China and Other Matters (review)

Reviews 537 political decisions regarding Hong Kong, and subsequentiy Macao, and also by die central government's future positions on economic development in general, whether regional or provincial. This volume on the Pearl River delta at the turn ofthe twenty-first century will be a most valuable reference for all who are interested in this region in particular , but also, more generally, for those interested in the future development and economic integration of China's coastal zones. Catherine Sarlandie de La Robertie Institut de Gestion de Rennes, Université de Rennes, France Catherine Sarlandie deLa Robertie is the Director ofPostgraduate Studies in International Management; she ispresently researching the decision-makingprocess ofthe Chinese consumerfrom a cultural and managerial perspective. m Benjamin I. Schwartz. China and Other Matters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. viii, 292 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn 0-674-11751-4. Paperback $19.95, isbn 0-674-11752-2. In his illustrious career as teacher and scholar, Benjamin I. Schwartz achieved a well-justified reputation for his perceptive, complex, and dioughtful analysis of China. From his pioneering study ofMao Zedong to his magisterial The World of Thought in Ancient China, his writings combine a breaddi ofvision witii a concern for the precise meaning of ideas and texts. China and Other Matters brings together a potpourri of eighteen essays published between 1966 and 1989. These essays range from book reviews ofancient Daoism and explorations ofthe philosophic tenets ofChinese communism to personal reflections on enduring tendencies widiin die Chinese tradition. Despite the diversity of subject matter, each essay addresses in some fashion the conceptual underpinnings that shape our thinking about Chinese culture and politics. These reflections on the paradigmatic problems ofcross-cultural understanding and the relation ofthree millennia ofChinese history to contemporary intellectual and political concerns should make diis work ofinterest to specialists and nonspecialists alike.© 1998 by UniversityAbriefmtroductoryessayiayS out me main themes ofdie volume: a self-reflective defense of die beliefin the continuing validity ofarea studies, cross-disciplinary analysis, and the study oftexts as a means to understanding other cultures . As the essays demonstrate, the audior has long been skeptical of"bold 538 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 all-embracing theories, models, and paradigms" that purport to offer totalistic explanations . A list of abstract "scientific" models that previously influenced die field includes dieories of totalitarianism, Marxism, and modernization. Each of these very different models presumes monolithic categories to which all societies of a specific genotype conform. Once a category has been properly identified, it provides self-sufficient explanations ofboth the past and die present. But as the author shows, the search for abstract universal explanations flattens and simplifies reality, emphasizing only those elements of tradition that support the model while ignoring internal tensions and diachronic change. Marxist historians in China and Russia provide one obvious example of the misapplication oftheory. Official Marxist doctrine proclaimed that all human cultures must traverse necessary stages of history including slave society and feudalism . As "Some Stereotypes in the Periodization of Chinese History" (1968) reminds us, the empirical reality of premodern Chinese history for the last two millennia does not easily conform to a feudal model. Moreover, the very notion of the universality of slave and feudal stages of development is a distortion ofMarx's own writings on modes of production. Western social scientists are equally susceptible to the allure of 'value neutral' scientific theories. "The Limits of 'Tradition versus Modernity': The Case of Chinese Intellectuals" (1972) illustrates how seemingly objective terms like "traditional " and "modern" distort our understanding of complex reality. Today most contemporary social scientists and historians reject the notion that tradition is a static, monolithic whole that poses an implacable barrier to modernity. Yet the idea of a cohesive, timeless Confucian tradition still remains, now metamorphosed into the idea of a "Confucian edge," a set of cultural values inherited from the past that contributes to the successful economic transformation of East Asia. Even the familiar concept of modernity remains an unexamined abstraction that obscures differences within and among cultures. Schwartz insists that both tradition and modernity are a range of experiences filled with "tensions, alternatives and conflicts" rather than a "harmonious integrated" whole. The dominant strain of Confucianism contained...