China in Comparative Perspective

Stephan Feuchtwang, Hans Steinm????ller;;;

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786342416
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

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China in Comparative Perspective provides an overview of China based on empirical observation by field workers, as well as on historical documents, Chinese literary and philosophical texts and core theoretical frameworks in the social sciences. It enables readers to develop ways of putting the modern history, politics, economy and society of China into a framework in which China can be compared and contrasted with other countries.

Topics covered include the rise of capitalism, post-socialist transformations, family and gender, nationalism, democracy, and civil society. Each chapter offers a comparison with other countries in East and South-Asia, Europe and the rest of the world, showing how analytic concepts have to be modified to avoid either Eurocentric or Sinocentric bias, and how ideas derived from Chinese sources and observations must be accommodated for complete understanding of the issues discussed.

Written by two well-known anthropologists of China from the London School of Economics, Stephan Feuchtwang and Hans Steinmüller, this book is a comprehensive course for postgraduate students in Chinese and Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, political economy, politics and international relations.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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.

Every chapter introduces a number of different approaches to the topic; different general treatments and their particular applications to analyses of China and comparable countries. You will note that in most cases these are given some historical depth as well as dealing with contemporary China, chiefly the People’s Republic of China.

You may also read this book simply as an in-depth introduction to the study of China, appropriate to a number of social science disciplines ranging through economic history, international history, political science, sociology, demography, religious studies, and anthropology. As anthropologists, we have stretched ourselves to include the best writing in the other disciplines on China and its contrasting or similar countries of comparison.

The studies that we introduce in each chapter are available in English. Only in one or two cases are they only in Chinese, not translated. This matches the perspective we offer: China seen both by insiders (Chinese) writing in English and outsiders who read and speak Chinese and making explicit what might be left implicit without comparison. Many of the students taking our course have in fact been of Chinese origin, bringing themselves out of their home context and more or less willingly taken even further out by this course to view their own histories and country as one among others. To those who have come or are coming to China from outside, the problems are not those of assuming familiarity but those of treating China as exotic. In both cases, China or the West would be a contrasting other. We can illustrate this briefly by two classical sociologists of China, one European, and the other Chinese: Max Weber and Fei Xiaotong.

Max Weber and Fei Xiaotong

Let us consider them in chronological order, Weber working in the 1910s and 1920s, Fei in the 1940s. Both are still relevant.

Weber’s starting point was to explain the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe and nowhere else. He asked what orientation was there to stimulate large-scale capitalist enterprise, uniquely in Europe and among Europeans in the USA of the seventeenth century. What was the orientation, which means an action-guiding worldview, bearing such an affinity with capitalist endeavour? This was the key enquiry of the new sociology of action, which he created in the same years. Before embarking on his comparison, he had already found his answer in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). But to be sure that the Calvinist ethic and its affinity with the spirit of capitalist enterprise were uniquely seventeenth century European, he then proceeded to undertake a comparison in the sociology of religion. He confined himself to what he called the world religions, which were later called by his follower, the philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers, the ‘axial’ civilisations. These are religions conveying a sense of moral humanity that could be used in judgement of worldly action and reality. He found that none generated the abstract and anxiety-inducing drive that Calvinism did to test whether one had been saved in the results of worldly action. His reasoning will be further expounded in Chapter 3 where we reconsider the comparative project of the conditions for the existence of industrial capitalism.

Weber proposed a religious condition necessary for the existence of industrial capitalism. But he had already answered it before he conducted his comparison. That is one rather obvious methodological flaw in his endeavour. But his reading of sources, all in translation into European languages, was prodigious and many of his contrasts are still of great interest, including his contrast of Calvinist individualist innovation with Confucian perfection of self through a conservative adjustment to change in the world.

The other flaw in his method is that it is Eurocentric, as he makes quite clear in what he sought to confirm, namely that what is necessary for capitalism is a certain kind of individualism that was unique to Europe. That clarity is a virtue compared to the assumption that this individualism is universally human and the basis of all economics or in social psychology that compares individualism with collectivism — the latter being both pre-modern and also still to be found in contemporary cultures, particularly Asian.

Weber’s sophisticated but still Eurocentric comparison can fruitfully be compared with an equally sophisticated but Sinocentric comparison, accomplished by Fei Xiaotong in the 1940s. Fei was a sociologist and anthropologist who had completed a PhD under the tuition of pioneering anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics in 1938. He had direct experience of social life, not only in the city of London but also in small town and rural England and then in the USA. So, although these experiences were not prolonged nor were they undertaken as fieldwork, he had direct experience to add to his reading of English-language publications for comparison with his fieldwork in China and his extensive reading of Chinese philosophical classics and histories. In China in the late 1940s, he composed a series of essays on the essential character of Chinese society and what was needed to strengthen it after European military humiliation and Japanese military occupation and bring it into the industrial world. The book of these essays, originally published in 1947, was translated into English by Gary Hamilton and Wang Zheng and published in 1992 as From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Fei, 1992). As the translators write in their introduction (p. 4), the essays were an ‘effort to construct a non-Western theoretical foundation for a sociology of Chinese society’. This foundation is still a key reference point for anthropologists and sociologists of China, Chinese and non-Chinese. Fei contrasted two kinds of moral person, the Chinese and the Western Christian selves. The Chinese self is always in relationships that are asymmetrical, or hierarchical, by age, gender (male over female), reciprocal friendship and political authority and loyalty, as expounded in Confucian classical philosophy and also to be found in what was still mainly rural practice. Society is made from the networks, based on these relationships, created by individual Chinese selves always in a deferential or reciprocal dyad. In contrast, according to Fei, the Western Christian self is the same one autonomous conscience in a social world of organisations and institutions, of work and other roles, in which that individual is an active member and has joined with others in creating and reproducing the organisations in which the individual is a member.

Note how far his differentiated self and its created network is from the Western stereotype of collectivist Asians. Note too that his version of the Christian individual could be a less well-specified version of Weber’s Calvinist individual. For Fei as well as Weber, with whose sociology Fei was familiar, characterisation of the essential Chinese social self is an ideal type. An ideal type is a sociological construct, empirically based and useful for the interpretation of observed social action and its results but with no claim to its existence in its pure form. Fei’s ideal typical Western individual is useful as a contrast for what he is mainly after, which is a Chinese theoretical basis for the analysis of Chinese society. He is not interested in an equally searching analysis of society in the UK or the USA. His stereotype is a rejection of the relevance of the Western individual to the analysis of Chinese society and that is his one and only project.

After a visit to the USA in the 1940s, Fei wrote a short essay offering a further contrast, reprinted in 1989 (Fei, 1989). In it, he writes of his discomfort in US houses. What causes his discomfort is the absence of ghosts — by which he means the familiar ghosts of a long-settled family home, such as his own in Jiangnan, in the Yangtze delta region. The implications of this simple contrast are great, indicating two kinds of nations and their societies: in one, people stay in or know where to return as a homeplace, having an ancestral sense of family history, linked to national history; in the other, people constantly move, settling anew, maintaining a nation that knows itself as a land of opportunity.

So, we have in these two master sociologists a self-confessed Eurocentric proposal of the reason for the emergence in Europe of industrial capitalism and a self-confessed Sinocentric basis for the eventual industrialisation of China in terms of its own moral selfhood, not conforming to the European. Each raises issues of the institutional basis for industrialisation and its economy that are still live. Similarly, each raises issues of the pre-requisites and effects of modernisation (industrialisation, labour migration to wage work, and urbanisation) on family formation and transformation. All these issues will be raised in detail in subsequent chapters. Each makes possibly valid claims about orientations, or ideologies of aspiration, in Europe and China.

Here, the point of introducing them is to start a methodological discussion of how to conduct comparison. The virtue of both these sociologists is that they make the comparison explicit instead of assuming the world to be like their own societies and judging the rest of the world by implication better or worse, more or less (developed, civilised, etc.). But both are ‘centric’ in assuming from the beginning their own starting point, conducting the comparison simply to elaborate that starting point and not opening it out to being questioned.

Orientalism and Occidentalism

Comparison is based upon a ground of similarity and a contrast of differences. But because the comparison is never the first, it comes laden with the results of previous comparisons and with generalising concepts and theories of the differences found. So, treating something in China as a case study of a more general topic, such as politics or religion, is by implication a comparative study because the concept or category ‘politics’ or ‘religion’ is meant to apply anywhere. Then the comparison can become a questioning of the very categories themselves.

There is also another more historical ground for comparison, where similarities are the result of long contact and mutual influence. So, for instance, there can be comparisons within a region of mutual influences or a region of the dominance of a civilisation. And now, the historical spread over four centuries from Europe of industrial capitalism, scientific knowledge and the modern state, and even more recently, the accelerated pace of the migration of capital, labour, consumer products and digital media have increased the grounds of historical similarity on which comparisons can be based.

We are used to thinking that what we can call ‘the modern’, its main economy (capitalism), its knowledge products (science and technology), and its chief political institution (the nation-state), spread to encompass the globe from Western Europe. This same habit of historical thinking from origins brings with it the overwhelming temptation to measure the world by Western European standards, justified by the very spread of European institutions with imperialism from Western Europe and later from its main ex-colony, the USA.

Even those who gave intellectual and inspirational leadership to anti-imperialist movements, like Gandhi in India, Mao in China, Franz Fanon in North Africa, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, have taken up traditions stemming from the European Enlightenment — humanism, Marxism, the secular state, the sovereignty of peoples — and accused the imperial powers of betraying their own civilisation. But in this very fact we are brought short because they question some if not all the assumptions of the European Enlightenment even though they are bound by the spread of European knowledge and authority (political, military, and scientific).

The introductions to Breckenridge and van der Veer (eds.) (1993) and to Carrier (ed.) (1995) make a valid point that Western studies of others have been framed EITHER as the negative of their own idealised self-images, OR as romanticised images of their own dystopian (the opposite of utopian) view of modern Western materialistic civilisation. In other words, in the knowledge that accompanied Western imperialism, a double pairing occurred in social sciences and humanities, of Occidentalism and Orientalism. In one, the Capitalist (the progressive, the historical, the materialist, the rational and the secular) is contrasted with the pre-capitalist, the primitive, the good but childish, and the fixed and static East. In the other, the more spiritual East, the more in-touch with body and natural surroundings, a spirituality and oneness is contrasted with the materialism of progress.

Euro-American social sciences provide more analytic dichotomies of the advanced and the backward, the free and the despotic, organic division of labour and mechanical (segmentary) division of labour, society based on contract and law versus society based on status and hierarchy, abstract versus intuitive or pragmatic thinking; adversarial habits of discourse versus reference to authority. These dichotomies are like West/East, or like modern/traditional, or modern/primitive. They seem to refer to all societies and all histories in their scope. But do they when held up to the light of comparison? Is there not a huge scope for criticising them by findings of much that does not fit?

Both these introductions pick out one of the most worked-out anthropologies of such a dichotomy in the books of a French anthropologist Louis Dumont. His knowledge of European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought was extensive and enabled him to produce a much more worked-out dichotomy than his predecessors, contrasting the egalitarian and individualist ideology of Western Europe with the Indian jajmani system of local castes ranked according to an ideology of purity and pollution.

Both introductions also take as their touchstone a book that has made one of the deepest impacts on cultural studies and anthropology, Said’s (1978) Orientalism. Said’s main idea is that the studies of the Orient confirm and elaborate the East as politically despotic, economically stagnant and dependent, and psychologically given to hedonism and patriarchy, treating it as the other of the European Enlightenment. His book is a warning: We must be careful not to reproduce these unthinking, uncritical dichotomies. This warning has become the touchs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgement
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Empire and Bureaucracy
• Chapter 3 The Great Divergence: Industrial Revolution
• Chapter 4 Demographic Transition
• Chapter 5 Religion and Civilisation in China
• Chapter 6 Statehood and National Independence
• Chapter 7 Revolution and Maoism
• Chapter 8 Socialism
• Chapter 9 Post-Socialism
• Chapter 10 Property Relations and China’s Contemporary Economy
• Chapter 11 The Countryside and Migration
• Chapter 12 The City
• Chapter 13 The Family and Gender
• Chapter 14 Schooling
• Chapter 15 Civil Society and Political Society
• Chapter 16 Rule of Law
• Chapter 17 Democracy
• Chapter 18 Conclusion
• Index