Political Science and Chinese Political Studies

We have witnessed the substantial transformation of China studies, particularly Chinese political studies, in the past 30 years due to changes in China and its rising status in the world as well as changes in our ways of conducting research. As area studies specialists, we are no longer isolated from the larger disciplines of Political Science and International Relations (IR) but an integral part of them. This book contains theoretically innovative contributions by distinguished political scientists from inside and outside China, who together offer up-to-date overviews of the state of the field of Chinese political studies, combines empirical and normative researches as well as theoretical exploration and case studies, explore the relationship between Western political science scholarship and contemporary Chinese political studies, examine the logic and methods of political science and their scholarly application and most recent developments in the study of Chinese politics, and discuss the hotly-contested and debated issues in Chinese political studies, such as universality and particularity, regularity and diversity, scientification and indigenization, main problems, challenges, opportunities and directions for the disciplinary and intellectual development of Chinese political studies in the context of rising China.This book represents a pioneering effort to offer an up-to-date overview of the state of the field of Chinese political studies. It assesses the field s past, present, and future, emphasizing the role of Chinese scholars in transforming it both from within and outside of China. In the process, this book discusses the most hotly-debated problems, challenges, opportunities, achievements, and directions in terms of its disciplinary and intellectual developments. The book focuses on the epistemologically-oriented debate, i.e., the serious tensions between scientific, universalistic, positivist traditions on the one hand and particularistic, historical and contextual traditions in the study of Chinese politics on the other. The book also deals with the ontologically-oriented debate between scientific knowledge and local knowledge, i.e., between scientification/westernization (ke xue hua/xi fang hua) and indigenization (ben tu hua) of Chinese political studies, and thus their influences on the study of Chinese politics.