On September 21st, 2018, the East Asian Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, hosted Professor Kevin O’Brien for a discussion on the study of China. More specifically, the talk titled “Speaking to Theory and Speaking to the China Field” focused on why scholars should aim to maintain balance between area studies and the social science disciplines. Professor O’Brien is a Bedford Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of contemporary Chinese politics, he has written extensively about legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, popular protests, policy implementation, protest policing, and political reform. His most recent work centers on the Chinese state and theories of popular contention. This event was chaired by Professor Lynette Ong, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto.
Professor O’Brien began the discussion with a brief but thorough inspection of two of his previous papers that made opposing arguments. His first paper, “Doing Fieldwork in China” (2006), was a plea for China scholars to search for “low-hanging fruit” in the disciplines to better mainstream China studies. Professor O’Brien found it problematic that many theories that have been developed using Western cases are applied to a place like China, seeing that many concepts do not always travel well. The problem of grafting Western theories directly to China is that they are all deeply embedded in assumptions about pluralist democracies. Professor O’Brien found an opportunity for theory-building and remained hopeful of the prospect of bridging the divide between area studies and other disciplines.
His second paper, however, turned sharply in a different direction. Professor O’Brien saw developments in China studies that made him uneasy. Students had not only started paying very close attention to the disciplines, some had also stopped talking to each other. For him, the China field was being hollowed out, largely due to two major trends —disciplinary specialization and topical specialization. Professor O’Brien felt that by the mid-2000s, most debates among China scholars had exhausted themselves. Even if there were new, lively debates beyond topics such as state capacity and nationalism, he thought that they often were narrow-gaged, polemical, or marked by as much agreement as disagreement. Professor O’Brien believes that the reason for this development is the fact that scholars were aiming to engage disciplinary colleagues who focused on completely different topics and did not take China to be their main subject of analysis. As for topical specialization, the reason was even simpler and more obvious – no one has the time to study everything about China. If any depth is to be achieved, some division of labor is inevitable and desirable. “Maybe the study of China was just following the Western model, or even, just following the model of natural sciences, where subfields have proliferated at a rapid rate and scholars have long been accustomed to the high degree of topical specialization. Maybe it’s no longer feasible to be an expert of more than a few fields about China.” Nevertheless, Professor O’Brien had doubts about these developments. Topical specialization by nature produces high-resolution pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but fails to explain how each piece fits together and forms the larger picture. Furthermore, such specialization discourages China-centered discussions. Disciplinary specialization can cut off experts on China from each other, and create new islands of research. This trend hampers efforts to develop a holistic understanding of Chinese politics, economics, and culture. Students in the China field have come to share less common knowledge and become less of a group, resulting in findings that are often disappointing, obvious, or only of real interest to people who know little to nothing about China.
Professor O’Brien believes that there are at least three reasons for scholars to produce country-centered research on China. First, social science theories come and go, but China will last. Second, mainstreaming the study of China may at times be wrong-headed or premature if it over-normalizes China. Third, interest in China is high, and people want to know more about China. There is a large and growing demand for country-based analysis, and scholars should be the first ones to address this demand.
Professor O’Brien foresees a future in which China studies tilt towards an era of mixed methods, high-tech quantitative work, and new experimental big-data research. He also pointed out two troublesome trends in the China field today, at least in political science: 1) narrowly conceived empirical studies that often purport to speak to immense issues, such as the nature of authoritarianism; and 2) the over-emphasis on methodology.
It is crucial that we ask ourselves: in a time when broad, in-depth knowledge about China is seen by some to be a frivolous luxury, when fieldwork in the eyes of some is becoming a time-consuming indulgence that is difficult to do and downplayed, when focus on comparison and measurement threatens to crowd out the development of a rich, rounded picture of Chinese politics – what can be done?
Nevertheless, Professor O’Brien ended the discussion on a more optimistic note. Despite all the problems he mentioned, Professor O’Brien argued today is still the golden age to study China. The infusion of scholars from China and better-trained scholars in the West are bringing more to the table than ever before. People in China are now poised to make major contributions to China studies, and there are undoubtedly strategies to finesse the tensions Professor O’Brien brought forward during his talk. Any vibrant field of study depends on revolutionary successes, pioneering approaches, and creative uses of data that were unforeseen just a few years prior. Professor O’Brien remains excited to see where the next generation will take us in finding ways to deal with the aforementioned trade-offs in the study of China.
Ching-Lin Tiffany Kao is a fourth-year student studying International Relations and History at the University of Toronto. She currently serves as an Event Reporter for Synergy: The Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies, East Asian section. She is interested in cross-straits relations, including the socioeconomic situation and cultural similarities and differences in China and Taiwan.
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