Rethinking Contemporary China

All foreign observers have interpreted China through the filter of their own era, as well as their personal background and experiences. A virtual academic industry has developed, not on China itself but on 'interpretations', 'perceptions' and 'images'. This paper deals with the period since the communist revolution, not to discuss the topic of 'perceptions' or 'images' of China, but the narrower, though not always separate, issue of scholarly approaches and interpretations, and the changing trends in these. What we are seeing in contemporary China studies is a tentative effort to ‘bring history back in’ and to ‘bring society back in’. This is leading to a rethinking of contemporary China: a shift away from a narrow ‘elite politics’ approach towards a multidimensional perspective which puts contemporary China into both a broader historical framework and a more complex social framework. [George Ernest Morrison Lecture on Ethnography, 1991, The Contemporary China Centre]