What is wrong with US Political Science Scholars

Most American political scholars are “exquisite egoists”, and Chinese scholars should transcend this point.

Chu Yun-han, 20 July 2020

Professor of the Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University, Academician of the “Academic Research Institute”

朱云汉：美国政治学者多是“精致利己主义者”，中国学者要超越这一点

The Chinese political science scholars should step out of the stage of drawing lessons from and transplanting western political science. In fact, this should have been done a long time ago, and the conditions may be more ripe now. Chinese political scholars on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are fully qualified to take a different approach and should take this move with a clear-cut stand.

The western politics we followed in the past is basically American or Americanized politics. There are serious deviations and defects in American politics. It deviates from the proper connection between theory and practice, and the word “exquisite egoist” can be used to describe the professional attitude of many American political scholars.

I think that the achievements of academic activities in social sciences, especially in the study of political science, will have a strong practical significance, and it is impossible for scholars to evade this issue. Who are you studying for? Who are you going to share your knowledge with? How do you want to change the world or this era? This is what scholars must face. I say to go beyond it because Western politics, especially American politics, has forgotten these basic points. We should return to the center of the world and help the people, and re-establish the close relationship between theory and practice.

In the inheritance of Chinese history and culture, such a kind of care and thinking is extremely rich. Everyone is familiar with Yu Youren’s calligraphy. His “four sentences of Hengqu” written by Zhang Zai (Zhang Hengqu), a great thinker of the Northern Song Dynasty and a master of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties, “set the heart for heaven and earth, establish the life for the people, continue to learn for the past, and open peace for all ages“. It expresses the pursuit and practice of the ideal of the Confucian school, which has been praised by people for a long time. It is the spiritual coordinate of the Chinese people, showing a Chinese scholar’s care, responsibility and sense of mission to the country and society. This is a very important crystallization of thought that can guide us to think about one’s worldview.

At present, it is difficult for the mainstream western social sciences to foresee and understand the current historical changes. The global financial crisis has put mainstream economics in a great predicament, and the legitimacy crisis of the western democratic system has made political scholars very confused. They are unable to face and respond to the knowledge challenges of this era of great historical changes. The reasons are:

1.The theoretical framework of the main social sciences in the West is unable to explain the development model of China. In fact, China’s development experience has broken basic assumptions of the western mainstream theory. Western scholars have either deliberately avoid it, or appear very pale in this respect. 

• Mainstream western international relations scholars are not mentally prepared for the reorganization of the world order led by China. They cannot understand the historical opportunities that China’s rise brings to developing countries, and they cannot correctly or seriously take China’s reemergence and the opportunity for China to lead the vast number of developing countries to participate in unprecedented independent development. In fact, even Chinese scholars have not carried out their own research in this area, and it is impossible to expect American and western scholars to engage in systematic and comprehensive research on the rise of China in a more forward-looking manner.

• American mainstream politics is in a dilemma of serious disconnection between theory and practice. Ignoring the earth-shaking changes in the field of philosophy of science after the 1970s, mainstream American sociologists cling to the theory of philosophy of science that has been abandoned and have always regarded it as the guiding principle of the knowledge construction of mainstream social sciences. Since the 1980s, the consensus in the field of philosophy of science is that logical positivism has seriously misunderstood the nature of scientific activities: first of all, the main object of exploration of scientific knowledge is not limited to the empirical world, but the mechanism behind the phenomena of the empirical world; secondly, the purpose of scientific knowledge activities is to give full play to the constituent nature of the real world and the causal mechanism based on necessity, rather than discovering empirical laws.

The root of this disjointed dilemma: first of all, it comes from its stubborn ideological position, secondly from the social philosophy theory it depends on, and finally from its partial and one-sided historical experience.

A considerable number of American scholars have stubborn ideological presupposition, resulting in various cognitive deviations, mainly reflected in: (1) liberalism bias: that the best system must be to respect individual freedom and choice. (2) the deviation of the end of history: the trinity of representative democracy, market economy and civil society shown by the West represents the highest stage of the development of human political civilization, while the non-Western world has either moved closer to the Western model or is in the stage of recalcitrant transition. (3) Western central prejudice: that the West has created modern human progress, and that Western experience is the coordinate that defines progress and backwardness, civilization and barbarism. The above three presupposed positions have seriously hindered American scholars’ understanding and understanding of the current great historical changes.

• Western international relations scholars refuse to face the advent of the post-western central world order. In recent years, I have conducted dialogues with many mainstream western scholars in international relations, and in the course of exchanges, I have deeply felt their resistance in the face of the trend of the times. In the face of objective reality, the world has gradually broken away from the western order and is entering an era of post-western world order, but they find all kinds of reasons and are unwilling to recognize the changes of the world order. Deconstruct the new world order with their subjective consciousness.

• There are serious defects in the basis of methods, theories and experiences in American politics. After World War II, the philosophical foundation of American social science was shaken in an all-round way, but mainstream politics, including neoclassical economics, resisted the most important guiding principles of scientific knowledge in a closed knowledge system constructed by itself. In the past 30 years, the theory of philosophy of science has undergone great changes and has already entered the stage of post-logical empirical development. However, many of our scholars who study methodology still use logical positivism as the basic theory of social science methodology in teaching.

• The empirical category covered by the mainstream American political theory has serious time and space limitations. There are deviations and fallacies in five mainstream international theories: “modernism, non-historicism, Eurocentrism, anarchism and nationalism”. Many theories of American political scholars, especially comparative political theory and international relations theory, cover a narrow range of time and space. International studies, for example, are basically the historical experiences made up of western sovereign countries after the Westphalia Treaties.

• It is difficult for western political scholars to transcend the stereotype of ideology, and American political scholars cannot transcend the theory of international relations under the influence of ideology. They consciously or unconsciously safeguard American hegemony, including “hegemonic stability theory”, “security dilemma” and “Kindlelberger Trap”. They use the so-called “theory of free system” and “theory of democratic peace” to provide a theoretical basis for the rationality of the western-dominated world order. Their “Code Theory” assumes that the values and codes of conduct pursued by Western countries can become universal norms, while basically neglecting that the non-Western world can start anew and establish new cooperation models and systems according to different world views and values. They can only use their utilitarian motives and behavior patterns to understand non-Western actors. They simply cannot understand the “distinction between justice and benefit” advocated by Chinese leaders and the community with a shared future for mankind.

At the same time, they deliberately ignore the two sides of hegemony. For example, the lack of using sovereign currencies as international reserve currencies is increasingly obvious, but the United States defends the hegemony of the US dollar and prevents SDR from acting as a supercurrency. In order to prevent other currencies from challenging the status of the dollar, the United States prevents oil transactions from being settled in euros or other currencies. For another example, under the leadership of the US Treasury, IMF implements strict rescue conditions for the foreign debt crisis, giving priority to protecting the rights and interests of international creditors, regardless of the huge social and economic damage to debtor countries caused by the rescue package. And long-term promotion of the Washington consensus to aggravate the polarization of distribution and exclusion of marginalized groups caused by globalization.

The domestic politics and ideology of the United States have led to a long-term shortage of international public service products. For example, the financing quota of IMF is seriously insufficient, but the United States has long opposed a capital increase to avoid diluting its voting rights and affecting its veto power. For example, the capital scale of the World Bank has been frozen for a long time, which is far from meeting the needs of developing countries, and it is also trying to resist the creation of the “Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank”.

The hegemonic behaviour of the United States has become the source of instability in the international order, and the international community has been subjected to the “public evil”  imposed by the United States. The leading financial globalization of the United States forces countries to open capital markets and deregulate financial regulations, resulting in hot money creating asset bubbles and financial crises in various countries, and flooding the world with toxic financial assets on Wall Street. The United States strongly promotes intellectual property rights under a variety of names. maintain exorbitant profits and market monopoly of American multinational enterprises, hinder innovation and knowledge sharing, and put drug patents above the value of life. The United States uses interdependence as a strategic weapon and uses bullying means to engage in financial blockade, trade war, long-arm jurisdiction, and network blockade to crack down on competitors.

• Selectively interpret the historical experience of the rise of the West. Western scholars’ interpretation of their own history is selective or even intentional bleaching: they basically ignore the exploitative, brutal and dark side of their country’s history. Many Western scholars write highly about their country’s achievements in the past few centuries, but they understate and cover up the important role played by foreign aggression, colonialism and slavery in the development of Western countries. In explaining the rise of historical documents in the West, they often turn around and fail to face up to how much role these barbaric, bloody and ugly factors have played in their primitive accumulation. For example, the historical narrative of North, a scholar of the new institutional school popular in western academic circles, is selective, using to simplify and compress history in order to cut feet to fit shoes. His analysis makes readers believe that the successful rise of Western powers such as Britain, the Netherlands, France and the United States is mainly because they have chosen the correct path of institutional evolution and overcome the problem of high transaction costs. In the theoretical framework of the transaction cost school, there is no room for the British East India Company, a colonial business empire based on conquest, occupation, plunder and monopoly, and it is also incompatible with the historical evidence presented in the classic Cotton Empire.

The trend of history is moving towards a turning point.

The era of great change is coming. Today, the post-World War II liberal international order has entered a stage of overall loosening. The globalization model dominated by the United States in the past 30 years has been unsustainable, the anti-globalization movement is surging, and neo-liberal ideology has been spurned in the great changes in the new century. The “third wave of democratization” has lost its main driving force in the new century, and the tide is obviously ebbing. The western democratic system has been degraded and has fallen into a crisis of social fragmentation and the shaking of the foundation of legitimacy. The EU is facing the crisis of disintegration, and the political power of Brexit is in the ascendant. While the decline of the western central world is accelerating, the non-western world is on the rise, and the post-western world order is about to emerge.

The world economic center will be transferred to seven emerging economies.

When we think about the future of the world, it is important to have basic data. In 2017, Price Waterhouse Coopers made a forecast for the medium-and long-term structure of the world economy, believing that the protagonist in setting the rules of the game of international economic cooperation, that is, the future world economic center, will be transferred from the G7 (big seven industrial countries) to the E7 (big seven emerging economies) countries. The E7 countries include most of the BRICS countries, namely, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey.

If using purchasing power equivalent analysis, E7 countries are all countries with a population of more than 100 million or close to 100 million, and they are also countries that continue to grow at a high rate. In 1995, the economic size and purchasing power equivalent GDP of these countries were only half that of the G7 countries, but by 2015, their economic size and purchasing power were on a par with those of the G7 countries, with an economic growth rate of more than 3.5% in the E7 countries and an average annual growth rate of only 1.5% in the G7 countries. By 2040, E7 countries are expected to surpass G7 countries. It is conceivable that the international order, international organizations and international rules that we are familiar with today are all likely to change greatly in the future.

The G20 Hangzhou Summit crosses three historical watersheds.

At present, we are in a transition period between the old and the new. We can see many very clear indicators, the most representative of which is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which was initiated by China three years ago. The United States has used all its influence to try to dissuade its traditional allies from joining the AIIB, a typical watershed event of American hegemony. By the end of 2018, 86 countries around the world had become full members of the AIIB. The AIIB has received an enthusiastic response from developing countries because existing multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, under the leadership of the United States, their dominant ideas and policies have been out of touch with the real needs of developing countries.

China is not only leading developing countries or emerging market countries, but also bringing many new initiatives and reform proposals to global issues and global governance issues. It also shows that China is transforming from passively responding to the agenda and adaptive role of the West in the past to having more voice and more active role.

The G20 summit held in Hangzhou in 2016 was a very important summit, which issued a forward-looking leaders’ declaration, crossing three historical watersheds in one fell swoop. First of all, for the first time, the focus of the G20 summit has shifted from solving the challenges faced by the transformation of the world economy to the issue of medium-and long-term structural transformation, and initiated a systematic reform of the global economic governance mechanism. Second, the dominance of global governance issues has shifted from Western countries to emerging market countries. Third, China has become a major proponent and consensus builder of global economic governance issues.

China has ushered in an era of diversified competition.

Starting with the start of the new, BRICS Plus model at the BRICS summit in Xiamen, the BRICS countries led by China hope to include other emerging market countries in this very important platform for dialogue and policy cooperation, on which they will discuss how to reach a consensus on major global issues and launch what they consider to be a much-needed global reform agenda.

The BRICS Summit held in Xiamen in 2017 has become a key consultation platform for major emerging market and developing countries. The BRICS countries advocate the multipolarization of the international system, the democratization of international relations, and a more inclusive, balanced, fair and sustainable international economic order. They advocate steadily advancing this long-term goal, promoting gradual reform and orderly transformation, and do not want chaos or disintegration of the international order.

At the BRICS Summit, China took a clear position to safeguard the existing global multilateral system and spare no effort to promote the goals set by the United Nations 2030 agenda for Sustainable Social Development. China has contributed to providing a better and more relaxed external environment for developing countries, which will involve 88% of the world’s population and play a great role in the future development of human society. In such a new era of development, China has brought unprecedented development opportunities to developing countries:

First, re-open the era of modern pluralistic competition. Many people may not realize that China’s development model and China’s road have been carefully studied and referenced by many countries. Fundamental changes have also taken place in the field of world ideology. In the 1990s, representative democracy, free market and autonomous society in the West were generally recognized as the highest stage of the development of human civilization. Neo-liberalism prevailed and Washington consensus became an unalterable dogma. The elites of non-western countries can not help but move closer to the western social development model, and the developing countries are generally faced with the dilemma that the development path options are highly narrowed.

Great changes have taken place in the last ten years. The ideological field is gradually opening up, and there is no longer only one option. China’s experience is the most outstanding, and China has experienced an arduous struggle. Since 1840, it has paid the price of tens of millions of lives to gain independent development opportunities. Of course, these experiences are difficult to copy and imitate. The development model of all countries can only be adapted to local conditions, respect national conditions and keep pace with the times.

Second, the rise of China has reshaped the global trade landscape. In the past, the unequal exchange relationship between the countries of the South and the North has been subverted. China has become the largest manufacturing platform in the world, providing all kinds of cheap and high-quality high-tech products and high-end equipment, which has weakened the superstition of American representative system politically and broke the oligopoly of western multinational corporations economically. On the other hand, China’s huge demand for energy and raw materials is driving up the prices of primary products. Many backward countries can enjoy more favourable trade terms, with rising prices for their exports and falling prices for industrial products and software that need to be imported. Chinese companies have brought hundreds of millions of Africans into the era of mobile communications. For example, Shenzhen’s Voice Holdings, which has not sold a single mobile phone in the Chinese market, has a 48% market share in Africa, and its basic entry phone costs only $10, which is affordable to everyone in Africa. China’s mobile phone manufacturers have enabled the vast number of African people to quickly enter the mobile communication era and the network era. Without the rise of China, there would be no such possibility.

Third, China has opened up a new development model, completely surpassing the experience of backward countries in dealing with western developed countries. For the first time in 300 years, a rising superpower does not face developing countries with the thinking and attitude of predators, bossiness or air of superiority. China has provided all kinds of assistance to these countries to promote economic cooperation. The main body of China’s economic cooperation is the political consultation platform set up by the government, with official development financing institutions and state-owned enterprises as the main body to promote cooperation and development assistance, and promote the active participation of private enterprises. China does not take the maximization of return on capital as the only criterion. This kind of development model is not adopted by the Western countries and rejected on ideology ground.

Many developing countries have bottlenecks in their development, of which the biggest bottleneck is in infrastructure, which has neither foreign exchange nor sufficient financing conditions to break through this bottleneck. China has unprecedented engineering capacity to help hundreds of countries overcome infrastructure bottlenecks at the same time, including the construction of ports and deep-water terminals, power plants, railways, roads and other facilities. These are areas where China can exert its capacity. No superpower in the world has this kind of energy, let alone the will. These are the great roles that China can play in this rapidly changing world pattern.

As the largest trading partner and source of investment of many countries, China respects the national conditions of these countries, does not inculcate ideology, does not force these countries to cut feet to fit shoes, does not force them to buy and sell weapons, and does not export color revolutions. all these have given the vast number of developing countries unprecedented confidence.

The rise of the Chinese model breaks the monopoly of the discourse power of dialogue in the West.

We should form transcendence and breakthrough in theory, otherwise it will not be enough to explain or deal with the new development trend. Here are several important entry points for the reconstruction of knowledge systems:

First, the mainstream science in the West has its own ideology, and it will not change its position and accept the concepts of socialist democracy or socialist market economy. Chinese scholars are duty-bound to construct this theory.

Second, the theories pursued by the mainstream social sciences in the United States have long been abandoned. Chinese scholars should fully grasp the evolution trend of the philosophical theory of “post-positivism” in the 1970s and absorb the quintessence of important theories related to philosophy of science, such as the history of science, sociology of knowledge, scientific realism, critical realism, Marx’s political economy and so on.

Third, the historical experience of western political science theory has great limitations. Mainstream international relations scholars only study the sovereign state system with the West as the core in the past 300 years, and are ignorant of the Islamic world and the political order of East Asia for more than a thousand years. There is no in-depth study on how to co-exist for a long time among many countries and peoples in the Arab world and East Asia before the 16th century.

I think Chinese scholars have a huge space to play a role, whether it starts from the reconstruction of the source of philosophy of science, or greatly broadens the historical vision of politics, or reconstructs the organic relationship between theory and practice, it can enable Chinese scholars to surpass and make breakthroughs in the field of political science.

We should pay special attention to the impact of the rise of the Chinese model on breaking the monopoly of discourse power in dialogue in the West.

(1) with the rise of China’s development model, the western social development model no longer represents universal values, and the western-dominated development institutions no longer monopolize the voice of the best economic development and government governance model.

(2) the Chinese model has inspired many developing countries to rethink how to strike a balance between social justice, sustainable development and Pareto optimal (Pareto 0ptimaliti) resource allocation.

(3) China’s development experience reveals that the socialist market economic model can open up a third way beyond American-style capitalism and Western European-style democratic socialism (welfare state) system.

(4) China’s political model has its obvious effect in balancing procedure, ability and result, and guiding society to pursue the best public choice, which not only opens up an effective mechanism for the legalization of political system, but also takes into account both governance ability and governance performance.

The rise of the Chinese model has restarted the pattern of pluralistic competition in the field of global ideology. China’s development experience emphasizes respecting the differences of national conditions and exploring the best way in practice, which inspires that each country should find the most suitable development strategy according to local conditions; different stages of development will face different challenges and problems and need to keep pace with the times; there is no standard model that applies everywhere, and there is no solution once and for all. The basic ideas explored by China in practice provide an important reference for many developing countries to pursue the path of independent development.

Chinese scholars should have clear and conscious practical goals and test the correctness of knowledge and theory through practice. It is necessary to have the accomplishment of comprehensive knowledge. Throughout ancient and modern times, look at the world, do not rest on your laurels, do not repeat the same mistakes, first start with a deep understanding of your own society and inherited historical experience, comprehensively carry out social exchanges and dialogue with different civilization systems, and do not forget the original ideals and aspirations. In order to re-establish the academic tradition based on humanistic self-cultivation, it is necessary to have a solid foundation of methodology, the training of critical thinking, an independent talent training mechanism and not to be an academic vassal.

Translated from original source (with aid of online translator) : https://www.guancha.cn/ZhuYunHan/2020_07_20_558245.shtml