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"The Rise and Fall of the EAST" by Yasheng Huang explores the longevity of China's autocratic political system and its potential decline. Huang argues that the keju, an examination system used to select administrators, is the central pillar of Chinese autocracy. The keju homogenized thinking and produced standardized human capital that helped entrench autocratic rule. However, Huang also suggests that the keju's monopoly on intellectual elites stifled innovation and made China a "state without a society." The book also examines how the Communist Party of China continues to prioritize control over dynamism, potentially hindering technological advancement. Overall, "The Rise and Fall of the EAST" offers a unique and insightful perspective on Chinese history and governance. [Extracted from the article]

Volley fire with gunpowder weapons is often seen by modern scholars as one of the important innovations which allowed Europe to politically dominate other cultures and societies. Many historiographical theories, of the kind Lyotard termed metarécits, “metanarratives,” have attempted to explain this phenomenon. Recently, compelling evidence has emerged that other civilizations also practiced the technique, most notably China. This article brings together existing and new evidence that volley fire with firearms was developed and practiced in China long before it appeared in Europe and challenges several of the grand narratives of European exceptionalism. This new evidence shows that the volley fire technique arose in China primarily as a reaction to domestic and foreign (semi-)nomadic cavalry threats, belying geographically deterministic accounts, which suggest that sophisticated infantry tactics with firearms would not arise in states bordering the steppe. This article will also challenge the claim that volley fire in Europe benefitted from its emergence in a competitive system of states undergoing a traditionchallenging Renaissance. I call for a reconsideration of the innovative potential of Eurasian land empires bordering the steppe, and stress the importance of studying political contingencies and cultures of innovation in shaping world history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of hierarchical political trust-i.e., the higher the level of government, the higher the level of political trust-is prevalent in China. This article examines the source of hierarchical trust using survey data from the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey. The results indicate that while dissatisfaction with governmental performance is negatively associated with both central and local levels of government, attachment to the traditional, authoritarian, and paternalistic components of Chinese political culture significantly lessens the negative effect of dissatisfaction with governmental performance on central trust, but exerts no obvious effect on local trust. This finding not only helps to explain the local--central trust pattern but also contributes to an understanding of the consistently high level of public support for the single-party authoritarian system in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the new century, a growing power rivalry and contest between China and USA has significantly impacted the Asia-Pacific region. In turn, Indonesia has tried to avoid being caught in the middle between these two great powers. Among unanswered questions are how to respond to influences affecting politics and security and how to interact concerning economic cooperation and market integration. This article will explore how Indonesia tried to protect its own national interests amid this great-power competition by making strategic and timely policy choices from 2016 to 2022. We offer a new argument and interpretation for how a middle-sized power like Indonesia can flexibly and efficiently operate a hedging strategy toward US and China to promote its own security and development. Neoclassic realism will be applied to interpret a strategic triangle. As such, we explore Indonesia's state leadership, domestic politics, political culture, and economic entity within the context of US-China power rivalry, closely in related to facing China's Belt-and-Road initiative (BRI) as well as US's Indo-Pacific Strategy with Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a large economy trying to achieve industrialization, it needs to develop indigenous technological capacities to make growth sustainable. Industrialization can be challenging to achieve because it might be difficult to develop technologies without changing culture and political institutions which are useful to maintain ruling. Rulers in ancient China choose institutions to prevent internal rebellions. Industrialization was a new goal for the Qing government in the 19th century, and previous institutions were not designed to handle this issue. China's high growth rates after 1978 resulted from internal reforms to increase efficiency and external openness to absorb foreign capital, knowledge, and technologies. China's state capacity and leadership supported developing technological capacities in the catch-up process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, while the social life, economic structure, and even cultural atmosphere underwent profound changes, the dominant aspect of political culture was still deduced along the traditional track of the imperial system. The prominent characteristics of China's social form in the Ming and Qing dynasties are the development of the commercial economy and the enhancement of social freedom; the developed trend of common people's culture; and the sustainable development of the centralized monarch-bureaucratic-aristocratic system, which constitute a self-consistent pattern. This paper on the political culture of political spirit, political value, political thought, the four dimensions, the specific period, specific social community, public power setting and operation, and the perspective of the Ming and Qing social form of political culture, this study helps people to the imperial environment of Ming and Qing rural political culture and understanding and exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese democracy is discussed here from the perspective of intercultural dialog and the need for a global conversation and cultural understandings to build a new democratic global political order. Democracy in China is a controversial issue. But democracy is today problematic and full of paradoxes and contradictions everywhere. We indeed face a paradoxical situation: Western liberal democracy can no longer be considered the unique and universal model of democracy, yet we cannot surrender to a relativistic perspective on democracy. In this article, I first deal with some presuppositions and questions that constitute the "common sense" about Chinese politics: Is Chinese political culture compatible with democracy? Does democracy exist in China? Is talking about democracy in China a Western imposition? Even more: Is democracy necessary? All these questions are intertwined and drive us to ask which democracy we are talking about. Second, we focus on some of the main debates on Chinese democracy: transition to democracy, gradualism, the New Left, deliberative theories and present visions of democracy linked to the new era, the Chinese Dream and the Chinese concept of "Tianxia" (all under heaven) for a new model of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how aspects of national culture may shape the design and implementation of public policy, using the example of energy policy in China. It focuses on cognitive style and on political and legal culture. China’s energy policies display a combination of pragmatism, incrementalism, internal contradiction and ambiguity. This is consistent with evidence from experimental psychology and history that the development of Chinese and East Asian cognitive styles have taken a path distinct from those of Western civilizations with their Greek philosophical heritage. These variations of cognitive style between cultures are reflected in brain function and genes. Policy implementation also bears features from imperial times in the political culture of China’s Communist Party and the contemporary legal system. These arguments reinforce existing calls for caution when seeking to transfer energy or other public policy approaches between countries with different cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from a substantial body of government archives and internal reports from mainland China, the United States, and Taiwan, this article examines how daily transnational and technological communication practices among the masses impacted the making of political culture in Maoist China. The article begins with an overview of the pervasiveness of listening to enemy radio—the overseas radio stations unsanctioned by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC)—followed by an in-depth analysis of the historical legacies, ideological and cultural rationales, and structural deficiencies that contributed to that popularity. It then explores how local radio users' responses and active reaching out to enemy radio stations in the 1950s and 1960s prompted the competing geopolitical powers facing off across the Taiwan Strait to adjust their government policies. Ultimately, this article argues that listening to enemy radio as a technological counterculture was instrumental to the making of socialist subjectivity, arising from the populace's appropriation of the strategic interplay between the PRC government and its Cold War rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five decades ago, Inglehart for the first time described and explained an unprecedented transformation of political cultures in advanced industrial societies, which he called the "silent revolution." It was characterized by the emergence in those countries of postmaterialist values as the result of a sustained period of economic growth, and the profound impact of those values on people's political attitudes and behavior. As China has experienced extraordinary economic growth in the past several decades, has such a "silent revolution" happened there? The answer to this question has been far from complete or clear. Using three longitudinal, cross-sectional national surveys, we find that while the current level of postmaterialist values in China remains relatively low, such values have flourished among younger people, and those values do shape political attitudes and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the court was going through a serious crisis caused by Taiping Rebellion, different forces mentioned above made conscious moves to interpret the court gazette to their advantage. Eighteenth-century readers digested edicts and memorials thoroughly and regarded the court gazettes as textbooks sharing statecraft knowledge, while readers in the nineteenth century cared more about personnel change. However, Mokros discovers the significance of gazettes as a unique channel through which political and intellectual elites experienced the Qing dynasty and its government. [Extracted from the article]

This article describes the US origins of the field of PRC history. It argues that research on PRC history is widely derived from an approach to knowledge that predates area studies: the theory that societies can be controlled and changed through the transformation of human cognition—referred to as "public opinion," "values," "culture," "political culture," "tradition," or "belief"—by nonviolent means. The author calls this approach to knowledge the values paradigm. A separate, but related argument is that this paradigm has proven more important than the availability or content of new sources in determining how PRC history has been written. The aim behind these arguments is twofold: to highlight the intellectual debt (or burden) that links PRC history, via area studies, to policy science; and to elucidate other ways of guiding research in place of the increasingly exhausted values paradigm–based approach. The conclusions they lead to are that historical and social scientific explanations of political change in China have become intellectually dependent on the abstraction of mass consciousness, and that this abstraction has been used to obscure the endemic violence of Maoism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng's death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng's suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In particular, by examining the cases of the Wukan protest in 2011 and the Honda auto-parts strike in 2010, Liu describes how protesters in China sought to take advantage of official norms and the divisions between the center and local authorities. While the book sheds light on some underappreciated dimensions of protest culture in China, its narrow focus on the body, space, and visibility sometimes hinders its interpretation of protest events. Liu also posits that the occupation "symbolizes the workers' refusal to be exploited" and that "through the act of occupation, the logic of private ownership is contested" (78). [Extracted from the article]

As a strategy to temper centralized governance with a degree of public participation in China, the "Mass Line" approach has been used throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize citizens in support of national projects and use this engagement as a channel for feedback. The Mass Line has been employed in attempts to address "radicalization" and challenges to centralized state control, indicating that the CCP's approach to counter-terrorism goes beyond the top-down, oppressive tactics that China is often associated with. This paper explores China's programmes of mass mobilization as a part of its counter-radicalization strategy in order to deepen understanding of how the country is responding to a key security challenge. It demonstrates that this approach reflects significant historical continuities, and thus national characteristics, in terms of political culture and state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lately it has become fashionable to speak of a 'political meritocracy' in Chinese political culture, which contrasts with the liberal 'electoral democracy' of the west. Here, however, I consider the moral psychology of an emotion that arguably shadows the history of meritocratic practices in China and in liberal democracies: the emotion of resentment, expressed by agents who consider themselves to be wronged by the high-stakes competition for status, income and power inherent in these practices. I examine the unstable nexus between this emotion and these practices and draw on Confucian, Qing era vernacular literature and modern studies of educational credentialism for insights into how the potentially destabilizing, destructive manifestations of resentment can be mitigated and channelled into less destructive, dissenting political and cultural expression. I argue that, on balance, electoral democracies have better resources for mitigating such resentment than does the 'political meritocracy' attributed to Chinese political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Sciences in China is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Policymakers define threats through the development and presentation of threat narratives, which seek to shape, promote, and limit policy agendas and debate through public discourse. Since 2015, American officials engaged in a securitization process which depicts great power competition, in the form of a rising and aggressive Eurasian alignment of China and Russia, as an existential threat to both America's geopolitical position in the international system and the liberal-democratic world order. This led to the articulation of an international threat environment under threat from revisionist powers and a revival of Cold War-era rhetoric about both a democracy-autocracy binary and spheres of influence. Utilizing an original dataset which codes the content and evolution of these threat narratives, it seeks to answer the following questions: How is this securitization process reflective of American geopolitical culture? How does the U.S. believe that this challenge arose? How does Washington see its role in this process? It finds that the perceived intentions of these countries, fueled by their respective political cultures, were the crucial factors for precipitating this process, rather than their growing capabilities. It also identifies four ways in which this process reflects underlying fears found in American geopolitical culture under declining unipolarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes contribution of aesthetic modes and norms to establish and maintain the idea of China as a culture and society. Topics discussed include role of Chinese state in deploying and managing aesthetic practices, internalization of state-prescribed rules and norms that people come to regard as essential for their social well-being and role of Chinese state in the aesthetic ordering of lived social experience, practice and relations.

This article examines how politics has shaped Hong Kong's education system and the curriculum 23 years after the British handover of Hong Kong to China. Particularly, through the concept of nationalism, the article examines how the education system is being shaped. The article is intended to provide international readers with a perspective of the political and socio-educational dynamics at play in Hong Kong. The central question at issue is: how has political culture and identity been promoted in school education under the framework of "One Country, Two Systems" after the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from Britain to China? Two areas--the censorship of curriculum materials and the politicization of nationalism-- particularly reflect the influence of power relationships, and the historical and societal pressures on the formation of students' identity in school education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How quality of government affects residents' life satisfaction is a seldom discussed subject, especially in a non-democratic context. This research aims to address that gap by focusing on the case of China. It investigates the relation between different aspects of quality of government and Chinese residents' happiness. Our data was provided by telephone interviews of 5015 residents in Shandong Province. The findings indicate that the majority of China's citizens consider their lives offer them a high level of satisfaction. Positively and significantly contributing to their life satisfaction are the government's trustworthiness and responsiveness, and its performance in public service delivery. This result implies that the quality of government has a positive and important impact on Chinese citizens' happiness, both technically in terms of its ability to deliver public services efficiently, and politically in terms of the extent of democracy involved. But of these, it seems that the former is the more significant. The reasons for this lie in the country's level of economic development, in China's political culture, and in the policing mechanisms of the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese conservatism is often reduced to a cultural movement the main concern of which is the preservation of traditional culture. This article proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. Conservatism in this period was a reaction against New Culture activists' denial of the political utility of this culturalist nationalism and constituted a response to World War I, leading some to question the merits of Western civilization. As a result, tradition no longer unitarily evoked the cultural elements corresponding to modern Western politics. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, it divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the self-construction of Chinese democratic political parties participating in building socialism with Chinese characteristics, ideological and political construction is the core and foundation. In other words, ideological and political construction is fundamental to building a political party in organization, institution as well as organ and personnel. Unity is the theme in the ideological and political construction in this regard, because wining peopled support and consensus is the biggest issue in politics. In the new political party system of China, consensus is the ideological and political identity derived from the common political and cultural background. It is the ideological and political bottom line that has always been upheld in a wide range of political alliances.lt is also a kind of ideological and political consciousness based on the common political value orientation.As political parties participating in building socialism with Chinese characteristics, the democratic parties in China have reached political consensus with the governing party in the following aspects: the construction of the theory of political parties participating in building socialism with Chinese characteristics; practicing the core values in political culture; and the participation in the process of political consultation led by the Communist Party of China. The ideological and political construction of political parties participating in building socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era should be guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. This is sure to lead to unity in the political direction and thus enhance people's identity with the Chinese system; to cultivate a common mentality in the political culture so as to expand consensus on the ideological and political construction; and to build consensus in political consultation so as to gather strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the features of Chinese political culture and its current structure, which consists of the socialist, Chinese traditional feudal and borrowed Western capitalist political cultures. However, despite the availability of a considerable amount of research, there are many disputes regarding the generalization, classification of political and cultural phenomena. Therefore, the study of the features of China`s political and cultural structure is relevant. The purpose of the study is to explain the existing political and cultural phenomena in China, to determine the content of Chinese political culture, to understand its structure and to divide it according to Chinese characteristics. It has made a progress on its own; it was influenced by Western capitalism and socialism as well, which made it different from the Western model. It is also important to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the political and cultural structure that will enhance the understanding of Chinese historical traditions and cultural experiences. Methodology of the research. The paper uses an analytical method to investigate the transformation of China`s political culture and its components that combine traditional Confucianism and Western political influences. The structural principle has been applied in the grouping and presentation of factual material, its analysis and use. Systematic and functional methods have been used to consider policy of the People`s Republic of China (the PRC) as a coherent, self-regulating mechanism to carry out the contemporary social changes, local economic factors, which have become primary motive of political and cultural upgrades. The study is also based on comparative and behavioral principles, which allowed to identify the research problem of uneven market development in China and to understand the mechanisms of cause of rapid changes in Chinese society that given up the ideological on behalf of economic growth and liberties. It is proved that at the present stage of development, Chinese political culture has undergone radical changes. There is a meddling of Western political culture in traditional Chinese one, which formed a dual value system (traditional and Western), and the formation of a socialist political culture with Chinese specificity, resulting in the emergence of a triple value system. Therefore, due to the revival of traditional values and the influence of Western popular culture, the three-vectored PRC`s development is in a strengthened position where each of the components of Chinese traditional, socialist, and Western political cultures do not conflict with each other but interact, contributing to the most intense development of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"May Fourth" has long been considered a turning point for modern China, resulting in continuous heated discussion on the topic since the 1920s. These discussions not only reexamine culture but also have political intent. Many recent scholars have discussed the "ideologization" of May Fourth from the perspective of "memory politics." They argue that "May Fourth discourse" was not only used to understand and recapture the past, but also to help one's own cherished values occupy a core position in modern Chinese history, thus using historical interpretation to create a compass for China's future that conforms to historical tides. From the four great philosophies of modern China, the Nationalists and Communists have incorporated May Fourth into the "Three People's Principles" and "New Democracy," respectively. Liberals held up democracy and science as a need for China's future, and made efforts to propagate and practice democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949. As for New Confucians who had continuously criticized May Fourth for being anti-tradition, they supported traditional values but also believed that democracy and science were a "priority and necessity for China's cultural development," and hoped to use the spirit behind this ideal. They along with liberals criticized the Nationalist and Communist autocracy for departing from May Fourth ideals, and especially noted how May Fourth created fertile ground for the rise and expansion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), "resulting in the growth of the Communist Party," and the Nationalist government's move to Taiwan. After 1949, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and the Guomindang (GMD) Nationalist Party he led primarily assessed the May Fourth Movement by synthesizing the views of the liberals and New Confucians. They highlighted the slogans of saving the nation, ethics, democracy, and science to promote ethical education and "national spirit education" as top-priority cultural policies. The focus of this article is to examine how liberals and New Confucians used the topic of May Fourth to criticize the CCP and GMD in Hong Kong and Taiwanese political commentary magazines during the 1950s (approximately 1949–1960). It also explores how the GMD synthesized liberal and New Confucian views to lay out their own position. This discourse shows how May Fourth had diverse interpretations under the context of conflict between the liberals and the New Confucians as well as Nationalists and Communists. The criticism of the ideologization of May Fourth in recent years is actually an important turning point in the scholarly study of May Fourth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies articles about terrorism in the representative Chinese newspaper People's Daily in order to analyze how traditional Chinese political culture, in particular Confucianism, permeates contemporary Chinese geopolitical discourse. Specific attention is paid to articles on terrorism and the U.S. "war on terror." The author argues that, instead of interpreting terrorist actions and U.S. counter-terrorism politics as binary opposites, using a lens of a Confucianism-style morality, the Chinese newspaper observes connections between them. The author considers how these discourses affect China's perception of itself in the realm of international security politics. The representative Chinese newspaper articles on terrorism, in addition to China's repositioning on the global stage, reveal a geopolitical fault-line with strong moral undertones. The paper sheds light on the historic and often implicit political impact of Confucianism within present day Chinese geopolitical discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main issues facing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is its enlargement. Traditionally, this issue has been viewed in terms of practical policy. The longer this dispute over enlargement drags on, however, the greater the depth it acquires. The enlargement debate reflects the unique political culture of the SCO. Another issue well-known from other organizations also arises—"different levels" in the admission of new participants. But the question of the organization's future is emerging in discussions of enlargement as the main matter in dispute: is it to be a global future (as Russia is more inclined to see it) or a regional future (as China is more inclined to see it)? Thus, the SCO faces one of the most important conflicts of today's world—that between globalization and regionalization. While debates about these trends and the relationship between them continue in the political, economic, and social sciences, the SCO has to make a practical choice in favor of one of the trends or find a way to combine them in determining its work priorities. The authors reformulate the issue of enlargement as a problem of finding a balance between globalizing and regionalizing trends in the SCO strategy. At the practical level this will make it possible to reconcile the basic interests of Russia and China in Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article redefines the concept of an artistic image perception and explores the process of artistic perception of China and the Chinese in the Soviet literature of the 1920s-1940s. The authors reveal the typology of the political and poetic settings, which defined the approach to creating images of China and the Chinese. According to researchers, personal experience of communication with another culture and political non-involvement became the main criteria for the creation of a reliable literary image of the Chinese and China. Factual and dramatic genres became the main ones demanded by the Soviet literature of those years and embodied the perception of the image of China and the Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social volcano thesis states that the rising inequality in China threatens regime stability. This idea, although widely held in the media and in academia, is backed by little positive evidence but by much negative evidence. Two primary pieces of negative evidence are that the Chinese people trust the central government and that they are highly tolerant of inequality. This paper discusses the shortcomings of the negative evidence and re-examines the thesis in a rigorous and direct way. Our multilevel analysis shows that provincial inequality has negative effects on individuals' trust in the local government but not in the central government, and this negative effect holds for both the rich and the poor. Because distrust in the local government implies distrust in the central government, we conclude that a social volcano exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach for researching the political transformation of China. By taking a critical review of literature on democratization of China as my point of departure, I argue that previous studies focus too much on structural explanations and neglect constructivist aspects. The structural approach can produce only limited explanations and has regarded the political culture of a society as a static and reified entity, neglecting the constructivist element of the human agent. In addition to examining traditional economic and political institutional change, this paper suggests an approach to the study of democratization that involves examining the construction of political values and culture. This constructivist approach regards political culture as a construction and a contentious process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education with Chinese characteristics is inherently embedded in both Chinese traditional culture and Chinese modern political culture. This article examines the ontological conception of higher education with Chinese characteristics from both conceptual and political perspectives. First, by illustrating the Government agenda and politics for the construction of higher education with Chinese characteristics, this article explains the particular roles played by individual universities and colleges. The article then moves on to describe the ontological conceptual framework used in identifying higher education with Chinese characteristics for the purpose of showing how higher education with Chinese characteristics differs from Western dominated higher education concepts and models. Both the distinction between the Eastern and Western contexts and the integration of the globalization and localization are involved in construction of the concept of higher education with Chinese characteristic. The final section considers the policy implications for the developing higher education with Chinese characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s future is one of the most important variables in international affairs. While the world has witnessed the extraordinary socio-economic growth and development of China over the past four decades, the country is now at a series of junctures and faces unprecedentedly complex challenges. It has achieved “middle income” status, but in order to navigate through the “middle income trap” and become a fully developed and modern economy will require not only multiple structural adjustments in the economic structure, but also a significant liberalization of the political system. This article explores four alternative pathways that China might follow in the coming years, and it posits potential consequences of each path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to provide a framework for conceptualizing and interpreting the resilient capacity and adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party to cope with changing political and economic environments and to sustain its hegemony through periods of crises and transformations. Based on an instrumental reading and reflective incorporation of some relevant concepts and discourses of Gramsci’s political theory, the paper aims to facilitate a well-rounded analysis of the CCP’s authoritarian resilience, which is achieved through a continuous process of “passive revolution”. The party’s new hegemony is realized through a reconstituted historical bloc on the basis of convergence of interests and through neutralizing the pressures of various contending forces that might otherwise trigger profound structural transformations. The paper concludes that “authoritarian resilience is one of the strongest enduring features of the CCP’s political culture, characterized by dynamic adaptive skills and greater institutional capacity for political survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a new perspective on Guwen 古文(Ancient-StyleWriting) in the mid-eleventh century and Cheng Yi's 程頤Daoxue 道學(Learning of the Way) based on two interconnected approaches. The first involves an analysis of wenqi文氣and the yong用(efficacy) of wen in traditional literary criticism, while the second examines the role of the Confucian classics in Guwen and Daoxue. The notion of wenqi helps to elucidate what essentially connects the wen of the sages and their dao--it resolves the seeming dichotomy between aesthetic quality and moral-political practicality, and that between culture and nature in our understanding of Guwen. Situating the activity of writing in mid-Northern Song political culture and its civil examination system, the author also argues that the priority of dao over wen, sometimes seen in the Guwen proponents' works, should be understood as contextualized political rhetoric. Meanwhile, the classics occupied a central position for Guwen as well as Daoxue: both mideleventh-century Guwen proponents and Cheng Yi believed that learning from the classics was the best way to guarantee accurate understanding of the dao. This attitude toward the classics, combined with a belief in humanity's innate capacity to apprehend the dao, formed the continuity between Guwen and Daoxue; the attitude toward writing was where they parted. A critical shift from Guwen to Daoxue scholarship was from asking "what is good writing" to "what is good reading." The author considers Ouyang Xiu's approach to the classics a preliminary hermeneutic circle and Cheng Yi's a continuous one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how president Xi Jinping’s political discourse legitimizes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as China’s ruling Party through representations of political ideologies. It probes two dimensions of the representations: thematic representations concerning the topics and topical patterns in Xi’s discourse, and evaluative representations concerning the attitudes and emotions associated with these topics. This study adapts Fairclough’s three-dimensional approaches to Chinese political discourse analysis: description regarding the linguistic features of the discourse, interpretation and explanation of the discourse by considering China’s social, especially political and cultural, particularities. Through the analysis, this article reveals the discursive practice through which the CCP utilizes a range of political ideologies to legitimize its politics. It is hoped that this study can shed light on adapting critical discourse analysis (CDA) to Chinese political discourse analysis in the context of China’s particular culture and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media promotes a broad discussion about the contemporary public sphere in China. Analyzing the relationship between social media and democratic politics in the unique context of China helps us to rethink a metamorphosis of Habermas’s public sphere model. The study supports the idea that the online public sphere more often than not transforms into a fragmentized formation of the multiple tensions between participatory democracy, journalism transformation and governmental authority. It may be difficult, under a single theoretical framework of civil society, to map out the complexities in Chinese social media. The key point is how a fragmentized structure of the public sphere has been integrated in the power game process of achieving consensus. Based on the special Internet policies and political environment in China, the implication of public sphere theory in Chinese social media is reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with China's economic and military rise, its leading political values will increasingly shape both China and the world at large. Hence, we need to understand, compare, and learn from leading values in China's political culture. This review discusses recent efforts to systematically compare three leading values in China's philosophical traditions-meritocracy, hierarchy, and harmony-with leading values from the political culture of Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Wuhan University Journal (Philosophy & Social Sciences) / Wuhan Daxue Xuebao (Zhexue Shehui Kexue Ban) is the property of Wuhan University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

When Lu Xun 魯迅(1881-1936) sows in "Gudu zhe" 孤獨者(The Misanthrope) the analogy of a seed in a conversation about the nature of children, he alludes to the epistemic seedbed other than evolutionary thinking: Buddhism. This study probes into this moment of double conjuration as religion encounters science and soteriology confronts natural law. It unravels the significance of the Buddhist reference by tracing the seed to itsYogācāra provenance and implanting it in a twentieth-century debate between the Yogācārins and the advocates of the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine across East Asia. The author situates Lu Xun in a shared intellectual horizon with the contemporary lay Buddhist scholar, Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無 (1871-1943), whose critique of Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論 (Treatise on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, or the Awakening of Faith) in 1922 furnishes a Buddhist exemplum of the "obsession with China." In spirit both Ouyang and Lu Xun anticipate the Critical Buddhism movement of late 1980s Japan, in which hongaku 本覚, or original enlightenment thought, is censured for latent ideological complicity with Japanese ethnocentrism. Lu Xun, the author suggests, turns out to be the most critical of all Critical Buddhists.This is evidenced by his "Sihuo" 死火 (Dead Fire), which features a ghastly twist in its retelling of the burning house parable from the Miaofa lianhua jing 妙法蓮華經 (Saddharma-pundarīka-sūtra; Sūtra of the Lotus of theWonderful Dharma, or the Lotus Sūtra). Having undergone a Buddhist vita contemplativa in the preceding years of the literary revolution, Lu Xun came to personify a profound "consciousness of darkness" (youan yishi 幽暗意識) in dwelling on the karma of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]