Studying China in an Era of Globalisation

Abstract

Studying China’s political economy in the pre reform era was not an easy task. With the plethora of information that is now available from China, it is worth remembering how difficult it was to get data and reliable information out of China for many years after 1949. The sort of information that is available on one visit to the web page of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (www.iwep.org.cn) would have taken most scholars years to collect. Access to the Tsinghua collection of Chinese academic journals through Eastview (www.eastview.com) — both used in preparing this manuscript — gives more articles on any given subject than you can cope with. Conducting the sort of interviews that are now relatively common with Chinese officials, scholars and business people was impossible. And if Chinese officials or scholars visited the West, it was unlikely that they would engage in free and frank discussion, engage with western ideas and methods, or provide candid observations on the domestic situation in China. As Morgan (2004: 77) notes:

Twenty-five years ago the China specialist was of necessity a generalist. Since then, mastering the slow dribble of information that can be gleaned from a closed society, has been replaced by the management of a deluge of policies, facts, and figures. Simply keeping pace in one’s own small area of expertise has become an onerous task.