The following article is from Xuehai Zhouji, written by Zhao Dingxin
Introduction: Zhao Dingxin, born in 1953, a native of Xiaoshan, Zhejiang. He was admitted to the Department of Biology of Fudan University in 1977, received a master's degree from the Shanghai Institute of Entomology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1984, a doctorate in insect ecology from McGill University in Canada in 1990, a postdoctoral fellowship in insect ecology from McGill University in Canada in 1990, a transfer to the Department of Sociology in 1990, and a doctorate in sociology from McGill University in 1995. Since 1996, he has been teaching at the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he has served as assistant professor, professor, max palevsky chair professor, and Wu Yuzhang chair professor at Chinese Min University (2006-2009). Since 2015, he has been the dean of the Advanced Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of Zhejiang University, and since 2018, he has served as the director of the Department of Sociology and chief guidance expert of Zhejiang University. His research interests include political sociology, historical sociology, and social science methodology. His publications include Lecture Notes on Social and Political Movements, The Eastern Zhou War and the Formation of the Confucian State, The Limits of Democracy, The Politics of Legitimacy, and State, War, and Historical Development. He has won the American Sociological Society's 2001 Best Book Award for Asian Studies, the 2002 Best Book Award for Collective Action and Social Movement Studies, and the American Sociological Society's 2016 Best Book Award for Political Sociology Research. This article is excerpted from Reconstructing Chinese Sociology: Oral Accounts of 40 Sociologists (1979-2019)
Limitations of Western sociology
People who have read my stuff tend to find my approach to thinking and analysis unique and original. But readers must not forget the following background: when I switched to sociology in 1990, I had a very clear sense of the problem; at the same time, I was 38 years old at the time, had more than ten years of training in natural sciences and a doctorate in natural sciences, had been honed by a difficult life, read a large number of "miscellaneous books", and had initially possessed the ability to analyze and reflect on various social phenomena. It was because of this combination that I was able to complete my second Ph.D. in just four years. It is precisely because of this combination that a set of things in the Western social sciences dominated by the United States is difficult to trap me. In short, because of the peculiarities of the personal path, I was greatly dissatisfied with many aspects of Western sociology from the beginning. However, it is precisely because of my training, knowledge and reflective ability, the starting point of my dissatisfaction, and the "way" of trying to develop my own set of analytical methods, but at the beginning it is relatively positive, and it has become more and more distinctive under the continuous collision with Western scholars.
Looking back, my dissatisfaction came mainly from two points: pragmatism ontology and political correctness. These two points are basically opposed in the West, but they are like difficult brothers. Pragmatist philosophy can be said to be a philosophical response formed by the Indigenous American elite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the face of various extreme "isms" from Europe. Sociology, built on the basis of a pragmatic philosophy, has many commendable strengths, such as its ability to guide humanities and social scientists accustomed to a large-scale approach to pay attention to the diversity and complexity of society, its ability to help us discover and understand the various social mechanisms and the ways in which they work in different contexts, and forcing us to make specific analyses of specific problems rather than from a conceptual point of view. In addition, it has also driven the development of a variety of quantitative methods. However, pragmatic sociology is too fact-based, so the conclusions of research are often seriously disconnected from the problems that the institute is trying to solve, forming what we usually call "false learning". For example, the quality of primary and secondary education in the United States is very serious, so there are many researchers. But the research of American scholars tends to focus on educational methods, that is, to examine the relationship between different teaching methods and teaching effects. The conclusions of such studies may be reliable and their applicability is good under experimental conditions, but they are not helpful in solving the problem of the quality of primary and secondary education in poor neighborhoods in the United States.
The incompetence of pragmatic sociology in the face of social problems gives politically correct sociology a chance. Politically correct sociologists are diverse, but mostly leftist. Some of these scholars deconstruct certain phenomena for reasons that seem profound but superficial, some deliberately create various "new" perspectives and "new" concepts in order to give a voice to a marginalized group, and some try to prove that a certain value they promote has positive social significance, even historically. Many of the ideas and concepts they put forward have varying degrees of academic significance. The problem is that discourse does not equal reality, and academic criticism cannot replace critical scholarship. Compared with the old left, the "politically correct left" tends to be not only more incompetent but often shows frivolity in the face of specific social problems. This is why a significant portion of the lower echelons of American society do not welcome these scholars.
Finally, I would like to emphasize that any discipline, not just sociology, has its own specific reason for developing into a certain state in a given time and space, and it is very different whether the research is done well or badly in this state. In this case, in order to pass on the "profession" of sociology well, we must first seriously study the current Western set of things, and then we can talk about development or abandon it. We can compare sociology to the profession of dance, and sociologists to dancers. Although the dance methods of dance at different times will be very different, at any time only those who can lay a good foundation can be a good dancer. From this point of view, the primary task of domestic sociologists is still to learn the basic skills and strengthen professionalism, rather than to swing around in the middle of the water. I suggest that we sociologists look at variety shows such as "Street Dance", in the fierce and relatively fair competition, the requirements of young people who dance street dance for their basic skills and the professionalism they show are much stronger than ours.
Participated in the construction of Chinese sociology
My earliest involvement in continental sociology was through william Parish, an old professor in our department. The White Williams are very good, and so are the Teachers of China. I remember that in 1997, Li Lulu came to visit the University of Chicago, and since then Pan Suiming and Li Qiang have also visited. We immediately made friends, and I went to them every summer when I returned home, and my communication with the sociological community in the country became more and more extensive.
My first official collaboration with the Department of Sociology in Mainland China was in 2003 at tsinghua University. At that time, when they had just established a department, I gave them a course on "social movements." At the same time, Li Qiang and Shen Yuan talked to me, saying that they wanted to publish a set of "Tsinghua Sociological Lecture Notes" and asked me for my support. A request from a friend, I agreed on the spot. Tsinghua students made recordings during my class, and someone else sorted the recordings into text. When I received the manuscript, Zhou Xueguang's "Ten Lectures on Organizational Sociology" had already been published, which was also the first book in the "Tsinghua Sociology Lecture Notes" series. Compared with the "Lecture Notes on Social and Political Movements" that I later completed, Xueguang's book is more of a basic textbook, but Xueguang writes seriously, expresses clearly, has no nonsense, and in just "ten lectures", it has made an in-depth and concise introduction to the development of Western organizational sociology for many years, and has interspersed with a lot of experience, which shows that it has made great efforts.
Under the "pressure" of Xueguang's example, I spent more than a year on the basis of the text collation draft to make very serious revisions, supplemented a large number of documents, and at the same time combined with the sociology of knowledge and methodological perspectives, and seriously wrote the "Lecture Notes on Social and Political Movements" from a critical point of view. Western social movements and revolutionary theories were still new in China at that time, and my book not only systematically introduced a large number of literature to China for the first time, but also analyzed the academic and social background of these ideas and theories, the value tendencies of the scholars who created these ideas and theories, and their respective characteristics and shortcomings in methodological and empirical analysis. One of my intentions was to gain confidence in Chinese scholars who were still relatively "sublime" at that time. I would like to make you think that a systematic critique of Western theory based on solid scholarship is possible for Chinese. At the same time, I also want to train Chinese scholars in some basic methodological and epistemological skills, because the foundation of domestic scholars in this regard is generally relatively weak. Probably for this reason, I have heard that many sociology and non-social college departments in China will use my book as a methodology textbook.
At that time, I also began to Chinese academic writing. I remember that around 2004, the editorial board of Sociological Research invited me to write an article on the theory of social movements. That was the first time I wrote a sociological article in Chinese, because Chinese didn't use it for a long time, and I couldn't write sentences, which was really tiring. I went abroad in 1986 and used Chinese to write again in 2004, and I really haven't used much Chinese write in nearly 20 years. At that time, I was really sweating profusely, and I couldn't write it several times. But then I thought I couldn't even write Chinese, so I gritted my teeth and decided to break through this barrier. In this way, the article was written for nearly half a year and finally finished, after which the feeling of Chinese writing slowly returned.
After Tsinghua, I also had substantial cooperation with Fudan and Chinese University: after a few months of cooperation with Fudan, it is difficult to continue, but the cooperation with Renmin University is very pleasant. During this period, I taught many times at the National People's Congress and gave academic guidance to their young professors. In particular, I have a three-day workshop on political sociology that I and Feng Shizheng co-organized, which are held every summer. The topics of the workshops changed from year to year, and I remember including social movements, revolutions, democratization, nationalism, ideology, empire, politics and economics, globalization, competition. However, the academic goal is relatively clear, that is, from a multidisciplinary perspective, with the perspective of historical sociology as the core, to carry out exchanges between Chinese and foreign scholars on major issues in the current world. This class is completely public welfare, and also provides scholarships for regular students, and the University of Chicago and Renmin University have a lot of money invested every year. The workshop has been held for nine years now, and in these nine years, the number of applicants for the workshop has been about 600 people every year, the number of formal students we recruit is fifty or sixty, the rest are observers, and almost 130-150 people come to listen to the lectures every year, so in nine years, there are 1,000 or hundreds of people participating. The vast majority of the lecturers are domestic graduate students and young teachers, but there are also many middle-aged teachers and overseas students. The workshop has played a certain role in promoting the qualitative research of China and the development of historical sociology.
After that, I participated in the discipline construction of the Department of Sociology of Zhejiang University, and it has been more than two years now. In the past two years, Zhejiang University has officially imported thirteen or four scholars from overseas, plus those imported from China and those with overseas experience, adding up to more than 20. Through the in-depth observation in China in the past two years, I am still a little worried about the development of Chinese sociology, I think that although the professional ability of the older generation of sociologists who have experienced before the "Cultural Revolution" and the "Cultural Revolution" in China is generally lower, the best of them have read many books, and they have experienced the great changes of the times, they have an atmosphere, a clear sense of problems, and a good sense of experience, and they are all very thoughtful people, and these are exactly what the domestic middle and young scholars, including young scholars who have returned from overseas, lack. Because of this, Zhejiang University has hired three old professors, Liu Shiding, Ma Rong and Shen Yuan, hoping that they can take our young scholars for another step. The Department of Sociology of Zhejiang University has made significant changes in recent years, the department has adopted a new doctoral training program, the courses offered have been greatly enriched, and it has become more and more popular with students inside and outside the department. The academic atmosphere in the department is growing, resulting in many high-quality workshops and academic conferences. Some of the teachers in our department have begun to publish articles in top Western sociological journals, and their academic work has received international attention. These are very gratifying, so I decided to quit my job in the United States and help Zhejiang University develop the sociology department full-time, making greater efforts for the development of sociology in China.