The Logic of Comparative Politics and the Development of Political Science in China

This article attempts to discuss the debate about “indigenizing political science in China” from the logic of comparative politics. The author believes that the phrase “indigenizing political science in China” is misleading at best and destructive to political science development in China at worst. The logic of comparative politics is the same as other comparative social sciences: namely, it is the process of replacing proper names and treating tempo and spatial factors as potential variables contributing to the explanation of political phenomena. As social scientists, we should not be content in using “local Chinese conditions” or “special Chinese cultural factors” to explain political behavior and phenomena in China. Instead, we should decompose the “special Chinese conditions” and “cultural factors” for the deeper meaning of these conditions and factors so that we can conceptualize and elevate these conditions and factors to a theoretical level. In short, the author favors making political science study in China more scientific and argues that the future of political science studies in China lies in replacing the proper name “China” or “Chinese”.     

Family planning and world health

She is coauthor of the 1987 and 1988 editions of State of the World;and author or coauthor of several Worldwatch papers, including: “Our Demographically Divided World” and “The Future of Urbanization.”     

Gendered Narratives: Stories and Silences in Transitional Justice

Stories told about violence, trauma, and loss inform knowledge of post-conflict societies. Stories have a context which is part of the story-teller’s life narrative. Reasons for silences are varied. This article affirms the importance of telling and listening to stories and notes the significance of silences within transitional justice’s narratives. It does this in three ways. First, it outlines a critical narrative theory of transitional justice which confirms the importance of narrative agency in telling or withholding stories. Relatedly, it affirms the importance of story-telling as a way to explain differentiated gender requirements within transitional justice processes. Second, it examines gendered differences in the ways that women are silenced by shame, choose silence to retain self-respect, use silence as a strategy of survival, or an agential act. Third, it argues that compassionate listening requires gender-sensitive responses that recognize the narrator’s sense of self and needs.     

Innocent denials of known genocides: A further contribution to a psychology of denial of genocide

Conclusion The problem of revisionism, or efforts to deny and censor the incontrovertible history of known genocides, is a growing one. It is now clear that denial is inevitably a phase of the genocidal process, extending far beyond the immediate politically expedient denials of governments who are currently engaging in genocidal massacre or have just recently done so—i.e., the Chinese government's abject denials of the killings of some 5,000 in Tiananmen Square, or the Sri Lanka government's denials of the state-organized massacre of 5,000 Tamil. Denials of genocide continue long after the event by a variety of groups and people, including successor governments or successor enemies of the victim people, such as anti-Semites against Jews, Turks against Armenians, and bigots and celebrants of violence and murder of all sorts. But such denials also occur—and this is the most perplexing fact—among a variety of not obviously malevolent people, including intellectuals who, in the process of calling for a better world, effectively exonerate, support, encourage, and participate in denials of a known genocide, implicitly condoning and even celebrating its occurrence, meanings, and portents for the future. This article is an effort to study and analyze this latter phenomenon, which has been little recognized. Together with previous essays on the psychology of more explicit malevolent denials of genocide, the intention is to generate a broader psychological theory of denials of genocide and revisionism by proposing that there are also a variety of “innocent denials” of the factual reality or significance of known cases of genocide, and a variety of “innocent disavowals of violence” which in truth celebrate the violence. These “innocent denials” join with the well-known explicit bigots in creating a vast panorama of dangerous denials of genocides and implicit calls to new genocides in our world. The basic thesis of this article has been under development since its first presentation in a plenary address at the Soviet Academy of sciences in Yerevan, Armenia in 1990 on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.     

Report Card from East Germany

Based on extensive field research that the author has conducted in eastern Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this essay discusses the history of communist education in East Germany and its relevance for Western education today. Among the topics addressed are the differences between “propaganda” and “enlightenment” according to communist ideology, the structure of the East German system of education and extracurriculars, how that system fostered “textbook Reds,” and how its curricular materials portrayed the USA.     

The Politics of Poverty Mis-targeting in China

Based upon a county level analysis, this article explores the complex processes of poverty mis-targeting in China and supplements the pre-existing literature with a bottom-up analysis. It argues that the rational calculations of key county leaders, shaped by a combination of formal and informal institutions, determine whether a county, irrespective of poverty level, competes for the title of “state-designated poorest county (SDPC).” This article also demonstrates that the interaction between formal and informal institutions is dynamic and subject to change. For future relevant research, this article suggests to analyze the practice of poverty reduction in a disaggregated manner by examining the interplay within and among different levels of government. Juan Wang, a Ph.D candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “Going beyond Township and Village Enterprises,” Journal of Contemporary China, Issue 14, Volume 42, (February 2005), pp.171–181. The author is particularly grateful to Kellee Tsai for her valuable suggestions and support throughout this project. I am indebted to William Rowe, Mark Blyth, Wang Sangui and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The Institute of Global Studies (IGS) of Johns Hopkins University receives my gratitude for its financial support of this project.     

Leadership change, legitimacy, and party transition in China

Using Max Weber’s theory of legitimacy and transition, this article suggests that the biggest challenge for China’s new leadership is to transform the Communist Party into an institutionalized ruling party. After analyzing the scenarios of democratization, legitimation, decay, or repression, resulting from the interactions between public contention and the ruling elite, this article argues that the CCP has accomplished the transition from a revolutionary to a reformist party but is now somewhere between claiming to “govern for the people” and “hanging on to power.” To become an institutionalized ruling party, the CCP needs to curtail official corruption and control its membership growth. There are, however, some serious political and personal limitations that China’s new leaders will have to overcome. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1988 and 1992 respectively. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, research fellow at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria, and a visiting senior fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore. His research interests include Chinese political institutions and leadership changes, theories of international relations, Taiwan-Strait relations, and U.S.-China relations. He is the author ofParty vs. State in Post-1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The author wishes to thank John Watt, Joshua Forrest and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the draft version of this article.     

Independent Candidates in China’s Local People’s Congress Elections

In the Chinese political system, according to the constitution, the people’s congresses at the primary level are the only institution which the voters can directly elect. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the “direct elections” and takes every measure in the elections to prevent grassroots power from entering even the primary-level people’s congresses. In recent years, grassroots power has kept struggling for its legal rights in the “direct elections” held in a few localities. The conflicts between the grassroots power and the authoritarian party in the “direct elections” have become an interesting political phenomenon, a subject deserves close observation and research. This paper studies the background of the independent candidates, their motivations and behaviour in elections. The paper also examines the party’s control in the elections and thus exposes the true nature of China’s people’s congress “direct” elections. The paper argues that independent candidates can have little impacts on China’s political structure at the current stage because of the party’s tight control, but their political participation has the most democratic value, compared with the “reforms” instigated and carried out by the CCP.     

Reports from “Backstage” in Entertainment News

While “serious” news outlets struggle financially in the United States, evidence suggests that entertainment news coverage is thriving. By expanding upon Erving Goffman’s performance perspective and performance theory, this article seeks to illuminate representations of celebrities in the news media, with attention to the recent news stories regarding Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock. The analysis also explores the off-screen performance of celebrities—developed and presented in news stories, interviews and photographs—and the repercussions when reports of a celebrity’s unmanaged backstage performance exposes the front stage performance as a pretense.     

Challenging Privatization: A Conceptual and Theoretical Argument

This is the second of a three-part polemic against the destruction of state owned enterprises in China (the first, “Against Privatization: A Historical and Empirical Argument”, is published in JCPS 13:1, 2008). It critically examines the ideology of privatization and argues for alternative guidelines of reform. The central contention is that a healthy market economy does not require domination of private property; rather it relies on apposite political-legal-ideological power and regulatory-monitoring regimes of accumulation and distribution socially legitimated within a given public culture. Rejecting the fallacies of ownership determinism and precision requirement on property rights for morality and efficiency, this essay clarifies distinction between the notion of exclusive properties and the vision of their socialized utility and management. Justifications for reforming state and private sectors alike in accordance with a unifying commons of social defense and feasibilities of innovative reform measures and policy proposals in that direction, will be elaborated in a third essay titled “Overcoming Privatization: A Strategic and Institutional Argument”.

Political Myth and the Sacred Center of Human Rights: The Universal Declaration and the Narrative of “Inherent Human Dignity”

This paper will explore the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an exemplar of political mythmaking, a genre of narrative designed to channel and thereby to quell social anxiety and to orient select groups toward desirable beliefs and practices. One of the Declaration’s most fundamental and forceful elements is its enshrinement of the “inherent dignity” of each member of the human family. Drawing upon contemporary theorizations of mythmaking and sacralization, this article will elucidate the manner in which inherent dignity functions as the central item of sacredness within what we might call the “secular morality” of universal human rights.     

Capabilities Theory and the Limits of Liberal Justice: On Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice

In Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum applies the “Capabilities Approach,” which she calls “one species of a human rights approach,” to justice issues that have in her view been inadequately addressed in liberal political theory. These issues include rights of the disabled, rights that transcend national borders, and animal rights issues. She demonstrates the weakness of Rawlsianism, contractualism in general, and much of the Kantian tradition in moral philosophy and shows the need to move beyond the limitations of narrow rationalism, nationalism, and speciesism. Nevertheless, Nussbaum fails to elaborate adequately the grounds for her own capabilities position or to face fundamental theoretical questions about the nature and implications of that position.     

The problem with the “portfolio approach” in American energy policy

One predominant theme in American energy and electricity policy is the idea of a “portfolio approach,” or that society must embrace an assortment of different energy technologies simultaneously. This article argues that such a strategy, in practice, is (a) biased, since fossil fuel and nuclear technologies have been heavily favored; (b) opaque, obscuring the different full social costs of energy systems; (c) inequitable, promoting technologies that contribute to climate change; and (d) unsophisticated, ignoring important qualitative differences among technologies. The article estimates the full social costs of electricity generation, concluding that the five cheapest forms of electricity generation are all renewable resources; that intermittency is not a reason to reject renewable energy technologies; that nuclear power has significant technical and environmental problems, especially from a greenhouse gas emissions and climate change perspective; and that “clean coal” and carbon capture and sequestration technologies face significant challenges to deployment.     

The Forgotten Hysteria Over Malpractice

This article explores the origins of the medical “malpractice crisis,” and describes the basic social, economic, and political transformations that led to its emergence and the reasons for its rise. An understanding of these dynamics explains the gap in awareness about what the doctor/patient relationship is and what it should be, and its correlation to the upsurge in medical malpractice lawsuits and patient safety programs. The author recommends managing for and conserving the doctor/patient relationship as the key priority to be tackled in order to put an end to the “crisis” and prevent circumstances that further encourage it.     

Stockholm Syndrome: Radical Islam and the European Response

This paper argues that too restrictive an understanding has governed both academic and popular analysis of the social, cultural, and political conflicts between the Western European majorities and their Islamic minorities. These conflicts are typically viewed through the prisms of majority racism and/or minority economic disadvantage. While such social facts are undoubtedly important, I argue that the ideology of radical Islamism must be taken seriously in any analysis of the problem. Thus, I do two things in this essay. I outline the elements in twentieth-century radical Islamic writings that relate to the relationship between (broadly understood) Islamic and Western civilization; I also offer an overview of the now long-lived situation of culture war in Western Europe that supports my argument that Islamic cultural pathology, more than European racism, is the chief causal factor. This is intended as a warning that “clash of civilization” and “Islamo-fascism” models, usually disparaged in the academy, must be taken quite seriously.     

Time Exposures

He is the author of many articles on the cultural significance of photography, including “The Photographer as Educator” published in Teachers College Record.     

Tariq Ramadan and the Quest for a Moderate Islam

Tariq Ramadan calls himself a bridge builder between Muslims and European culture, but contradictions in his theology prevent him from fulfilling this role. He is an Islamic intellectual who espouses democracy and pluralism, yet he believes that shari‘a law is universal. He exhorts his European followers to refrain from anti-Semitic violence, yet he cites as an authority Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is an apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers. He calls for Muslims to be full participants in Western civic societies, yet he calls on Muslims to “resist” the neo-liberal economic order that forms the basis of Western society. Ramadan has made alliances with left wing politicians and academics in France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, but he has a pattern of disappointing and frustrating his leftist allies. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Britain and the Netherlands, the British and Dutch governments called upon Ramadan to support peaceable brands of Islam in these traumatized countries. These efforts failed because Ramadan’s most important constituency has always been “the Muslim street,” and this makes it difficult for him to embrace liberal principles.     

The Social Value of Self-Esteem

This essay reflects upon the current cultural skirmishes over the parenting practices of Americans, which have pitted “Helicopter Parents” against “Free-Range Kids”; “Tiger Mothers” against “Panda Dads;” and at-risk communities “Waiting for Superman” against privileged students in the “Race to Nowhere.” Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in these and other popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices. Through different means, the relatively privileged parents who write child-rearing memoirs (or confessionals) pursue a similar end: to build and enhance their children’s self-concept and emotional competence. In particular, professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure inter-generational transmission of advantage. The goals of emotional competence and self-esteem replicate the mechanisms of control to which elite parents are subjected in professional careers and therefore represent an important form of cultural capital in the reproduction of class advantages.     

The ethos of sovereignty: A critical appraisal

Taking as its starting point the commonly held claim about the obscurity of the concept of sovereignty, the article first identifies a fundamental paradox between the classical Westphalian notion of state sovereignty and human rights. In the rhetoric of international politics, attempts to establish the responsibility of states to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms within their jurisdictions are often countered with claims referring to the “sovereign equality” of all states and the subsequent principle of non-intervention. The article suggests that in a more contemporary understanding of sovereignty the responsibility of a state to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms is seen as a constituent ingredient of the state itself. The chapter continues to elaborate how this change has come about. The classical notion of sovereignty is illustrated through a reading of Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576). In Bodin’s world, sovereignty is a constitutive element of the state, and the possibility of a multitude of sovereign entities in a global world logically denying the possibility of any “supra-national” normative framework is still a minor consideration. This possibility is only worked out with the emergence of international law. In both classics such as Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) and more contemporary treatises such as Lassa Oppenheim’s International Law (1905), state sovereignty has become conditional to recognition by other sovereign states and a subsequent membership in the “family of nations.” The conditional membership in the “family of nations” involves a contradiction: a sovereign state must act in a “dignified” manner, it must use its sovereignty with “restraint” by respecting the human rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens, i.e., it must employ its sovereignty in a non-sovereign way. This restriction of sovereignty, addressed as “ethical sovereignty,” becomes a constitutive element in a post-Westphalian state and a central ingredient in the contemporary doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The article further criticizes the various uses (and abuses) of “ethical sovereignty” in the regulation of “failing” and “rogue” states and concludes by identifying its general political dangers. Finally, with reference to Jacques Derrida’s Rogues (2003), the article suggests a more radical reappraisal of the concept of sovereignty. It is a fact that sovereignty is a term used without any well-recognised meaning except that of supreme authority. Under these circumstances those who do not want to interfere in a mere scholastic controversy must cling to the facts of life and the practical, though abnormal and illogical, condition of affairs.¹ —Lassa Oppenheim But to invoke the concept of national sovereignty as in itself a decisional factor is to fall back on a word which has an emotive quality lacking meaningful specific content. It is to substitute pride for reason.² —Eli Lauterpacht     

“Relational goods” and participation: Incorporating sociability into a theory of rational action

Theoretical explanations of why rational individuals would participate in politics remain unsatisfactory. This paper addresses the problem by developing and analyzing models which include among citizens' payoffs “relational goods,” objectives which depend upon interactions among persons. The models predict more participation than do the standard approaches. For example, under some circumstances persons will be more likely to act if they believe others will act, contrary to free-rider logic. More importantly, conditions are identified under which leaders could increase mass activity. Thus, a model is provided of “mobilization” in terms of the preferences and decisions of a rational individual. The author thanks the Russell Sage Foundation for support as a Visiting Fellow during 1986–87. The paper has benefited from the comments of Patricia Gurin, Steve Brams, Jane Mansbridge, Linda Cohen, Tyler Cowen, Ami Glazer, and seminar participants at the University of Rochester.