroneously conclude that an effort to produce major changes was actually producing them. The sorts of unanticipated consequences that sociologists love to uncover were for the most part invisible in the highly didactic Chinese media. It was also very difficult to use media reports to analyze variations across individuals and communities, the staple of sociological analysis elsewhere. Studies based on media reports tended to convey an unrealistic impression of uniformity, thus reinforcing the prevailing stereotype of China as a totalitarian society.

Partly in reaction to these limitations, a second primary method of research on China from the outside developed—the refugee interview. Scholars in sociology and related fields spent extended periods of time in Hong Kong interviewing individuals who had left the PRC for the British colony. Typically, these individuals were used not as respondents in a survey but as ethnographic informants "at a distance" about the corners of the Chinese social world from which they had come. Although the individuals interviewed obviously were not typical of the population remaining in the PRC, for some topics these refugees provided a rich and textured picture of social reality that contrasted with the unidimensional view conveyed by Chinese mass media. Elaborate techniques were developed by researchers to cope with the problems of atypicality and potential bias among refugee informants (see Whyte 1983).

By combining these methods with brief visits to China, sociologists and others produced a large number of useful studies of contemporary mainland society (Whyte, Vogel, and Parish 1977). Even though the arcane methods they used often seemed to nonspecialists akin to Chinese tea-leaf reading, the best of these studies have stood the test of time and have been confirmed by new research made possible by changes in China since 1979. However, the exclusion from meaningful field research in China did have unfortunate effects on the intellectual agendas of researchers. Much energy was focused on examining the "Maoist model" of development and whether or not China was succeeding in becoming a revolutionary new type of social order. Since the reality of Chinese social organizations in the Maoist period was quite different from the slogans and ideals upon which such constructions were based, this effort appears to have been a waste of scarce intellectual resources. Both this unusual intellectual agenda and the distinctive research methods sociologists studying China were forced to use reinforced the isolation of these researchers from "mainstream" work in sociology.

The year 1979 was significant in two ways for the sociological study of China. First, as already noted, that was the year in which China's leaders gave approval for the "rehabilitation" of sociology. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and given the authority crisis that followed in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao leadership reopened many issues. China faced a number of serious social problems that had been ignored previously, and in this situation long-standing arguments about the utility of sociology for the study of social problems could be raised once again.

The second major change that occurred in 1979 was the "normalization" of diplomatic relations between the United States and China. That development led to approval for American and other Western researchers to conduct extended field research in China for the first time since 1949. The days of frustrating confinement to research from outside and academic tourism were over. It also became possible for U.S. sociologists to meet Chinese counterparts and to begin to discuss common research interests and plans for collaboration. Westerners began coming to China to teach sociology courses, Chinese began to be sent abroad for training in sociology, and collaborative conferences and publications were initiated. Leading figures in the West, including Peter Blau, Alex Inkeles, Nan Lin, W. J. Goode, Hubert Blalock, and Jeffrey Alexander, lectured in China and recruited Chinese courterparts for collaborative research and for training in their home institutions. All of the kinds of intellectual interchange between Chinese sociologists and their foreign counterparts that had been impossible for a generation were resumed.

The dangerous political aura surrounding sociology in the Mao era and the lesson of the abortive 1957 attempt to revive the field might have been expected to make it difficult to attract talented people to Chinese sociology after 1979. However, the field revived very rapidly and showed surprising intellectual vigor. A number of surviving pre-1949 sociologists reappeared to play leading roles in the revival, considerable numbers of middle-aged individuals trained in related fields were recruited (or ordered) to become sociologists, and many young people expressed eagerness to be selected for training in the field. The Chinese Sociological Association was formally revived, with Fei Xiaotong as its head. (Fei "unrenounced" his pre-1949 works, weakened his ties with ethnology, and resumed advocacy of the program of Chinese rural development he had championed a generation earlier.) A number of departments of sociology were established in leading universities, and new sociological journals and a large number of monographs and textbooks began to appear. Institutes of sociology were established within the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Peking as well as in many provincial and city academies. Apparently, the novelty of the field, the chance to make a place for oneself, and perhaps even the chance to study abroad without having to face competition from layers of senior people more than compensated for the checkered political past of sociology. In any case, the speed and vigor with which the field revived surprised the skeptics (see Whyte and Pasternak 1980).

The intellectual focus of the revived sociology was fairly broad. Social problems and the sociology of development were two major foci. Within these and other realms, two sets of issues loomed large. One was the study of the after-effects of the Cultural Revolution and the radical policies pursued under Mao Zedong in the period 1966 to 1976. The other major issue concerned the impact of the opening to the outside world, decollectivization of agriculture, and the market-oriented reforms launched in 1978. A large number of studies began on these and other issues, and by the end of the 1980s the problem facing foreign sociologists studying China was not so much the scarcity of data on their object of study but its abundance. The publication of large amounts of statistical material, the availability of census and survey data dealing with demographic and other matters, and the mushrooming of social science publications threatened to overwhelm those who tried to keep track of Chinese social trends.

In pursuing their new intellectual agendas, Chinese sociologists easily found common ground with Western specialists. The latter were no longer so entranced with the Maoist model and shared a fascination with the social impact of the post-Mao changes. Many Western specialists readily adapted to the chance to conduct research in China and to collaborate with Chinese colleagues. Hong Kong did not die out as a research site and remained vital for some topics, but work from outside China was increasingly seen as supplementary to research conducted within the country. (After 1997 and Hong Kong's reversion to China this was still the case, as the special autonomy enjoyed by the former British colony produced a freer research atmosphere than in the rest of the country.) China specialists now had to share the stage with many sociologists who did not have area studies training. With data more readily available and collaboration with Chinese counterparts possible, area studies training and familiarity with the arcane techniques developed in the 1960s and 1970s were no longer so important. Many non-China specialists found the opportunity to study the world's most populous society increasingly attractive. These changes have been beneficial for China specialists within sociology. Given their small numbers and the complexity of Chinese society, there is more than enough "turf" to be shared with sociologists not trained in China studies. And these changes have reduced the intellectual isolation of the specialists, from both colleagues in China and those in their own departments.

As a result of these changes, Chinese sociologists ended their isolation from world sociology, and Western sociologists conducting research on China escaped from a highly constrained environment and began to produce work that was less idiosyncratic. It should be noted, however, that sociological research in China is not without limits, either for foreign researchers or for Chinese. Even in the most liberal phases of the initial reform decade from 1979 to 1989, some topics remained taboo, some locales were off limits, and bureaucratic obstruction and interference were constant facts of life. Nonetheless, even for foreigners it became possible to conduct extended ethnographic studies, carry out probability sample surveys, and gain access for secondary analysis to the raw data from census and survey studies conducted by Chinese, experiences that those who were studying the Soviet Union before its collapse could only envy. The result was a new spurt of research activity and publication that enriched our knowledge of Chinese social life immensely. (For a review of Western research during the decade after 1979, see Walder 1989. For an overview of developments within Chinese sociology during that period, see Lu 1989.)

However, the political fallout from the 1989 Tiananmen massacre raised new problems for the sociological study of China. At least some conservatives within the Chinese leadership used the crackdown following the massacre to attack sociology and other newly revived social sciences in terms reminiscent of 1952 and 1957. The field was once again accused of being an ideological Trojan horse designed to spread doubts about socialist orthodoxy. Some sociology departments were not allowed to enroll new students, while others had their enrollment targets cut. While these restrictions eased after a year or two, new and serious threats to collaborative research projects continued through the 1990s. Edicts designed to restrict and maintain strict political control over survey projects involving foreign collaboration were passed in secret in 1990 and 1995, resulting in the confiscation of survey data already collected in one instance and delays and torpedoing of projects in others. (The data confiscated after the 1990 secret edict were eventually released to the researchers involved, and other stalled projects resumed, but only after several years of tense negotiations.) In 1998 an international collaborative survey project in social gerontology was publicly attacked within China for allegedly endangering the health of China's elderly and having a concealed aim of enabling foreigners to profit from the "genetic secrets" of the Chinese people. Only after a vigorous public defense from both foreign and Chinese researchers was the disputed project saved. These developments mean that researchers who embark on sociological research within China on even quite nonpolitical topics face some risk that they will not be able to complete their projects due to political interference.

Despite the unpredictable political environment, Chinese and foreign sociologists pressed ahead with a wide-ranging variety of research activities during the 1990s. The success of this effort is a testament to the increasingly robust ties linking Chinese and foreign sociologists. During the 1980s large numbers of aspiring young Chinese sociologists were sent abroad for doctoral training, primarily to the United States. By the latter part of that decade and into the 1990s, a majority of the Western sociology doctoral theses dealing with China were being produced by students from China. After the 1989 Tiananmen massacre most of these newly minted specialists on Chinese society did not return to China, but instead embarked on research careers in the West. However, mindful of the desirability of leaving the door open for their eventual return, China did not treat this decision as disloyalty, but instead in most instances encouraged and invited these foreign-based Chinese sociologists to visit China to assist in the development of the discipline there and to undertake collaborative research projects. These young, foreign-trained sociologists are able to come and go and to navigate the complex political and bureaucratic terrain surrounding sociological research within China much more easily than their non-Chinese counterparts. Furthermore, the relatively smaller number of Chinese sociologists trained abroad who have returned to the PRC usually have found their new skills and contacts valued and rewarded, rather than treated with envy and suspicion. Many of these individuals are moving up rapidly into positions of responsibility and leadership within Chinese research institutes and universities, where they are generally able to keep research projects moving ahead despite bureaucratic obstacles. As a result of these trends, an increasing share of the new sociological research initiatives and publications that are having an impact on China studies in the West involve sociologists from China, whether currently based abroad or within China.

The changing sources of funding for research on Chinese society also are having an impact. Whereas in the past most research by Chinese social scientists was funded by the Chinese government and was responsive to state priorities and concerns, in the reform era Chinese sociologists and others in China face increasing constraints on government funding of research. New competitive peer review procedures are being introduced to determine who gets scarce research funds, and Chinese authorities encourage research institutes and researchers to find ways to raise or obtain funds on their own to support their research. In this altered environment a variety of Western and international sources of funding—from United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, foreign nongovernmental organizations, etc.—have become important in financing research that Chinese sociologists otherwise could not carry out. This changed funding picture thus reinforces other trends that are strengthening the links between sociology within China and abroad.

While the topics pursued within the sociological study of China in the 1990s were varied, the dominant focus was still on the process of market reforms. Some of the impetus for this focus came from a comparison with developments in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Sociologists have joined others in trying to understand why to date the dismantling of central planning and the introduction of market reforms have generally been much more successful in China than in Eastern Europe (see, for example, Rozman 1992; Walder 1996a). The bulk of this research, however, looks not at the causes, but at the social consequences of the reforms, and here the concerns are varied and wide-ranging. For example, spirited debates have arisen about whether or in what respects the reforms are contributing to increased inequality within China, and about whether prereform political elites are largely monopolizing the gains produced by the reforms or are being displaced increasingly by new elites (see, for example, Nee 1996; Xie and Hannum 1996; Walder 1996b; Bian and Logan 1996; Zhou, Tuma, and Moen 1996; Buckley 1997). Sociologists and others are also examining the new entrepreneurial class arising within China as a result of market reforms to determine what sorts of social origins they have, and researchers on this topic debate whether these entrepreneurs are a force for political change or are, instead, co-opted and controlled as a result of their dependence upon the state (see, for example, Unger 1996; Nevitt 1999). Research on the latter theme is part of a larger exploration of whether China's reforms are leading to the development of institutions of a "civil society" that might eventually lead to the democratization of China's political system (see Whyte 1992; White 1993). Within research on Chinese stratification there is also a growing body of work considering whether, on balance, the reforms have been harmful or beneficial in terms of the quest for gender equality (see Bauer et al. 1992; Croll 1994; Lee 1998; Entwisle and Henderson forthcoming). Another major focus of research concerns changes in Chinese family life, with the investigation of topics such as rising divorce and premarital sex rates and whether such trends indicate that Chinese family patterns are increasingly "converging" toward the patterns found in other societies (e.g. Xu and Whyte 1990; Davis and Harrell 1993; Logan, Bian, and Bian forthcoming). Still another major focus is on tracing the impact of particular reform changes—for example, the relaxation of migration restrictions that have allowed tens of millions of rural migrants to flood into China's cities, the attempt to revive labor markets as a way of distributing jobs, and the layoffs and unemployment being generated by reforms of China's inefficient state-owned enterprises (e.g. Bian 1994; Guthrie 1997; Matthews 1998)Solinger 1995; Sensenbrenner 1996.

Another primary research focus of China sociologists, in addition to the causes and consequences of the post-1978 economic reforms, involves China's dramatic fertility decline and its social consequences. The transformation of China from a society with moderately high fertility (total fertility rates of 5+) to extraordinarily low rates (total fertility rates under 2) has occurred in roughly the same time period as China's economic reforms (from the 1970s through the 1990s), but these two fundamental changes have been produced by contradictory processes. Whereas in economic affairs the state has increasingly withdrawn from bureaucratic management and has allowed markets to govern distribution, in regard to population the state has shifted away from indirect management and persuasion in favor of direct bureaucratic mandating of fertility quotas. The high national priority of this fertility reduction program has complex implications, in terms of sociological research. High priority, combined with recurring foreign criticism of China's human rights record in the realm of family planning (see Whyte 1998), produce political sensitivities that often obstruct and constrain research on this topic. However, that same priority has made research on topics related to fertility so important that foreign as well as Chinese demographers and others have been recruited to help plan and carry out a large number of high-quality surveys of China's demographic dynamics. These data have also in most instances been made available for examination by foreign as well as Chinese researchers. On balance the result has been a boom in research on China's population and a much better understanding of current trends in fertility, mortality, and other demographic domains than existed prior to the 1980s (see, for example, Banister 1987; Coale 1984; Feeney and Yuan 1994; Riley and Riley 1997).

In sum, recurring political turbulence in China has in some cases obstructed and delayed sociological research, but both the field and its practitioners have continued to forge ahead despite the uncertainties involved. The rapid and complex social changes that have occurred in China in the 1980s and 1990s have provided many new research questions for sociologists to explore, and a maturing network of Chinese sociologists and foreign China specialists (and nonspecialist sociologists interested in studying the world's most populous and most rapidly developing society) have taken advantage of new research opportunities. As a result of these changes the sociological study of China at the end of the 1990s was much better established than it was two decades earlier, with a wide variety of social processes and trends better studied and more fully understood.

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Martin King Whyte