Foreword - Deng Zhenglai, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

Deng Zhenglai
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

In the nineties Chinese social science underwent profound changes because the slow and complex development eventually has borne fruit of intensifying communication and interaction between the Chinese and the international scholarly world. This process had been triggered off by the Dengist reforms that were being launched in the late seventies and was reflected in the increasing number of Chinese scholars visiting Western universities and research institutions, studying there for long periods and sometimes even joining the staff in particular at universities of the English-speaking world. Vice versa, China's opening up was accompanied with a recurrent flow of Western experts into China as well as a tremendous number of imported books and journals, frequently also linked with an impressive effort in getting Western ideas translated into Chinese. Although those feverish activities bear a certain resemblance with similar events in the late 19th and the early 20th century, the mere quantity and the reach of those phenomena is larger and broader by magnitudes. Hence, the safe assumption can be made that there is an essential qualitative difference, too. Of course, at a closer look the Chinese scholarly community seems to be stratified according to different degrees of knowledge of the Western discourse, and there are considerably diverging orientations in academic work, which is very frequently more or less directed at practical issues. There is a clear hierarchy of "places" where scholarly discourse is taking place in real time and space, as reflected, for example, in the towering role of Beijing University. Nonetheless, precisely because of the aforementioned quantitative dimension of the interaction between China and the world, and because of the rise of new techniques for communication (the net in particular, which is spreading so fast in the Chinese world), these places slowly loose their historical exclusiveness. Today, those leading academic circles set the tone for an increasingly far-reaching and intensive scholarly debate in the social sciences, and those circles have become truly national as well as global ones.

It is in this complex process of the emergence of a national and at the same time global Chinese intellectual elite in the social sciences where we find the probably crucial difference between the present and the past: The contemporary Chinese scholarly world is becoming a global one, with networks of discourse linking up scholars in many different countries who continue writing and thinking Chinese even if their actual working language is English in the majority of the cases. Remarkably, this does also include, in particular, American-Chinese scholars who joined the flow of people into China in the eighties and nineties. There is no comparable community of scholars in the world, with European scholars frequently staying in their parish, and the American ones being satisfied with acting an a home stage which sets the standards of what is being regarded as the "world's best". For example, even in Russia, with a very strong intellectual potential, change still seems to be more or less inward-looking, and there is no comparable thing like those global networks in academic discourse the growth of which has been eased by communication nodes like Hong Kong where, for instance, Oxford University Press launched a book series in Chinese language with an international, yet Chinese editorial board.

Alas, there is stunning imbalance in that important process, with Chinese scholars moving self-consciously in the modern conceptual world of social sciences and spinning threads of thought in an increasing number of high-quality journals, yet without any reflection of that process in Western social sciences. The Chinese phenomenon might be reflected in the relevant area studies and Chinese philology, but there is a void in the social sciences proper, the mathematically oriented branches being an however notable exception (vide the increasing number of Chinese economists publishing in leading American journals). Yet, this exception proves the rule, because precisely in the field of mathematical social science there is nothing special Chinese in the work done, and what is being published has almost nothing to do with the scholarly discourse within the Chinese community an the Chinese mainland. For example, there was an important discussion in 1996 about the possible relevance of case studies in the social sciences as being of prime importance for understanding the Chinese experience of transition, which gave rise to the publication of books and special journal issues. Such kind of a methodological debate with special "Chinese" claims is still without any impact in the West.

Why? We believe that simple, yet very important reason is lack of access to the Chinese language for the overwhelming majority of Western social scientists, and the implicit and explicit obstacles against launching a specifically Chinese topic of discourse in international journals. In our foreword, we cannot dwell upon the fundamental issue how languages might shape at least the process of getting ideas published in the modern world of "refereed international journals". But there is the guess that languages define particular scholarly communities, which might be the topsoil where seeds of new ideas will eventually ripen that in a slightly different environment would not have been able to reach maturity. Perhaps this kind of a suspicion was the reason, why the editors "being Chinese and German" agreed to realize the project presented herewith. Germany and China (but we hasten to add, the same is true, for instance, for France and many other countries with a strong cultural tradition of their own) still feature scholarly communities which in particular areas continue to rely an the native languages. In the first half of the 20 `h century, Germany was an important source of new ideas in the social sciences which were firstly produced in German and which where then globalized via translation and, of course, via the exodus of German Jews under the Nazi terror. Towards the close of the century, German social scientists struggle for more international recognition facing the American intellectual supremacy, in particular in areas like economics, and in the recent decade bold decisions were taken to transform time-honored institutions like the most famous journals in economics into English language publications: A decade or so ago, the "Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft" and at present the "Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften", the official journal of the "Verein for Söcialpolitik", the institution where debates surrounding intellectual giants like Max Weber took place at the beginning of the century. Time will say whether for the better of for the worse.

Given the fact of the globalization of the Chinese intellectual community, similar issues had to come to the fore by necessity. In 1994, a new issue of "the normativitization or/and indigenization in Chinese social sciences" , emerged in the Beijing academic circles and attracted broad public attention in mainland China. It were the "Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly" and the "China Book Review" that raised the issue. These two journals have been edited by the same editorial board which consists of a number of leading academics in different disciplines in the social sciences in China. So issues raised by such a group of academic have considerable representativeness for the collective state of mind of the entire scholarly community. The fact that discussions which sought to offer answers to the issue of "normativitization and/or indigenization" lasted for an extensive period of time, and that they inspired similar discussions in Chinese academic journals other then the two, indicated these were questions with a common concern of Chinese scholars in the past decade.

What was at stake? At the first sight, discussions of the issue force quite separate matters into one: while the call for normativitizing social sciences derives from the concern with the thin methodological foundation of Chinese social sciences, that for indigenization of social sciences results from emphasizing the independent value that Chinese social sciences ought to have. Whereas the seeming solution of the former issues might simply require to devote even more resources to raising the level of education of Chinese scholars so that they might be able to fight their way through the reviewing process of leading international journals, the possible answer to the second issue seems to be more or less a more sophisticated task to accomplish. The reason for the complexity of the latter issue lies in the fact, that every attempt at indigenizing social sciences is tantamount to posing a challenge at the established methodological standards of social science at least in the currently prevailing mainstream fashion. Hence, a convincing solution presupposes that Chinese social sciences already would have achieved the normativization, because only under that condition will the results of indigenization be accepted as a valuable contribution to social science in general. So there is a paradox, or, at least a problem of dialectics: In order to achieve a uniquely Chinese standard of social sciences, Chinese social sciences have to become standardized according to universally valid principles which just deny the relevance of culturally specific solutions. In order to produce a Chineseburger, you cannot but become perfect in producing Hamburgers, but then you might have the problem that after being perfect in producing Hamburgers, you might no longer have the intuition for the possible taste of a Chineseburger.

Although this quip might fail to be taken seriously, we should not let ourselves being misguided by the over-formalized way how these problems were presented in the Chinese discussion. Beyond the surface of those academic issues lurk the anxieties concerning Chinese identity and modernity which encompass just a totality of existence. If an outsider only pays attention to the formalistic way in which the issue has been raised, and to the problem as to whether the two matters, "normativitization and indigenization" are logically related to each other or not, (s) he will miss the factuality of the debates and the existential problems staying in its core. Those scholars who have been engaged in the debate and who virtually live in the related existential situations and who have to face themselves with various intellectual problems, they may have their reason when they argue that such problems are hardly different. From the perspective of the issues of Chinese identity, "normativitization and/or indigenization" are just one single and same problem. For many participants of the debates, following global standards means relinquishing things essentially Chinese. The factuality of that existential situation goes beyond the factuality of normativitization or indigenization as such; it becomes manifest in the way in which "Chinese social sciences" have become a topic for commentaries. So the factuality is actually the discourse of Chinese social sciences proper, in part at least. In that discourse, all disciplines in Chinese social sciences share a common destiny, and the shared destiny as designated in the "official account" has stifled the separate destinies of the disciplines. And those separate destinies are linked up with very personal destinies of Chinese scholars who, for example, step into career patterns in the international arena. So the debate is a factuality which bridges the very extremes of the formal and the personal dimension of the issues involved.

Of course, such a discourse is made up of a great number of elements, and what the concepts of "normativitization" and "indigenization" have touched upon are just two aspects among many. Social sciences are derivatives and companions of modernity; they have appeared as culturally peculiar intellectual practices in the context of Western history and have shown themselves to be a system of problem consciousness, approaches, and institutional patterns of a culturally specific nature. Imitating the why, what, and how of Western social sciences is an inevitable "rite de passage" in the making of Chinese social sciences. This is particularly necessary because China has long been isolated from the outside world. However, mere imitation does not help Chinese social sciences in establishing their identity. So while imitating the West, Chinese intellectuals have entered into the global ranks of modern academia. In the global stratification of communities of discourse in the social sciences in which the West has been dominant, even the Western practitioners of Chinese social sciences have found themselves to be classified into the "surplus" arena of "China Research", viz. a specialization of the rather narrow field of "area studies", let alone their Chinese counterparts. In such a context, the quest for indigenization has a close linkage with the quest for gaining a "qualification" in the sciences. For many observers, that means to ask whether special knowledge of things Chinese might give rise to universally valid insights in the social sciences. In that regard, both the Western "China scholars" and the "Chinese scholars" share the same problem which sometimes boils down to the mundane issue in which journal a paper might be published. Are the social sciences a reservoir of theories, methods and techniques which are simply applied an a special case like China, or can the intellectual engagement with China eventually lead to changes precisely of those theories, methods and techniques? Can a paper an China simply be assessed in terms of the methods applied (e. g. fine econometrics), or might it be important to grasp something different in China?

Certainly, some readers are already plunged in strong qualms about the argument presented so far because it smells of a sort of doubly mirrored orientalism, where the East is going to be represented as something essentially different from the West by just the protagonists of "the East" themselves who at the same time begin with building a new kind of "Occidentalism". Therefore we wish to state clearly that it is a fact of science that social science rests partly an value statements, that values cannot be justified by scientific method alone, and that hence social science has cultural roots by necessity (and not by default). There are two different reasons.

Firstly, social scientists cannot present a complete justification of their specific methods in terms of the new knowledge to be harvested ( i. e. objective performance criteria) because it is the nature of science to be a journey into the unknown. Only ex post we are possibly able to compare different methods in terms of their success, but we would fall into the trap of a misplaced inductivism if we were to claim that this enables to predict future success of certain methods proven valuable in the past. For example, even knowledgeable promoters of the mathematization of economics in the second half of the twentieth century admit that it is not clear whether the output in terms of reliable knowledge about reality is worth the effort. Nonetheless, that process continues to intensify, because there is an implicit belief that "science" must go hand in hand with mathematization. A similar observation can be made in many different areas, as, for example, when comparing the pretty different methodological status of laboratory experiments in psychology and sociology, respectively, or of survey methods in economics and sociology, respectively. The ranking of methods in the different disciplines is strongly dependent an values and beliefs about the proper approach in empirical research.

Secondly, every branch of science rests upon a few fundamental ontological claims without which it would be impossible to approach reality at all, like, for example, when adopting the perspectives of "systems theory" , of "methodological individualism" or "class conflict". Since our knowledge about social reality is far from complete, we cannot but take a decision about our fundamental assumptions without any full-fledged "scientific" justification. Precisely in that area the role of Chinese scholarly preoccupations, frequently lacking a down-to-earth workmanship approach to science and the perseverance and patience that can be observed in many lives of Western scholars. Perhaps this attitude might even be a modern reflection of the consciously chosen status of a layman in the traditional ideal of the Confucian scholar. However, such discussions had, in a specific phase of transition, concentratedly expressed intellectual sensitivity to the conditions of intellectual life in contemporary China, facing the challenges of being factually integrated into a global culture of social sciences. Through the lens of that debate, we can more clearly see the trajectories of Chinese social sciences in the 90s. For example, we have got to understand the significance of institutional economics in Chinese economics, particularly the economics concerned with the issue of economic transformation in China; or, as another example, we have got to understand why academics in the anthropological circle have paid so much attention to the interplay between communities and macro-processes. Equally clearly, we have realized that the sense of common destiny in Chinese social sciences has dispersed in the past two or three years: academics have become more and more and more specialized in their areas of expertise and less and less an "intellectual collectivity". Rather than indicating the change in the conditions of social science research in China, such observations signal certain changes that the discourse of that intellectual condition is experiencing. Obviously, precisely the actual process of normativitization taking place in the Chinese social sciences is changing the factuality of intellectual life in China, because the common experience of being an intellectual is fading out, thereby finally completing a long historical process of redefining the role of the intellectual in Chinese society. So at present the pendulum seems to swing away from "indigenization", and the aforementioned dialectics of both core concepts still awaits further explorations.

The above brief reflection serves as nothing but a historical background to the current collection presented in this 1998 Chinese Social Sciences Yearbook. In 1994, the Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly edited a collection of translated articles that it had published in two years before. This collection can be regarded as a successor volume to the first one. Compared to the Western scholarly condition, Chinese intellectuals of the mid-nineties indeed have shared a more collective consciousness. The articles included in our collection were all written around 1995. The reason why they are engaged in a sort of collective discourse lies in the fact that they appeared in the same journal, the Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly, an important arena within which the above-mentioned debates concerning of universal standard and cultural peculiarity of social sciences were brought into play and where discourses of "Chinese social sciences" in the 90s have so far presented themselves. In fact, that arena, as it is recognized among most Chinese intellectuals, has played an important role in the development of social sciences in China in the 90s.

We have selected papers encircling important ideas which had been prominent in the debates of the nineties and which mirror in some way the issue of "normativitization and/or indigenization". Furthermore, we placed emphasis an Chinese research about China, having in mind two different objectives, namely first, easing the explicit comparison between Chinese and Western studies an modern China, and second, making Chinese research accessible to social scientists interested in the general topics raised in the papers. Foremostly, East and West met with the hot issue of applying the "civil society" concept an China, which was a major scholarly debate in the mid-nineties. Although the topic was also very important in the area of late Qing dynasty social history, we feel that the highest significance was with reference to the Chinese transition where so many and complex phenomena of self-organization can be observed in particular in the rural areas. , The "civil society" concept is also a representative concept for the methodological issues which we discussed above. On the one hand, the idea is deeply rooted in Western history and can be understood as reflecting values governing the process of separating society from the state during modernization. On the other hand, in the field of Chinese studies the concept has been utilized as an analytical tool in order to assess the state of transition. Evidently, such an application as an analytical tool cannot work but with taking the premise as given that the historical evolution of Western societies can be interpreted as a special case of universal laws of societal change, which is an assumption that still awaits a convincing proof. Hence, the use of the concept of "civil society" is deeply enmeshed with value statements originating in Western discourse. In our volume, six papers deal more or less directly with that problem. We begin with a survey by Yang Mu an a case study approach towards thirty Township-and-Village enterprises in China - by the way, a Singaporean author who edited a volume related to this topic in the aforementioned book series of Oxford University Press in Hong Kong. In the TVE sector we find an economic example for the crucial feature of Chinese transition which is the sometimes very close interaction between the state (here: state enterprise sector) and the seemingly "spontaneous" emergence of new organizational forms. This aspect is also scrutinized in Sun Liping's historical tour de force through the changing relationship between state, elite and the masses, when he discusses the impact of economic reform since the late seventies. Just the increasing degrees of freedom of utilizing resources lead to a redefinition of the relation between the state and the "non-state ruling elite" as Sun identifies them. These structural changes between state and society are investigated in more detail in Wang Mingming's study of patterns of cooperation in South China villages. In his observations we can realize that precisely the reemergence of traditional social structures amidst economic reform links up the concept of "civil society" with the idea of culturally specific ways to organize social groups. Yet, as we also learn from a quick glance at China's social history, there was always a symbiosis between the state and certain groups organizing themselves, thereby casting doubt an the applicability of the concept of "civil society" which presupposes a clear boundary between state and society. Sun Bingyao, in his paper, therefore introduces the concept of "official-popular duality" which is used in a major fieldwork the results of which are also analyzed in the paper by Wang Ying. In contemporary China, the crisis-crossing webs of interest between actors in the government and social groups as well as the conscious instrumentalization of social self-organization by the government make any attempt elusive directed at the discovery of an autonomous "society" . Deng Zhenglai draws the different strands of thought together and reflects upon the meaning of the idea of "civil society
" for understanding the Chinese development, eventually pointing out that a law-like treatment of the Western "modernization framework" has led theorists astray when applying that kind of concepts an Chinese reality.

With Cheng Nong's paper we selected an interesting and fine-grained analysis of a particular case how Western social science has been introduced in the recent scholarly debates, and how this complex process led to serious distortions and even some kind of a recreation of the original thoughts within a distinct Chinese outlook an modernization. In addition, he also observes in detail the role of the interaction among the global Chinese community of scholars. His object is Geertz work, and he argues that it is the Chinese adoption of the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy which eventually misleads Chinese intellectuals in getting the crucial point in Geertz's argument precisely rethinking that basic concept in terms of its consequences for anthropological understanding. The role of the global community for the Chinese discussions is also the topic of Zhang Rulun's comments an Yu Yingshi's ideas and opinion's how to redefine Confucianism in a paradigm of Chinese modernization. That problem is closely related to the question of the role of ideology in science and, hence, Zhang's paper contributes to the analysis of the possible influence of traditional attitudes toward ideology an the contemporary debates in Chinese social sciences.

We conclude our selection with an example of Sino-Western collaboration in research where, generally speaking, certain approaches first are adopted in the joint projects and subsequently are being assimilated by the Chinese community via the Chinese partners in those projects. Our example, a paper by Ge and Elder, is illuminating because the authors demonstrate how the different social science approaches toward analyzing the life cycle are meaningful for reconstructing the tumultuous changes in post-revolution China.

What we do here when we edit a new issue of the Chinese Social Sciences Yearbook may just be treated as an opportunity for knowing more about the Chinese activities in the area of social sciences. But examined in the context of what we put forward in the above, it may also be viewed as a manifestation of the quest among Chinese social scientists for a position in the global academic hierarchy, which has, in an alternative manner, expressed the collective condition of Chinese social sciences -- after all, we are here translating their/our works into Western language, not the other way around In the phase of global capitalism, the sensible things that Chinese scholars can do largely include facing ourselves with all kinds of tensions within our own situations and making efforts by way of academic practice in order to gain a balance and induce further development.

Let us conclude this foreword with expressing our serious gratitude to the German Robert-Bosch-Foundation which sponsored this volume generously, including travel grants for the editors and the whole costs of translating, editing and printing the volume. We hope that the volume meets with their hope to support the dialogue between East and West in the Social Sciences.

Beijing and Witten, Winter 1998
Chinese Social Sciences
Yearbook, 1998
© 1998