Chinese political studies: Overview of the state of the field

Abstract

The main change in English-language studies of China during the past couple of decades has come from greater participation by Chinese-Americans and especially China-born scholars. By no means do these researchers all agree with one another. Their collective influence, together with China's hesitant opening to a greater variety of international researchers, has led to better empirical probes of perennial questions in Chinese politics. Such questions relate to each other, and most are not new. Several of them, insofar as they have affected analyses published in Western languages to which this article is limited, are as follows: