Abstract
The political development of contemporary China defies existing political theories. The framework of “political science” based on the ‘rational man hypothesis’ has proven to be fallible in terms of correctly envisioning China’s future. Appertaining to the Chinese political history, historical political science offers not only epistemology and methodology of the subject, but also an ontological element, for observation. With respect to historical political science, contemporary Chinese politics is considered to be the natural genetic extension of the Chinese civilization as well as a continuous and unified development process spanning over a period of 70 years ever since the People’s Republic of China was founded. Historical political science, deemed to be a tailored research approach for the development of contemporary Chinese politics, essentially adds further value and significance to this discipline.
Highlights
This article is a review of how the political development of contemporary China appears as a major agenda in both, Chinese and foreign political sciences, as well as a substantial challenge to the existing political theories
The apparent reason behind this outlook is that the Western press and academia strongly endorse the dichotomy of “democracy and non-democracy”, and believe that any political path or system that does not conform to the Western democratic ideology is certain to encounter problems sooner or later and even lead to the failure of the state, along with the inevitable “democratic transition”
Hobbes’ “political science” deviates from the classical political traditions adopted by various Western countries, and bears no relation to the political traditions of several other non-Western countries
Summary
We first need to answer this question: why do we need historical political science? China abolished political science as an independent discipline in the 1950s, but scientific socialism, one of the three major principles, belongs to Marxist political theories. The unique “genes” of Chinese civilization include the following at any rate: the Chinese nation, the fundamental unaffected Chinese characters, the territory with the Yangtze River and the Yellow River as the core, the idea of unification at the national level, the people-oriented governing philosophy, the bureaucracy at the government level (including the county system and the imperial examination system), the inclusiveness and the golden mean at the cultural level, the freedom and autonomy of social life, the focus on family ethics, and the Tianxia (world) system in foreign relations These “genes” are internalized and instilled in the Chinese nation inhabiting in a fixed territory and form the Chinese civilized community that has spanned over thousands of years. The fundamental difference between historical political science and historical sociology lies in its ontological nature
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