This is a very timely contribution to the field, as China study is rapidly growing in major centers of higher education everywhere in the world. With the rapid rise of China, and its increasing openness to Western academic studies, the field of China studies is also going through a paradigm shift. Part of this shift is generational, as a younger cohort of scholars trained during Post-Mao China is now coming of age, as represented by three of the co-editors of this book. Part of this shift is related to structural changes in North American universities, as area studies are increasingly integrated with various social science disciplines. Scholars of Chinese politics hence are increasingly designing their studies using comparative politics concepts and research methods. Many academic departments will find this book highly useful as they attempt to bring more conceptual and methodological rigor into their Ph.D. programs.
The book is structured into three parts, covering the available research sources, the qualitative methods, and survey research methods for studying Chinese politics, respectively. Chapters were all written by active researchers of Chinese politics, offering both in-depth background and practical strategies. The useful sources discussed in the chapters include state-generated data (Xi Chen, Chapter 1), archives (Neil J. Diamant, Chapter 2), official records (government-released biographies, Victor Shih, Wei Shan, and Mingxing Liu, Chapter 3), Internet resources (Allen Carlson and Hong Duan, Chapter 5), and media content (Daniela Stockmann, Chapter 6). One chapter explains how experiments can be constructed to generate data (Peter Hays Gries, Chapter 4). Together, these chapters cover quite a comprehensive range of available sources for scholars to explore when it comes to understanding Chinese politics. They also go into practical detail on locating and accessing these sources. Furthermore, these chapters also show how such sources can be harnessed to examine various issues and topics, such as contentious politics (Chapter 1), patriotism (Chapter 2), Party leadership (Chapter 3), and foreign policy-related issues (Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
The second part of the book gives three perspectives on qualitative research on Chinese politics. Calvin Chen (Chapter 7) shows that ethnography can lead the researcher to multiple and sometimes hidden factors in any given case or phenomenon. Benjamin Read's sustained focus on civil society politics within urban China's residential spaces shows that an ethnographic approach can bring strengths that neither single cases nor large-N studies have (Chapter 8). William Hurst shows that qualitative studies with an inter-regional design can help capture rich variations within China's local political economies (Chapter 9).
The book then devotes a total of five chapters to survey research, which makes up Part III. This part can in fact make a separate book, as it covers most if not all of the important issues regarding doing survey research in China. Manion gives a comprehensive review of doing survey research in China (Chapter 10). The emphasis is on the regulatory and logistical environment of conducting surveys in China, the expansion of space for scholars to survey larger and evermore representative samples and to apply ever more sophisticated methods. Manion also points to the methodological and conceptual frontiers, such as recently established survey projects that promise the academic community data of much higher quality, as well as the key research questions regarding China's semi-competitive elections.
The other four chapters in Part III present a full picture of survey research from different perspectives. Bruce Dickson and Jie Chen represent the best effort in the field to understand the aspirations and outlooks of the capitalist class in China, hence Chapter 11 (by Dickson) shows the ability of survey research to tackle specific topics important for understanding political changes in China. Pierre Landry has been the pioneer in pushing methodological sophistication, and his Chapter 12 explains GIS-supported sampling strategies. Mingming Shen, Ming Yang, and Manion give a full account of the most systematic and sustained survey project tracking stability and change in China, the Beijing Area Study that has been conducted yearly since 1994. Lily Tsai then discusses how survey research should take into account local context in rural China (Chapter 14).
The book closes with a chapter by Kenneth Lieberthal, whose account of the changes that have taken place in the field of Chinese politics makes for very enjoyable reading. More importantly, Lieberthal points out some of the “current issues” facing scholars of Chinese politics and warns that all is not well. The root of these issues still seems to be the tension between a more area-study approach that emphasizes local context and histories and a social science approach that emphasizes methodological rigor. Ph.D. students are facing pressure to undergo more methodological training at the expense of training in language and local culture and spending more time in the field.
Lieberthal argues that “the development of China studies in political science holds out serious opportunities for the overall development of political science” (p. 276). This is an important task into which scholars of China need to invest more effort. Implicitly, Lieberthal's chapter and this whole book raise the question of how the study of Chinese politics can be mainstreamed into political science, but without offering answers. That major political science journals such as the American Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Research, World Politics, and Comparative Politics, among others, publish very few articles on China is indeed troublesome.
Lieberthal argues that public intellectuals such as the late John Fairbank could play a role in mainstreaming China studies, and the field can certainly hope that such figures continue to rise. Yet I believe one research strategy, if employed by a large number of China scholars, can greatly facilitate this. That is, research on Chinese politics should be embedded in more explicit comparisons. So far most such studies only focus on China, and comparisons with other countries or regions are often implicit. By explicitly comparing China and another country or region, the same research can attract both China scholars and scholars studying the other country or region. For example, as the research in Chapter 4 of this book shows, if the U.S. is also examined in a paper studying China, it is much likely to find its way to a much larger readership and generate much more debate in the U.S. scholarly community and mainstream media.
