Continuities and Discontinuities in the Social Sciences in China

The career of the social sciences China has been a tempestuous one. For those familiar only with their almost total eclipse during the period of the cultural revolution, and the struggling attempts (still uncertain of success) at reestablishment recent years, it may come as a surprise that an earlier period things were quite different. In the words of Maurice Freedman, for example, It could be argued that before the Second World War, outside North America and Western Europe, China was the seat of the most flourishing sociology the world, at least respect of its intellectual quality (1962:106-116). In this paper I am interested exploring the strain between theory and practice and its role the introduction and growth of social science China. My suggestion is that the tendency Western social science for social theories to be divorced from practice was reproduced and intensified when these theories were initially transplanted to China, and that much of the intellectually stimulating work done social science there represented attempts to adapt Euro-American theories to realities, and attempts to unify theory and practice solving China's problems. I will broadly outline two major, if overlapping, stages the development of social science China, with the major emphasis on academic sociology and anthropology (the two are not distinctly separate China): a period of introduction, covering the late 19th century and the first two decades or so of the 20th century, which the first became acquainted with Western social thought and first attempted conscious programs of social change inspired by Western models of social work; and a period of sinicization, beginning the 1920s, which there was a good deal of conscious theoretical work t o adapt imported theories to realities. Throughout this development the importance of practice and application remained high, though towards mid-century an increasing split had developed between socialists and Marxists interested rapid and revolutionary change on the one hand, and on the other hand academic (and largely functionalist) social scientists interested more gradual and reformist change. China had no indigenous social science the usual sense of the term. The imperial state was a centralized bureaucracy based on very labor-intensive agriculture. This bureaucracy accumulated an enormous amount of social and economic information. The interests guiding such accumulation were administrative, however, and not sociological; the goals were control and order, not criticism and theoretical understanding (Wang 1938:345). Control of a large number of agricultural producers by a small number of bureaucratic elite was achieved through promoting a Confucian doctrine of the naturalness of social hierarchy and a structured pattern of social duties within that hierarchy. The social thought of this doctrine concerned itself with normative statements of what social relations ought to be, and not with what they fact were (Fei 1979:20). The Confucian tradition was too humanistic to develop its own social science, in that the value of knowledge was judged by whether it could benefit people and bring quick improvements to their livelihood. Thus the practical efficacy of social techniques was extolled while the value of developing a scientific logic was dismissed and the importance of theoretical investigation denied (Wong 1979:2). The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) version of the Confucian bureaucratic state came under increasing pressure the 19th century. Internal social, economic, and political strains led to numerous and often very serious uprisings. After the Opium Wars of mid-century there were rapidly escalating encroachments by the various foreign powers, culminating the humiliating defeat of China by Japan 1894-95. The first response to this evidence of weakness was to try to reinvigorate the Confucian tradition and arm it with Western technology and science to help deal with the crisis; Chinese learning as substance, Western learning as instrument was the slogan.