The Chinese Political Novel

"The political novel, which enjoyed a steep yet short rise to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s, is primarily concerned with the nation’s political future. It offers a characterization of the present, a blueprint of the future, and the image of the heroes needed to get there. With the standing it gained during its meteoric rise, the political novel helped elevate the novel altogether to become the leading literary genre of the twentieth century worldwide.Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the genre from Disraeli’s England through Europe and the United States to East Asia. Her study goes beyond comparative approaches and nation-state- and language-centered histories of literature to examine the intrinsic connections among literary works. Through detailed studies, especially of the Chinese exemplars, Yeh explores the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes: the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global; the ways in which such a globalized literary genre maintains its core features while assuming local identity and interacting with local audiences and political authorities; and the relationship between the politics of form and the role of politics in literary innovation."

In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese literary world saw an emergence of fictional works – dubbed as "oppositional political novels" – that took political articulation as their major purpose and questioned the fundamental principles and intrinsic logic of the Chinese model. Based on close readings of five representative oppositional Chinese political novels, Questioning the Chinese Model examines the sociopolitical connotations and epistemological values of these novels in the broad context of modern Chinese intellectual history and contemporary Chinese politics and society. Zhansui Yu provides a sketch of the social, political, and intellectual landscape of present-day China. He investigates the dialectic relationship between the arts and politics in the Chinese context, the mechanisms and dynamics of censorship in the age of the Internet and commercialization, and the ideological limitations of oppositional Chinese political novels. In the process of textual and social analysis, Yu extensively cites Western political philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and references well-regarded studies on Chinese literature, politics, society, and the Chinese intelligentsia. Examining oppositional Chinese political novels from multiple perspectives, Questioning the Chinese Model applies a broad range of knowledge beyond merely the literary field.

This is the first full-length scholarly study of the Chinese 'core' leader and his role in the Chinese Communist Party's elite politics.

A comprehensive but accessible examination of how elite Chinese politics work covering the period from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

This book examines the Chinese political tradition over the past two thousand years and argues that the enduring and most important feature of this tradition is autocracy. The author interprets the communist takeover of 1949 not as a revolution but as a continuation of the imperial tradition. The book shows how Mao Zedong revitalised this autocratic tradition along five lines: the use of ideology for political control; concentration of power in the hands of a few; state power over all aspects of life; law as a tool wielded by the ruler, who is himself above the law; and the subjection of the individual to the state. Using a statist approach, the book argues that in China political action of the state has been the single most important factor in determining socio-economic change.

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.

Until this book, there has been no comprehensive, methodologically aware study of all aspects of Chinese political culture. The book is organized into three major areas: Chinese identities and popular culture (regional identities, anti-politics attitudes, Hong Kong identity); public opinion surveys (the Beijing area, Chinese workers, the Shanghai area); and ideological debates (the "new" Confucianism, masculinity and Confucianism, why authoritarianism is popular in China, the decline of Chinese official ideology). Here is the first work that reveals just how much, how rapidly, and how dramatically China is changing and why our perceptions of China must keep pace.

The Chinese political system is the subject of much media and popular comment in part because China supports an economy with an apparently inexorable dynamic and impressive record of achievement. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to China's political system, outlining the major features of the Chinese model and highlighting its claims and challenges. It explores the central role of the Communist Party in the country's politics and the way in which the Party controls most elements of the political system. The book also draws parallels with previous historical periods in China's history. Finally, it addresses the question of what kind of role the People's Republic of China will play in global politics as a whole, the implications for the West and the re-balancing of relations between China and its neighbors.