Title: Informal Chinese Politics: Society in the State
Abstract:Summary Harald Bøckman, ‘Informal Chinese Politics: Society in the State’, Forum for Development Studies, 1996:2, pp. 307–325. Informal modes of politics have for a long time been recognised as a vita...Summary Harald Bøckman, ‘Informal Chinese Politics: Society in the State’, Forum for Development Studies, 1996:2, pp. 307–325. Informal modes of politics have for a long time been recognised as a vital part of Chinese political behaviour, the Chinese Communist ways of managing the state being no exception. This article analyses this phenomenon in a broader social and historical perspective, seeing it as a part of a tradition which is termed ‘Chinese strategic thinking’. Two central concepts are analysed, namely the concept of ren qing, which is rendered as ‘bonded sentiments’, and guanxi, which is usually translated as ‘connections’ but which has much wider social connotations than our Western term. These forms of strategic thinking are operative over a wide spectrum from the personal to the political, providing a good example of how informal networks are making themselves felt in bureaucratic and political structures. We therefore have a case of society penetrating the state. Why this has become so is explained by discussing two distinctive features of the traditional Chinese social formation, namely the pre-modern Chinese legal culture and its ideological corollary, namely patrimonialism. Traditional legal culture is characterised on the one hand by early use of laws and public regulations in the development of the imperial state, and on the other hand by the continued prevalence of customary ritualised norms as the main regulating force of social relations. The patrimonial ideology is not just a crude extension of kinship ties into a bureaucratic structure, but the transformation of a hierarchically ordered kin-based structure into a Confucian ideology, where ancestor worship served as the ontological glue. Such customary and ideological environments created exceptionally good conditions for the perpetuation of informal modes of politics into present-day China.Read More
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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