Our Sense of Problem

Abstract

This article begins by reviewing the past three generations of postwar U.S.-based China research in terms of the central problematique of the most influential scholarship of each generation, and then goes on to place those into the larger context of the past three centuries of Western thought about China. The purpose is to demonstrate how the either/or binary of the West versus China has governed the questions asked and not asked by those influential scholars, and how it has shaped the main answers proffered, sometimes even when they violate available empirical evidence. The article argues that the interpenetration of the Chinese and the Western, with reinterpretations and syncretizing no less than tensions and contradictions, is in fact the basic given reality of a modern China; an either/or choice between the two is not possible in reality, only in theoretical construction. An insistence on the latter is what has given rise to violations of empirical evidence. A truly China-centered approach is not to swing from the extreme of Western-centrism to Chinese-centrism, but rather to make the real problems of modern China our own, namely, to search for a viable mix of the Chinese and the Western, anchored in empirical evidence. The either/or binary mode of thinking, moreover, is evidenced in a host of other similar binaries, including modernity versus tradition, industry versus agriculture, cities versus countryside, market versus population, market versus the state, formal-rational law versus substantive law, the universal versus the particular, and so on. A historical approach requires that we set the either/or, mutually exclusive mode of thinking aside and focus instead on their interrelationship and interaction. The article provides concrete illustrations, mainly about rural development and the justice system.