While political culture has always been my main inspiration for research since graduate school, this project did not begin until a few years after I started working as assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Upon the completion of this project, I am most grateful to Kent Jennings, to whom this book is dedicated. A role model of scholarly brilliance,...

In recent years, Confucius—an old Chinese sage whose political and cultural legacies had been criticized, attacked, and admonished throughout the twentieth century—became noticeable on China’s political stage once again. His statue was placed at, and later removed from, the Tiananmen Square, to be among the founding fathers of modern China such as Sun...

From the inception of the discipline, discoveries and enlightenment revealed in the research of political culture have informed, excited, and inspired generation after generation of social scientists. If we trace the influences of the understanding of political culture all the way back, we would find, as Pye did, that “all classical theorists from Aristotle and Plato...

When Confucius was born, the Kong family (孔; Confucius’ family name) had lost its hereditary title and the aristocratic privileges their ancestors had enjoyed. Confucius’ father, who was considered a “common gentlemen” (shi; 士), was many years senior of his mother. He passed away when Confucius was three years old. The mother and child had a difficult...

In the past decades, guanxi, a staple ingredient in China’s everyday political and social life, received ample media attention and scholarly scrutiny. As Gold, Guthrie, and Wank noted, guanxi “is the latest Chinese word to gain entry into English Parlance” (2002). A sizable literature has also grown to demonstrate that...

Since the late Qing era, establishing the “rule of law” has been one of the most prominent modern mandates of China’s modern nation-building efforts. As Su Li (苏力)1 observes, “in the 20th century Chinese political discourse, legislation has substantial legitimacy;” at the same time, it is “the most convenient method...

In the tremendous corpus of Chinese political historiography, political deliberation among the emperors, court officials, bureaucrats, scholars, and commentators were frequently recorded. The recent decades witnessed this tradition being enriched and developed by a plethora of “modern” deliberative institutions and practices, such as the Public Hearing Meeting (PHM),...

The ideological evolution of the CCP during the reform era is nothing short of a metamorphosis. The buzzwords have changed from “class struggle” to “harmonious society” and from the “Four Modernizations” to “Socialist Ecological Civilization” (社会主义生态文明). These changes are dazzling and puzzling...

Confucius’ time fits aptly into Dickens’ famous description of a historic moment: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.” In a time of chaos and suffering, there were changes and inventions. In a time of disintegration and reintegration,...

Interviewee 1:

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Dr. Shanruo Ning Zhang is associate professor in the Department of Political Science, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Ob~ispo. Employing various analytical tools including surveys, interviews, and content and discourse analyses, her research focuses on several dimensions of political culture, including how the...

In an attempt to reflect the rapidly changing political environment of the People’s Republic of China, editor Sujian Guo has assembled a book series to present specialized areas of research in current Chinese political studies. Incorporating theoretical, empirical, and policy research on contemporary Chinese politics both domestically and internationally, this series contemplates the Chinese...