The field of Sinology has benefited greatly in the past twenty years from a rich array of studies based on ethnography and participant observation. Anthropologists, not surprisingly, have led the way (Bruun, 1993; Chen, 2003; Fong, 2004; Friedman, 2006; Gladney, 1996; Hertz, 1998; Jacka, 2004; Jankowiak, 1993; Jing, 1996; Judd, 1994; Kipnis, 1997; Litzinger, 2000; Liu, 2000; Murphy, 2002; Notar, 2006; Perkins, 2002; Pun, 2005; Rofel, 1999; Schein, 2000; Watson and Watson, 2004; Yan, 1996, 2003; Yang, 1994; Zhang 2001). A number of sociologists also embrace these methods (Calhoun, 1994; Chan, Madsen, and Unger, 1992, 2009; Farrer, 2002; Lee, 1998). Whatever its disciplinary origin, and whether the specific topic is interpersonal relationships or village governance or migrant entrepreneurs, much of this work is strongly political in orientation. It hardly seems possible to come away from such books without acquiring immensely valuable knowledge about the workings of power in China, particularly at the local level.

Several political scientists have applied versions of these research techniques in China as well. But these methods have a more problematic relationship with the discipline of political science. Though members of our field have long employed ethnography and participant observation (which I group together below under the term “site-intensive methods”), such approaches have never been seen as mainstream. The discipline is now going through a process of energetic debate over what constitutes important knowledge and what methods usefully contribute to such knowledge. Practitioners of other qualitative methods began some time ago to weigh in with articulate statements explaining how what they do fits into the process of building and testing political science theory. A new generation of ethnographers and participant observers has recently emerged as well (Schatz, 2009b). As Schatz notes, members of this group differ among themselves, with those identified as interpretivists challenging multiple aspects of the ontology and epistemology of mainstream political science. Others, he writes, carry out ethnographic work in a qualified neopositivist mode, one that “uses attention to detail to generate middle-range theories, that considers cumulative knowledge a possibility worth pursuing, and that is optimistic about the scholar’s potential to offer contributions” (Schatz, 2009a: 14). While I applaud the idea that politics should be studied from many perspectives, not merely those fitting within scientific paradigms, what I have to say here falls within the latter category. I argue that political scientists of many stripes can and should appreciate the value of the fieldwork techniques under discussion.

The political elite was an early focus of Western analysis of the People’s Republic of China, partly because information about the elite was relatively available in the opaque political system. As China opened up, information about all aspects of Chinese politics became increasingly available, thus decreasing the relative importance of elite studies in China. In this chapter, we first argue that elite studies continue to be important and necessary for understanding authoritarian regimes like China. Further, we introduce a dataset of Central Committee (CC) members that combines traditional elite studies with new coding and statistical methodologies. The data are used to trace several basic characteristics of the CC through the entire history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and to measure the relative influence of Hu Yaobang and Hua Guofeng in the CC. We further discuss the potential of this dataset for providing more systematic evidence of how elite characteristics and elite conflict affect policy and political outcomes in China.

Elite Studies in Authoritarian Regimes

At a time when China was sealed off from the rest of the world, Western scholars of China relied mainly on the official press and in some cases military sources from Taiwan to make scholarly inferences. As the heroic deeds and – at times – the “errors” of senior leaders were often the foci of official press coverage, Western scholars naturally made extensive use of this relatively abundant source of information, thus creating a heavy emphasis on the elite. Today, China scholars have a wide range of sources available to them, ranging from internal government documents to interviews to survey instruments. The proliferation of new sources has given rise to the study of grassroots-level political phenomena in China and a decline in the relative importance of elite studies. However, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime provides compelling reason to continue elite studies.

Political sensitivity is always a challenge for the scholar doing fieldwork in nondemocratic and transitional systems, especially when doing surveys and quantitative research. Not only are more research topics likely to be politically sensitive in these systems, but in trying to collect precise and unbiased data to give us a quantitative description of a population, we are sometimes doing exactly what the government – and sometimes certain members of that population – would like to prevent. In this chapter, I discuss some of the methodological and ethical issues that face researchers working in these contexts and describe strategies for dealing with these issues. I argue that in these contexts a “socially embedded” approach to survey research that carefully attends to the social relationships inherent in the survey research process can help alleviate problems of political sensitivity, protect participants and researchers in the survey research process, and maximize data quality.

For this chapter I draw on my experience conducting a village-level survey on village conditions of officials in 316 villages in rural China in 2001 as part of the twenty months of fieldwork I conducted for my doctoral dissertation and book, Accountability without Democracy: Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China (2007a). Unlike an individual-level opinion survey of the mass public, this survey focused on village-level institutions and outcomes and interviewed one or more village officials in each village as informants on their village’s economy, politics, and society.

As Manion details in Chapter 10 of this volume, social scientists with an interest in China already have contributed a healthy stream of survey research based on national probability samples, but the methodology behind these surveys has historically been dependent on the household registration system, or hukou (户口 ). Since the 1950s, Chinese households have (in principle) been listed exhaustively by village or urban neighborhood; for decades, local officials took great care to maintain and update these lists. This system was an efficient collection of population data, and household registration lists have thus been widely used as the basis of the vast majority (if not all) of probability samples drawn in China since 1978.

China’s rapid economic transformation has dramatically undermined the key assumption that hukou lists are accurate and complete representations of the population of their respective localities. Until the early 1990s, reasonably reliable lists of residents could still be obtained from villages and neighborhoods, but China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization have severely undermined the ability of local officials to track their populations effectively. As a result, survey researchers who sample the countryside face the problem of drawing respondents who, according to official lists, live in a village but in reality have become urban residents; yet, if researchers sample from urban hukou lists, they will often discover that migrants are not properly listed unless they happen to hold a formal temporary registration. Given the magnitude of recent internal migration in China, the problem is severe. We can no longer claim that samples drawn from hukou lists are representative of the population in a given locality. Nor can we claim that such samples are probability samples.

Do concerns over “face” play a greater role in Chinese than American foreign policy? What is the nature of Chinese national identity? Can it be empirically measured and compared to other national identities, and is it consequential for foreign policy outcomes? For instance, how do Chinese patriotism and nationalism compare with, say, American patriotism and nationalism?

This chapter argues that experimental methods and psychological measures provide valuable tools to the political scientist interested in answering such questions. Experiments have long been the first choice for establishing causality in the hard sciences. The social sciences are catching on, with psychology and behavioral economics leading the way. Political scientists, led by Americanists interested in voting behavior, are beginning to follow suit (Druckman et al., 2006). International relations scholars have taken notice. As Rose McDermott (2006: 356) has recently argued, “experiments offer a unique opportunity to make a clear causal argument … which is why it has been differentially adopted by the hard sciences, psychology, and behavioral economics as the gold standard method of choice.” It is the random assignment of subjects to experimental and control conditions that allows analysts to be confident that variation between groups of subjects on dependent measures was “caused” by variation in the independent variables that were manipulated. By contrast, the majority of quantitative work in political science, which is based on research designs that are correlational in nature, cannot confidently make causal claims.

China specialists in the reform era are blessed with much better ­accessibility to data than previous generations (Perry, 1994b: 704–713). In particular, much information that was collected and maintained by governmental agencies has now become available to researchers. However, because of scholars’ unfamiliarity with such sources, uncertainty about collecting them, and long-existing skepticism of their reliability, so far very few scholars have taken full advantage of this opportunity.

In China, many topics on state-society relations are regarded as “sensitive” by the government. Consequently, researchers are faced with various restrictions on their empirical inquiries. Those who study popular contention often find themselves in a difficult situation: interviews or surveys are difficult to arrange, and little information can be found in the media. Under such circumstances, governmental materials, if available, often provide the best sources for the study of state-society interactions. After all, for a long time the party-state not only monopolized political power but also tightly controlled the flow and distribution of critical information.

In her 1994 review of the state of the Chinese politics field, Elizabeth Perry notes that the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979 presented a new generation of American political scientists with an opportunity to “pursue a new brand of scholarship, based upon field work and documentary materials available only in the PRC.” Moreover, given the “extraordinary diversity that makes up the Chinese political experience” and the maturation of the field, she argued that Chinese politics might finally “be fertile soil for the formulation of new analytical approaches” (Perry, 1994b: 704, 712).

Since the publication of Perry’s article, China has not only accelerated its economic reforms but also has inaugurated a new generation of national leaders, joined the World Trade Organization, and become the world’s second largest economy. These profound changes, brought about by a matrix of global, national, and local forces, are opening up more avenues for research, dissolving and reconstituting old boundaries, and forcing us to reconsider how we understand issues that have been central to the field of Chinese politics. For example, how does state action impact economic and social transformation, especially in areas where the “reach of the state” has been historically weak (Shue, 1988)? What forms can increased political participation take and how might they contribute to greater political stability and legitimacy? How are market-oriented activities reshaping institutions, practices, and social structures, especially at the local level? In what sense can reemerging and evolving social identities provide a basis for effective collective action? The Chinese case offers a valuable perspective on these and other questions and may potentially deepen our knowledge of how similar processes affect citizens in other regions of the world.

Not that long ago the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the People’s Republic was greeted with an uneasy combination of euphoric enthusiasm and considered skepticism by political scientists. Well into the 1980s, scholars seriously debated the merits of fieldwork on the mainland versus research conducted exclusively in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or abroad (Thurston, 1983). From the beginning, fieldwork on the ground in China was a touchy political subject and researchers’ concerns continue to center on gaining access, ensuring the safety of interviewees and collaborators, and the political impact of their findings inside and outside China.

Frequently left aside, however, are questions of how to choose fieldwork sites and what impacts one’s choice of locale or locales have on research designs and outcomes. One recent exception is Maria Heimer’s thoughtful essay in support of what she terms a “one-case multi-field-site approach” to fieldwork research design, in which she argues that “authors can gain a deeper knowledge of one phenomenon by probing for similarities, while downplaying variations across place” and emphasizes that “this research design is different from, say, going to four field sites and treating them as four different cases of one phenomenon … and looking for variations between the four cases” (Heimer, 2006: 62, 69).

At a workshop at the University of Michigan in November 2006, three generations of scholars met to discuss and debate the study of Chinese politics and how new and diverse sources and methods are changing the field. This volume is the culmination of that workshop. Drawing on diverse research experiences, we present a wide range of sources, methods, and field strategies for the study of Chinese politics in the new era. As political scientists, we place our distinct methodological approaches in the framework of the discipline and point to particular challenges or opportunities (or both) of adaptation in the context of contemporary China. With the main focus on methodological concerns and the discovery of new data sources, the chapters in this volume are also richly substantive illustrations that demonstrate how to adapt method to context innovatively and appropriately. Thus, this book illustrates the benefits of the emerging cross-pollination between China studies and the broader discipline.

Three major themes emerged from our workshop discussions: (1) how to effectively use new sources and data collection methods, (2) how to integrate the study of Chinese politics into the discipline of political science to the betterment of both, and (3) how to deal with logistical and ethical problems of doing research in a challenging environment. In this Introduction, we discuss these themes in the sections below in the context of the initial workshop, the substantive chapters in this volume, and the field more generally. As only sporadic attention has been paid to the nuts and bolts of the study of Chinese politics, we hope this volume will spark future debates and other publications, conferences, and graduate training on research design and methodology in challenging fieldwork sites. We recognize that this volume joins an existing ongoing debate (Baum, 2007; Harding, 1994; Heimer and Thøgersen, 2006; Manion, 1994; Perry, 2007 and 1994b; Shambaugh, 1993; Wank, 1998). Collectively the following chapters illustrate that although much has changed in the realm of studying Chinese politics, many of the fundamentals that previous scholars learned about this endeavor still apply. Language skills and familiarity with China strike us as remaining core prerequisites for scholars wishing to make sense of any given aspect of Chinese politics. Moreover, local knowledge – that is, knowing China – is increasingly insufficient. Each of the contributors to this volume has also utilized a wide variety of research skills in his or her work. These skills cover a broad set of approaches to politics and include the use of sophisticated quantitative techniques, the production and utilization of survey data, the application of new technologies, searching out and making use of previously closed archival sources, and even conducting quasi-experiments. Although such approaches cover many tools in the political science kit, and are illustrative of the impressive and at times conflicting directions in which the study of Chinese politics is headed, all contributors to this volume have made use of such methods with a common purpose in mind: to amplify their ability to describe and explain key aspects of politics in contemporary China. As such, the volume shows the rewards of bringing together scholars with diverse backgrounds, yet who share a collective commitment to pushing both China studies and the discipline forward in an inclusive and mutually beneficial manner. Thus, although the volume focuses on mainland China almost exclusively, we believe that the methodology and research design strategies presented here are relevant to scholars in many other places around the globe.

Like many of the contributors to this volume, I began graduate school roughly a decade after China began its “reform and opening-up” process. At the time, the field of Chinese politics was, temporally speaking, reasonably well demarcated. Those of us in political science departments were expected to say something novel and significant about the post-1949 period. Within this rather narrow range, however, an even more contracted time span – post-1978 politics – drew the largest number of students, as well as generated the most interest among the broader public and departmental colleagues. To be sure, this temporal border was somewhat porous, but because it was also vigorously patrolled by tough-minded historians, who were reluctant to define the 1949–78 period as “history,” the “present-ism” in the study of Chinese politics was difficult to ignore. More recently, thanks to the growing interest in China’s “rise,” the gravitation of political science toward the present has become even stronger. Students of politics overwhelmingly concentrate on events in the last thirty years, whereas historians, with some exceptions, still focus on the pre-1949 period, leaving the other three decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) politics (1949–78) in a disciplinary twilight zone. In this chapter I suggest that presentism has not been cost-free in terms of our ability to understand Chinese politics and that these costs can best be recouped by broadening the temporal scope of Chinese politics and making archival research a far more integral part of scholarship than is currently the case.

These musings about disciplinary boundaries were stimulated by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s study of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s Last Revolution (2006). The book is exceptional in several respects. The authors collected fascinating data from a dizzying array of sources, among them Red Guard personal diaries, broadsheets, handbills, big-­character posters, and minutes from Politburo meetings. It is difficult to imagine a more dogged pursuit of data on such a sensitive topic. Unsurprisingly, the book is jam-packed with politics (which they view as driven by personal and family agendas, with “institutions” and “organizations” playing bit roles). At the same time, Mao’s Last Revolution is atheoretical; I doubt it would pass muster as a “job talk” in most American political science departments, let alone provide the ballast to cross the tenure threshold. Last is the topic itself. Although some historians and sociologists and their graduate students have been encroaching upon the Cultural Revolution, it would be the intrepid graduate student in political science who would venture into the mid-1960s to pen a dissertation about civil-military relations in, say, Sichuan province. As if snubbing their noses at the fads and scientific pretensions of political science, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals present a balanced political history of those fateful years. The extended commentary on the credibility of sources, the discussion of how to weigh a particular piece of evidence, and their digging for valuable data nuggets would make both authors highly attractive candidates on the history job market!