Political sociology and contemporary China: State‐society images in American China studies

Abstract

Images of ‘state and society’ have informed several generations of North American scholarship on China's communist polity. They express a concern for how power, authority, and influence are shaped by the interaction of party‐state efforts to control and mobilize the population with the responses, interests, and strategies of its citizens. While these images first came into focus in the 1960s, they reflect classical paradigms of political sociology and continue to focus research agendas into the 1990s. This article maps these images, highlighting some of their concerns and arguments.