Building a Harmonious Society and Achieving Individual Harmony

Rapid economic growth in China is accompanied by economic disparity, corruption, crime, and a great deal of frustration among China’s citizens. These social problems threaten the country’s further development, social stability, and harmony. This study discusses the recent campaign in China for a harmonious society. Many Chinese scholars, officials, and citizens seem to believe that more effective and efficient social structures will result in social harmony. However, social harmony is a more complex social psychological phenomenon which is determined by the interactions among social values, people, and society. People achieve social harmony when they feel their values and desires are attainable in society. They have to make strong social and psychological effort if they want to successfully achieve harmony with nature, society, and themselves. Ai Guo Han, professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University. He received a doctorate from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is specialized in writing pedagogy and language studies. He teaches courses in freshman writing, TESOL, Chinese language and culture. He is the Executive Vice President of the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences and Humanities in the United States and actively promotes academic and cultural programs between China and the United States. His recent research focuses on Daoist philosophy and rhetorical traditions. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Masks of autonomy

He teaches in the department of philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. He has published widely on ethical topics.     

Fallible judgments

published by Routledge in 1989. He is a British psychologist who resides at Ormonde House. He was formerly with the department of psychology at the University of Nottingham.     

Declining options/increasing needs

Before that, he served at the National Institute of Education. He has held teaching appointments at the Universities of Illinois and Oregon and at Cornell University, and is now adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has authored fifteen books, including Finding Work: Cross National Perspectives; Program Evaluation and the Management of Government;and he has edited the last four volumes of Policy Studies Review Annual.     

Equality or lasting inequality?

Jan H. Blits teaches in the University Honors Program at the University of Delaware and was previously Secretary of the Navy Distinguished Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy. He has published two books and numerous articles on educational and political philosophy.     

Books in review

He is currently on leave and is visiting professor at the University of Maryland-Europe.     

Crafting village democracy in China: The roles, networking, and strategies of provincial elites

There is no obvious and direct correlation between the provincial level of economic development and democratic level of village elections. There is a great disparity in the level of rural democratization and the implementation of village self-governance among and within provinces. The modernization model alone cannot explain why village elections work well in some provinces but not in others. This paper looks at the political elite’s ongoing efforts at provincial level to conduct village elections and implement village self-governance in rural China. These efforts include the strategies for crafting village democracy employed by provincial elites: elite cooperation, local legislature, political responsibility, political programming, and the art of balancing party leadership and village elections. He has published extensively on China’s village elections and local governance. He is author and coauthor of several books. His current research interests include the development of non-state, local governance, and political participation. The author gratefully acknowledges the anonymous reviewers, Professor He Baogang of Deakin University and Professor Zhong Yang of University of Tennessee for their suggestions on an earlier draft. My special thanks to Professor Joseph Fewsmith of Boston University, Professor Tan Qingshan of Cleveland State University, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as to East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore for providing support for this research.     

Eisenhower reconsidered

He is also a Russell Conwell Fellow at Temple University, where he is a doctoral candidate in history.     

Breaching confidentiality

He also is clinical professor of Child Psychiatry and Pediatrics at St. Louis University School of Medicine.     

Rethinking human rights

He is author of The Political Economy of the International Monetary Fund (published by Transaction).He is presently a visiting lecturer on ethics and statecraft at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.     

Sino-Japanese Dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands: The Pending Controversy from the Chinese Perspective

The Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands have brought China and Japan into a bitter dispute for many decades. With regard to the real question of who owns sovereignty over the islands, the two claimants can not come to terms on several critical issues, such as whether the islands were terra nullius when Japan claimed sovereignty in 1895, whether Japan returned the islands to China after the Japanese defeat in WWII, and how their maritime boundary in the East China Sea should be demarcated according to international law. There is no ready solution to the longstanding stalemate, but the pending dispute could be shelved and managed from escalating into a military conflict. Dr. Zhongqi PAN is an Associate Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs in Fudan University. He received his Ph.D. in international relations from Fudan University in 1999. He was a visiting scholar to Lund University (2006), the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University (2004), the Henry L. Stimson Center (2001), and University of Tokyo (1999–2000).     

Gore Vidal’s Anti-Jewish nationalism

Edward Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington and at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He is author of, among other works, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill; The Resonance of Dust; Isaac Bashevis Singer;and, most recently. The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies.     

Laissez-faire follies

He is a lecturer at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. His research centers on domestic political and economic influences on congressional decisions to terminate weapons production.     

Public pensions and demographic change

He is a former John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies of Harvard University. He has written several books and articles on issues of labor market theory, work time, and social policy. He is author of Motive und Interessen im Arbeitszeitkonflikt: Eine Analyse der Entwicklung von Normalarbeitszeitstandardsand Zeit und Geld in privaten Haushalten: Gelegenheitsstruktur und Bedarf für Eigenarbeit als Determinanten sozialer Ungleichheit.He is also co-editor of Working Time in Transition: The Political Economy of Working Hours in Industrial Nations.     

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.     

Neoconservatism: Myth and reality

Seymour Martin Lipset is the Caroline S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science, professor of sociology, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He taught previously as the George D. Markham Professor at Harvard University. Among his books are Consensus and Conflict, Political Man, The First New Nation, Party Coalitions in the 1980s,and Revolution and Counterrevolution.This text was originally delivered as the First Ernst Fraenkel Lecture, given at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin.     

Political Culture and the Study of Chinese Politics

It is both a truth and a truism that Chinese politics cannot be understood without reference to Chinese culture (a truth and truism that would apply to any other society as well). But within the academic discipline of political science political culture has lost status over the past generation as not conducive to the development of empirical political theory. The usual candidate for replacement is rational choice theory. But properly understood, political culture is compatible with rational choice, inasmuch as there is no single standard of rationality, but, rather, it will vary from society to society and era to era. Considerations of the cultural background are necessary to provide content to rational choice theory, since without consideration of culture context rational choice threatens to reduce to a set of colorless banalities.

Adopting new technologies

John Carey is director of Greystone Communications, a telecommunications research and planning firm in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He also serves as consultant to the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University and is an affiliated research fellow at Columbia’s Center for Telecommunications and Information Studies.     

Planning theory as political practice

Howell S. Baum is associate professor, teaching planning theory, social planning, and organizational behavior at the University of Maryland Institute for Urban Studies and School of Social Work and Community Planning. He has done research on planning in bureaucratic organizations and is author of Planners and Public Expectationsand The Invisible Bureaucracy.He is completing a book on the experience of working in bureaucracy, Membership Without Intimacy.     

Language, myths and rhetoric

Political language can evoke a set of mythic beliefs in subtle and powerful ways. Murray Edelman is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a consultant to various national and state commissions concerned with economics planning and collective bargaining. He has published widely in the fields of political psychology, labor management relations and public policy. His recent workds include The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescenceand American Polities: Public Policy, Conflict and Change.