Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective

Cambridge University Press, 11/29/1991
EAN 9780521410991, ISBN10: 0521410991

Hardcover, 352 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Few countries have had a more turbulent political history in the twentieth century than China. Although China's unprecedented stability and prosperity in the 1980s gave hope that such turbulence was at an end, the crises of Tiananmen, culminating in the massacre of June 4, 1989, proved that the turbulence continues. Here, eight distinguished China specialists provide wide ranging, original essays that attempt to explain the dynamics of contemporary Chinese politics by analysing the preceding patterns of development. Some of the essays focus on the most basic issues of the historical development of Chinese politics while other essays focus on developments in important policy areas since 1949. The book concludes with a penetrating analysis of the Tiananmen events by Tang Tsou, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Together, the essays detail the weight of the past on Chinese politics, but also the long term developments that prevent the simple recurrence of previous patterns.

Introduction
Part I. Contemporary China and its Prerevolutionary Heritage Brantly Womack
1. The dengist reforms in historical perspective Joseph Fewsmith
2. China's search for democracy
public authority and popular power in China Brantly Womack
3. A bourgeois alternative? The Shanghai arguments for a Chinese capitalism
the 20s and the 80s
Part II. Policy Dynamics Within The People's Republic of China Edmond Lee
4. The contradictions of grassroots participation and undemocratic statism in Maoist China and their fate Marc Blecher
5. The Chinese industrial state in historical perspective
from totalitarianism to corporatism Peter Nan-Shong Lee
6. From revolutional cadres to bureaucratic technocrats
Part III. China's Evolving World Role Hong Yung Lee
7. China's search for national identity Lowell Dittmer Tiananmen
8. The Tiananmen tragedy
the state-society relationship, choices, and mechanism in historical perspective Tang Tsou.

"This book presents an extraordinarily perceptive analysis of the historical dynamics of Chinese politics. It addresses many of the most fundamental questions about the course of China's modern development and examines crucially important contemporary dilemmas in their historical context. Both China specialists and general readers will be stimulated. The final chapter is a remarkable examination of the dilemmas facing China in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and the urgent need for a fundamental reconciliation between state and society in China." A. Doak Barnett, School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University