Party-state, nation, empire: rethinking the grammar of Chinese Governance

Vivienne Shue

Journal of Chinese Governance, 2018, vol. 3, issue 3, 268-291

Abstract: Western political scientists, regarding China as a nation-state like any other, commonly classify it as a ‘party-state’ and as ‘authoritarian’. Yet China’s transition to modern statehood differed from that of almost every other postimperial or ‘new’ nation on the planet. Drawing on new scholarship in the history of empire and of modern China, this essay reflects on certain repercussions of the Sinic world’s singular experience of empire, imperial breakdown, and passage to political modernity. What light, we ask, can reexamining China’s oddly intact transfiguration—from dynastic empire to people’s republic—shed on how the Party has governed since 1949? With a view to tailoring an altered research agenda for political scientists today—one better fitted to grasping what Chinese authorities may mean when they refer to building ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era’—we consider, in particular, several techniques of governance associated with empire relating to scale and strategy, to hierarchy and differentiation.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/23812346.2018.1488495

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