Trends in the Study of Chinese Political Culture

Author(s): Peter R. Moody, Jr.

Source: The China Quarterly, No. 139 (Sep., 1994), pp. 731-740
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State of the Field

Trends in the Study of Chinese Political
Culture
Peter R. Moody, Jr.
A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology,' if not ancient times, but came to the
fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural
revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions
were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the
Western pattern.2 The mainstream political science version of political
culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization
theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate
modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change.3 Modernization theory went out of fashion in
the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical
reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it.
More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture,
and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.4
Culture is an ambiguous concept, enjoying a plethora of definitions.
The mainstream political science approach has been to treat it as virtually
synonymous with attitudes and values toward politics, taking the culture
of a society as a kind of sum of the attitudes of the persons in the society.
"Political culture is the set of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about politics
current in a nation at a given time."5
The paradigmatic work remains The Civic Culture,6 an exploration of
1. Michael Brint, A Genealogy of Political Culture (Boulder: Westview, 1991).
2. Gabriel Almond and James Coleman (eds.), The Politics of the Developing Areas
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
3. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing in the Middle East
(Glencoe: Free Press, 1958); Everett E. Hagan, On the Theory of Social Change: How
Economic Growth Begins (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1962); David Apter, The Politics of
Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
4. Gabriel Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science
(Newbury Park: Sage, 1990), chs. 5, 6; Harry Eckstein, "A culturalist theory of political
change," American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (September 1988), pp. 789-804;
Fritz Gaenslen, "Cultureand decision-making in China, Japan,Russia, and the United States,"
World Politics, Vol. 39, No. 1 (October 1986), pp. 78-103; Ronald Inglehart, "The
renaissance of political culture," American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 4
(December 1988), pp. 1203-1230. I think the argumentby Samuel P. Huntingdon, "The clash
of civilizations," Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49, is wrong in many of its
implications, but the assertion that cultural differences are becoming more obviously
politically relevant seems on the mark.
5. Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: System, Process,
Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 25. The definition seems not very well thought
through. Is culture simply a set of attitudes, or is it a system of attitudes (and other things)?
Is every political system a nation, or is the concept relevant only to those which are? Shouldn't
culture be continuous over time, and not identified necessarily with opinions which prevail
at one given time?
6. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1963). For laterreflections
on the methodology and debates on the concept's adequacy as political theory, see Gabriel
? The China Quarterly, 1994

732

The China Quarterly

the underlying bases of stable democracy. The authors infer culture from
answers to a poll, with the responses interpreted as displaying attitudes
rather than giving information. The Civic Culture and the tradition it
belongs to form part of the tradition-modernizationparadigm. Traditional
society nourishes authoritarianpersonalities,7 while modernity is more or
less identified with middle-to-late 20th-century Western secular liberalism.8 The rational, secular civic culture (the pattern identified, more or
less, in England and America in the late 1950s) supposedly bolsters
democratic institutions; other cultural configurations, supposedly, do not.
Opinions about politics, then, become expressions of personality.
It may be more useful, and not much less parsimonious, to take a
broaderview. In anthropology, culture sometimes seems to refer to all the
non-biological aspects of human life, whether material or mental. In this
sense politics and political institutions are part of culture, and perhaps
could be profitably studied as such. We might show how politics is
conditioned by the larger cultural context, as well as how politics might
work to preserve or change the larger culture. Attitudes toward politics
would be considered not necessarily as projections of individual psychology, but as rational constructs to be understood in terms of the
worldviews current in the society.
Research on culture is sometimes taken as an alternative to studies of
institutions, or to a focus on social structures and processes, or to the
recently fashionable rational choice approach. I think, rather, that it
complements other possible ways to study politics: sometimes it may
generate particularempirical hypotheses (particularly when comparisons
are being made across different cultures or in the same culture at different
times), but, by and large, the cultural approach does not point to a theory
of politics. It provides the context for different theories. In the contemporary world, at any rate, there is no necessary direct connection between
a state's formal institutional structure and the culture of the society it
rules. The way in which formal institutions work will be conditioned by
the culture, and, if the institutions are effective, will also shape its
evolution. In the more generous anthropological sense of culture, social
structure (such as the number of social classes and the relations among
them) is itself a cultural trait. Similarly, there may be no such thing as
rationality in the abstract- there is certainly no universal abstract rationality of ends, since people can be demonstrated to value different things.
Rational choice means acting according to the logic of the situation,9and
footnote continued

Almond and Sidney Verba (eds.), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).
For a recent empirical study of political change using the concept of political study, see Robert
Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
7. Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).
8. David Horton Smith, Alex Inkles, "The OM scale: a comparative socio-psychological
individual modernity," Sociometry, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1966), pp. 353-377.
9. Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 147. The
best known (and most entertaining) systematic application of the concept to political science
is probably Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).

The Study of Chinese Political Culture

culture helps define what the situation is. Differences go beyond different
"values" or ends, extending to modes of reasoning and perceptions of the
world.'? A focus on culture is thus not a substitute for other kinds of
theorizing, but puts them in perspective and delineates their realm of
applicability.
Chinese Political Culture
This mainstream approach has been elaborated in China studies by
Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon." Unlike the authors of The Civic
Culture they do not survey public opinion'2 (although Solomon administered a Thematic Apperception Test), but abstractcultural generalizations
from Chinese history, literatureand contemporarypolitics. They share the
tradition-modernization paradigm and the assumption that culture is a
sum of individual attributes. So, Chinese combine a dependent craving
for authority with a sense that authority is arbitraryand must constantly
be placated; they build up resentments which they fear to express.
Chinese judge authority in moral terms. They identify morality with
harmony, so politics, the open conflict of interest and opinion, is inherently immoral as well as socially disruptive. Conflict is in fact as
inevitable in Chinese life as it is anywhere else in this vale of tears, but
lacking cultural legitimacy, its expression becomes pathological. Pye
identifies certain antinomies in Chinese culture - Confucianism and Daoism in former times, the Maoist and Dengist approaches today.'3 These
contradictions presumably mean that behaviour cannot be predicted directly from culture (since anything that happens will be consistent with
some element of culture), but the contradictions define the cultural style
and its range of probable reactions.
Although China allegedly lacks a modern culture, the country is not
totally without hope. Solomon, sporting an uncharacteristic Maoism,
speculated that the Cultural Revolution, by making conflict ("struggle") a
footnote continued

For examples of recent influential studies of democratization which take a rational choice
approach and which basicially ignore considerations of culture, civic or otherwise, see
Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and LaurenceWhitehead (eds.), Transitionsfrom
Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986). For a rational choice interpretationof Chinese politics partlycritical of a central
emphasis on culture, see Avery Goldstein, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics:
Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949-1978 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991).
10. Compare Aaron Wildavsky, "Choosing preferences by constructing institutions: a
cultural theory of preference formation," American Political Science Review, Vol. 81, No. I
(March 1987), pp. 3-23.
11. Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychological Study of the Authority
Crisis in Political Development (Boston: MIT Press, 1968); The Dynamics of Chinese Politics
(Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981); Richard Solomon, Mao's Revolution
and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
12. See, however, Andrew Nathan and Tianjian Shi, "Culturalrequisites for democracy
in China: findings from a survey," Daedalus, No. 122 (Spring 1992), pp. 95-124. This is also
discussed below.
13. LucianPye, TheMandarinand the Cadre: China's Political Cultures(Ann Arbor:Center
for Chinese Studies, 1988); something like this theme is pursuedwith intimidatingeruditionby
Wolfgang Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness (New York: Seabury, 1976).

733

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The China Quarterly

legitimate part of the political process, might shake the Chinese people
from their authoritarianlethargy.'4Pye allows for the possibility that with
the reform movement the Chinese are finally "shedding mystification and
joining the community of enlightened and rational people."15
The Dynamics of Chinese Politics was considered as heralding a "third
generation" of China scholarship.'6 As one of the first major syntheses
following the purge of the Gang of Four, it was a perceptive guide to
what really counted in the play of Chinese politics, refreshingly clearheaded compared with some earlier Western sentimental misinterpretations, which seemed to assume that making revolution was indeed a
dinner party or sewing an embroidery, or something equally refined.
Yet its generalizations are uncomfortably close to what has been called
the Shanghai mind, the Western folklore about Chinese culture chronicled, for example, by Harold Isaacs'7 that might pretentiously be called
the Western "discourse" on China.'8 The stereotypes do, of course, have
a certain objective foundation. They are shared by numbers of dissident
Chinese intellectuals in the post-Mao period. The Chinese government, if
it comes to that, is sometimes pleased to affect the same kind of views to
show it should not be expected to cater to outsiders' notions of human
rights, which are, after all, contingent on culture and circumstance,19
though this may be a point of view more persuasive to rulers than to
victims of rule. It is still ironic that the cultural approach can lead to
ethnocentrism: the commonplaces of the late 20th-century West become
the human norm, with deviations dismissed as irrational, to be explained
in psychological rather than intellectual terms.
Cultural analysis of this type is more persuasive when cast more in
terms of rational choice and less in terms of personal psychology.20 The
14. Solomon, Mao's Revolution, p. 520. A possible objection is that Chairman Mao
neglected to legitimate fighting back. To be fair, however, a case can certainly be made that
CulturalRevolution-era Rebel ideology evolved into an influence on the democratic ferment
of the 1980s. Anita Chan, "Dispelling misconceptions about the Red GuardMovement," The
Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 1992), pp. 61-85. For objections to
Solomon's methods and findings from more traditional China scholars, see F. W. Mote,
"China's past and the study of China today: some comments on the recent work of Richard
Solomon," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (November 1972), pp. 107-120; also
Thomas A. Metzger, "On Chinese political culture," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No.
1 (November 1972), pp. 101-105.
15. Pye, The Mandarin and the Cadre, p. 75.
16. Harry Harding, "The study of Chinese politics: toward a third generation of
scholarship," World Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 (January 1984), pp. 284-307.
17. Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Mind (Boston: MIT Press, 1958).
18. Compare Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
19. Renmin ribao (overseas edition), 18 June 1993. The point, of course, is not entirely
invalid. There is a political tendency to chattertoo glibly about human rights, without serious
consideration of what constitutes a right and what it means to be human - grave, perhapseven
sophomoric, philosophic issues, but relevant to any policy which would have human rights
as a component. A more accurate appreciation of the workings of culture might not solve the
philosophical issue, but would be relevant to practical policy.
20. Pye's dissertation, Warlord Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Modernization of
Republican China (New York: Praeger, 1971) interpretsChinese politics in the same way as
his later work (with an emphasis on the logic of the power struggle), but is founded on rational
choice assumptions, without much psychologizing. More recently, Lucian Pye, "China:
erratic state, frustrated society," Foreign Affairs (Fall 1990), pp. 56-74, shows how culture

The Study of Chinese Political Culture

Dynamics of Chinese Politics makes much of the role of guanxi, personal
connections, taking it as evidence of a Chinese,propensity to find security
in small groups. The pioneering work on this concept by Bruce Jacobs
demonstratedthat guanxi structuresrelationships in the Taiwanese village
he examined (and, by hypothesis, in large areas of Chinese life generally).21 Guanxi forms the context in which people must operate. The
locals may well have a psychological need for support from the group,
but whether they do or not, to succeed in day-to-day life they need to
know how to use connections. There is a cultural pattern here, but its
manifestation depends upon circumstances.
Andrew Walder has demonstrated how, at least until the mid-1980s,
the Leninist economic organization gave enormous power to the work
unit over the life of the individual and also tremendous power to those in
authority in the work unit. The consequence was a need to cultivate good
personal relations with those in power, leading to a "principledparticularism," an "integration of patrimonial rule with modem bureaucratic
forms."22The institutional structureby itself could explain both the role
of particularistic relationships and a dependent mentality by the underlings in an organization. There is a possible problem of
"overdetermination,"since while Walder's analysis is consistent with the
conventional view of Chinese culture, his theory derives more from
comparison with other post-totalitarian Leninist systems. A possible
hypothesis is that Chinese culture and Leninist organization, especially in
its less virulently totalitarian phases, are mutually reinforcing. Any
Chinese ability and propensity to form particularistic groups for mutual
advantage independently of the formal institutional structuremay explain
the greater success of Chinese reform over that in the Soviet Union, at
least if such groups are useful for engaging in business. In the Soviet
Union, unlike China, the collapse of the collective economy seems to
have virtually meant general economic collapse.
On an even more abstract level, the structure of society and the
relationship of society to the state are a part of culture. One conventional
view has been that in China and East Asia generally, the social order is
an artifact or reflection of the political order, and this helps explain both
the particularism and moralism of the political style in these societies.23
Other analyses postulate more autonomy for the society. One trend even
finds civil society, that old but now ubiquitously fashionable formation,
not merely in China today but even in Qing and Republican times.24But
footnote continued

helps shape Chinese social structure and state-society relationships, without reference to
individual psychological traits.
21. J. Bruce Jacobs, "A preliminary model of particularistic ties in Chinese political
alliances," The China Quarterly, No. 78 (June 1979), pp. 237-273.
22. Andrew G. Walder, CommunistNeo-Traditionalism: Workand Authority in Chinese
Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 187, 251.
23. Peter R. Moody, Jr., Political Opposition in Post-Confucian Society (New York:
Praeger, 1988). Pye, "China: erratic state, frustratedsociety" takes a somewhat similar line.
24. William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); Hankow: Conflict and Communityin a Chinese

735

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The China Quarterly

if China did have a civil society, the consequences were not the same as
in Europe. Other writers find there was no force in Chinese society
pushing for radical change.25It is difficult to be overly confident about
any general assertions about Chinese society, except that its analysis,
whatever use it may make of general theories, must continue to consider
what Prasenjit Duara calls the cultural nexus of power.26

Cultural Politics
Culture includes ideas as well as social structures. The nature of the
traditional culture and its problematic compatibility with modernity have
been guiding themes in Chinese politics for more than a century. An
academic focus on the theme is relevant both for the general problem of
tradition and modernity and for the substance of Chinese politics itself.
The ideas should be treated as rational constructs, not as mental quirks.
Here the work of Joseph Levenson, perhaps now somewhat dated,
remains exemplary.27To oversimplify, Confucian China could not modernize, since Confucianism defined a structureof power and privilege and
also defined the moral universe of those with power and privilege; and
Confucianism was rationally and politically incompatible with the
changes required for modernization.28By the same reasoning, the modernization of China meant the end of Confucianism. To use (or parody)
a Levensonian locution, moder China grew out of traditionalChina, but
also grew out of it; understandingChinese politics requires an investigation of cultural change. This approach addresses structures of ideas and
institutions, which define structures of interest and action.
Levenson finished his major work on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, and took the Communist regime as the epitome of Chinese
modernity. That regime's easy appropriationof the Great Tradition in the
early 1960s served as evidence that tradition no longer had any relevance
to ordinary life, and so was no longer a subversive political threat (just as
the Vatican museum can display statues of Apollo).29 But in the Cultural
Revolution the tradition was attacked again: perhaps it was not as dead as
it seemed. It continued to feature in polemics in the 1970s and 1980s.
footnote continued

City, 1796-1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Modern China, Vol. 19, No.
2 (April 1993) is devoted to the question of civil society. For the contemporary period, see
BarrettL. McCormick, Su Shaozhi and Xiao Xiaoming, "The 1989 Democracy Movement:
a review of the prospects for civil society in China," Pacific Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer
1992), pp. 182-202.
25. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1973); Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
26. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
27. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modem Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967).
28. The earlier statement of this theme is Max Weber, The Religion of China;
Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press, 1951).
29. Levenson, Confucian China, Vol. 3, pp. 78-82.

The Study of Chinese Political Culture

Although Levenson explicitly refrains from saying so, his historicism
implies that Confucianism (or any other system of thought) has no
meaning outside its particular cultural context. Like most of China
studies, work on Chinese philosophy does in fact remain somewhat
marginalized, but it has been the subject of increasing creative work both
in China and the West, and it seems to keep philosophical as well as
historical or ethnographic interest.30It is no longer readily assumed that
Confucianism (admittedly ratherbroadly construed) is incompatible with
modernization,31 although whether Confucian society can modernize
while under the sway of the central Chinese state remains an open
question.
Where Pye sees continuity, Levenson finds an absolute break. Both,
however, operate within the tradition-modernization paradigm, which
assumes that the two conditions, taken as ideal types, are mutually
exclusive. Those who have used the concept have always maintained, of
course, that actual societies are always mixtures of traditionaland moder
elements.32 But, to belabour the chemical analogy, societies may be
compounds rather than mixtures, and unstable compounds at that (implying that neither tradition nor modernity need be seen as simply something
that dilutes the other, and that they may interact in ways not obviously
predictable from the traits of either in isolation). The abstract juxtaposition of an ideal tradition and an ideal modernity may miss what is most
culturally significant about the social or political actuality. This school
also tends to trace the force for change in China not to tendencies
inherent in the older system but to the impact of the West.33Continuity
need not mean that China today is the same as traditional China, but
could imply rejecting a sharp dichotomy between the traditional and the
modern.34Traditional official Confucianism was probably not as blandly
free of inner tensions as Max Weber would have it, and modernization
may have helped resolve some of those tensions.35Students of literature
trace themes normally thought to date from the May Fourth period back
at least to the early Qing.36
30. See, for example, Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
31. Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modem
Applications (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
32. This point is made, for example, by both editors and by all contributors to Lucian W.
Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton;
Princeton University Press, 1965).
33. In American scholarship, the first to make effigies here was John K. Fairbank,although
Levenson developed the more profound argument. For a critique see Paul A. Cohen,
Discovering History in China: American Historical Writingon the Recent Chinese Past (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
34. Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susan H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political
Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
35. Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's
Evolving Historical Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
36. Jaroslav Prusek, Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970); Paul S.
Ropp, Dissent in Early Modem China: Ju-lin Wai-shih and Ch ing Social Criticism (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth
Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

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Even if the tradition-modernizationparadigm poses a false dichotomy,
if used prudently it is a fallacy with considerable heuristic value. The
paradigm remains alive, and so worth investigating, as a major component of Chinese politics. The May Fourth discourse, with liberals attributing China's ills to a dark tradition too powerful to die and conservatives
treating liberalism as a foreign slave's rejection of civilization, country
and good morals, has itself become an enduring theme of contemporary
Chinese political culture. Liberal polemicists attack the Communist
regime in terms previously used against the warlords and the KMT, with
constructs of traditional culture replicating the vision of it in Western
political science, oriental despotism coupled with psychological kinks.37
The relationship between the old culture and modern democracy is a topic
among serious Chinese scholars as well, with the socialist system seen as
a kind of adaptation,perhaps an inferior one, of the traditionalorder.38At
present the approach to culture through political thought perhaps appeals
more to Chinese activists and scholars than to outsiders, possible evidence of its relevance to an understanding of what is significant in
Chinese politics.
Part of the job of cultural analysis is to reconstruct (or deconstruct?)
the assumptions about the world current in a society. These assumptions
are (trivially) likely to be articulatedby the articulate,which may give the
analysis an elitist tinge. But popular culture remains important for the
study of Chinese politics, both for its possible influence on politics,
democratic or not, and as a perennial object of political concern. Whether
or not there is a difference between elite and popular visions is itself a
cultural attribute. A distinction, often probably exaggerated, between the
great tradition and the little tradition is a commonplace of China studies.
In political terms, the gap between ordinary and educated people may be
greater now than in the past: the proletarian world view was held, it
would seem, only within fairly narrow circles of activists. In the reform
period intellectuals uttering democratic principles were not always quick
to connect them to the lives of workers or peasants who might benefit
from their implementation.
Andrew Nathan and Shi Tianjian have made an interesting attempt to
apply the Civic Culture methodology to China, generalizing from a
survey conducted in late 1990.39This approach suggests certain questions
about the Civic Culture assumptions and interpretation of the findings.
They find an anomaly: in China, unlike in other countries, those with a
higher degree of education feel less sure of fair treatment by the authorities than do the less well-educated. Is this a Chinese cultural trait or a
reflection of an objectively valid perception of conditions following 4
June? They find another paradox: people generally see the government as
37. For examples, see Geremie Barme and John Minford (eds.), Seeds of Fire: Chinese
Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968).
38. For example, Guantao Jin, "Socialism and tradition: the formation and development
of modem Chinese political culture,"Journal of ContemporaryChina, No. 3 (Summer 1993),
pp. 3-17.
39. Nathan and Shi, "Culturalrequisites for democracy."

The Study of Chinese Political Culture

having little effect on their lives, pointing to a gap between the "objective
role" of an intrusive Communist state and the "subjective perceptions of
ordinary citizens."40But does ordinary Chinese usage consider the work
units analysed by Andrew Walder and others to be part of the state or
government? Or, perhaps, those surveyed were comparing the situation in
1990 with that prior to the reform period, so that however intrusive
politics may be, it is not as intrusive as it was. Or, perhaps, the answers
reflect the tacit bargain struck between regime and population around
1990, whereby the people would keep away from politics and, in return,
the regime would more or less allow society to go its own way. Or,
conceivably, the question was framed in a way so that those asking it and
those answering it did not understand the same thing by it.
Nathan and Shi conclude that should there be another political crisis,
the general population will probably not offer much active backing for
demands for political change.41 But if their results reflect underlying
culture (as they certainly may) rather than the conditions of the moment,
one is hard-put to understand the very evident active support for democratic change shown by the urban population in 1989. Opinion surveys
are always useful and interesting, but must be considered within the
context of more "interpretative"analyses of culture.42
Pedantic objections aside, it must be admitted that the survey findings
corroborate the picture of an apolitical, even antipolitical, atmosphere in
the China of the early 1990s described in interpretative studies of the
period. These and other surveys also show differences in opinion and
even cultural orientation between intellectuals and ordinary people, even
when both groups are alienated from the existing order.43Foreign commentary may over-emphasize the Western-influenced, nihilistic and explicitly dissident elements of popular culture.44The "hooligan" stories of
Wang Shuo no doubt appeal to certain states of mind,45but so do the
well-presented platitudes, as palatable to rulers as to the ruled, of his
soap-opera mini-series Yearning.46
China may be reverting to its cultural norm, with distinct but overlapping official and popular cultures, informed by a common spirit and
coexisting in an uneasy fashion, and with elements of the popular culture
40. Ibid. p. 104.
41. Ibid. p. 116.
42. Andrew Nathan, "Is Chinese culture distinctive: a review article," TheJournal ofAsian
Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4 (November 1993), pp. 923-936, makes the converse of this argument.
43. Compare Peter R. Moody, Jr., "The political culture of Chinese students and
intellectuals: a historical examination," Asian Survey, Vol. 28, No. 11 (November 1988), pp.
1140-1160. Zhu Jianhua, "From discontent to sympathy with the student movement? An
empirical study of urban workers on the eve of the 1989 democracy movement," Dangdai
Zhongguo Yanjiu Zhongxin Lunwen, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August 1992) analyses survey data
indicating that workers most sympathetic with the 1989 democracy movement were also those
most unhappy with the economic reforms.
44. Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin (eds.), New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel
Voices (New York: Times Books, 1992).
45. Geremie Barme, "Wang Shuo and Liumang ('Hooligan') culture,"Australian Journal
of Chinese Affairs, No. 28 (July 1992), pp. 23-64.
46. See the interesting overview of popular culture by Liu Xiaobo, "Towardvulgarity and
soullessness," Zhongguo zhi Chun, May 1993, pp. 28-34.

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The China Quarterly

abstractly subversive to the official order but not really threateningit. The
authorities retain their self-designated positions as cultural arbiters, albeit
tolerant ones unless the structure of power is endangered. A difference
from earlier times is a lack of moral centre, so that official interventions
may seem to be arbitraryand self-serving, and there will be no sense in
the inherent rightness of the order should it some day come under
effective challenge.

Political Culture
This brief overview can only suggest lines of argument and raise
questions for discussion without developing them, and leaves much that
needs to be expanded, clarified, qualified and probably even repudiated.
The root banality is that Chinese politics cannot be understood separately
from culture. Culture provides the setting for politics. In China particularly, cultural change and continuity are substantive themes of politics
and perennial topics of political debate. Explicit use of political culture in
mainstream American political science studies of China has largely kept
to the psychocultural approach to modernization defining the concept as
a sort of sum of the individual attitudes about politics held by members
of a society. The approach raises logical, theoretical and empirical
questions which should probably be discussed more explicitly than they
have been. I have the impression that while this scholarship is certainly
used for its insights, it remains peripheral to analyses using other
approaches. A broader, more traditional concept of culture may allow a
more systematic incorporation of culture into political analysis.
I think culture is most usefully understood as an impersonal structure
or pattern of relationships among actions, ideas and interactions. A focus
on ideas or attitudes is too narrow (and gains nothing by using culture as
a synonym for attitudes). Political cultural analysis should also encompass institutions and customary ways of acting. When ideas are
incorporated into the analysis, as they certainly must be, there should be
an attempt to show their logic or rationale, not simply present them as a
list or set of opinions or values.
Cultural analysis may sometimes generate specific hypotheses. References to political culture are not a substitute for substantive empirical
research. Nor are cultural generalizations a substitute for institutional or
other kinds of political analysis. Culture refers, perhaps, to the context in
which the various political, economic and social forces operate. To be
complete, any particular theoretical approach must take culture into
account, as culture provides the parametersof the theory, an indication of
the range and scope within which it might be valid and the ways in
which, if it is valid, it might show itself. Conversely, institutions, social
relations or historical events condition the ways in which culture manifests itself.