Chinese Informal Politics

Abstract

In the study of modern Chinese politics, the informal dimension has always played an extremely important part.1 This is due in part to the unsettled nature of the Chinese political scene throughout the twentieth century, making it difficult for any political arrangement to become securely institutionalized, and in part to the traditional aversion to law and a cultural preference for more moralistic and personalized authority relations. Though usually not part of the explicit analytical framework, the informal dimension has been implicitly taken into account in the biographical analysis of the lives of prominent leaders or thinkers, and in the study of leadership coalitions and cleavages ('factionalism'). Informal politics per se did not, however, become the basis of social science theory on China until the 1970s ? specifically, with the publication of Andrew Nathan's pioneering article and Tang Tsou's rebuttal.2