Organizer and Chair: Lynn T. White III, Princeton University
Discussant: Kenneth Jowitt, University of California, Berkeley
Area studies, notably research on the politics of peoples with traditions as rich as those of East and Southeast Asia, have been attacked by universalists who give priority to the task of trying to find premises that would account for human action everywhere, rather than trying to understand and generalize cases that arise at particular places and times. Chalmers Johnson, a San Diego scholar, has famously given priority to developing explanations for large events in Asia; he is best-known for accounts of the Chinese revolution and of the Japanese economic "miracle." This panel offers critical analyses of the ways in which Johnson’s ideas—and diverse concepts developed in opposition to them—have shaped research agenda. The papers offer examples: a new scrutiny of decentralization in the Japanese state tests Johnson’s views of political reform along with those of other scholars; a history of the debate on Chinese "peasant nationalism" shows the role of U.S. political controversy in spurring incisive new scholarship over a period of four decades. In Southeast Asia, searches for Japan-like "capitalist developmental states" largely failed—but led to findings about political institutions and business networks that largely explain the political/economic booms and busts there. A flexible kind of functionalism, evident in Johnson’s work and that of his most cogent critics in Chinese and Japanese studies, offers a practical unity of approach to topics as diverse as the origins of revolutions, the politics of international trade, and the bases for intercultural studies of Asian politics.
Decentralizing the Japanese State: A Political Reform Parable
David Arase, Pomona College
The ongoing process of political reform is a hotly contested topic in Japanese studies. Those who focus on the party system, such as Arthur Stockwin, perceive a kaleidoscope of change since 1993, but there is debate over whether this is leading to more competitive politics or to a return of stable LDP rule. Others, such as Chalmers Johnson, see a battle for primacy between an entrenched and powerful bureaucracy representing a strong state, on one hand, and corrupt conservative politicians on the other. T. J. Pempel focuses on changing structural alignments in Japanese politics, produced by global economic forces, to explain the political reform agenda in Japan. Finally, rational choice proponents explain events in Japanese politics as a function of what politicians do to win the support of voters.
I propose to use the effort to promote decentralization as a case study in political reform, comparing and testing the above-mentioned hypotheses. The case study method, which traces processes and patterns, will be used to analyze data provided by vernacular materials. Beyond this, I wish to address the importance of methodology for theory formation and testing. This examination of the ways decentralizing reforms can be explained will show the value of an empirically based, culturally and historically informed approach to the study of Japan. This approach can generate counterintuitive findings. It can guard against the danger of projecting onto other nations the concepts and assumptions that guide the politics of one’s own culture.
The Political Odyssey of an Intellectual Construct: Peasant Nationalism and the Study of China’s Revolutionary History
Suzanne Pepper, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Few arguments advanced in the study of China’s communist revolution have had a more controversial history, incited more productive refutations, or been more successful in defying proclamations of their demise, then Chalmers Johnson’s peasant nationalism. The first death notice was issued by Johnson himself fifteen years after Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962). With the Vietnam War just ended and his own defensive offense having culminated in Autopsy on People’s War (1973), Johnson reasoned that the controversies had finally run their course, prompting his mid-1970s "peasant nationalism is dead" proclamation. In fact, only the polemical phase had ended: the real work was just beginning.
This essay does not exhume the old arguments, but traces their evolution from academic thesis, to political polemic, and beyond to an impressive body of research on the rural pre-1949 origins of China’s communist movement. The political controversy provoked multiple dissertations, all intent on discovering the rural socio-economic roots of communist success and disproving Johnson’s emphasis on the anti-Japanese resistance war. For various reasons, however, research skirted the military-political dimensions necessary to reach definitive conclusions. The debate thus receded into a state of suspension, leaving open the question as to whether Johnson might be judged right for the wrong reasons—or perhaps even right. This ironic end was reinforced by the inability to reconcile rebuttals of peasant nationalism with the chief Chinese perpetrator’s repeated declarations of gratitude to the Japanese! Untutored in the Western debate, Mao routinely acknowledged Japan’s help in creating the conditions necessary for Chinese socialism’s pre-1949 victory.
Looking for Mr. Amaya from Bandung to Bangkok
Danny Unger, American University
Chalmers Johnson has battled "guardians of the methodological flame bemoaning the ‘atheoretical’ quality of area studies." His own work shows a commitment to the goal of "critical analysis" (Verba’s "disciplined configurative approach"). He stresses the need to uncover explanations for the particular, bridging social science generalizations and the manner in which they are actualized. This is an agent-accented approach to politics. Nonetheless, Johnson’s work on Japan emphasizes both the political strategies that created key institutions and their enduring, constraining legacies.
Johnson’s influence extends well beyond Chinese and Japanese area studies, occupying a central place in the institutionalist/statist political economy literature of the 1980s and 1990s. The debates he started about the politics of Japan’s economic miracle described "hypothesis generating" (Lijphart) or "heuristic" (Eckstein) cases. It shaped much subsequent scholarship—including that which arrived at conclusions quite different from his own. In Southeast Asia, for example, most scholars found little evidence of capitalist developmental states driving rapid economic growth. Johnson nonetheless set guideposts on the messy empirical terrain; others used these to grapple with the analytical problems they confronted. His account of the politics of capitalist developmental states encouraged investigators to wade ashore between Indonesia and Thailand in search of vanguard states with pilot agencies guiding industrial transformations. By and large, this search proved a vain one, but "theory-infirming" work fed new inquiries into institutions and the roles of social networks. This work lies at the heart of contemporary debate about the causes of Southeast Asian economic miracles and their recent busts.
Functional Constructions: Communist, Developmental, and Individualist
Lynn T. White III, Princeton University
Chalmers Johnson’s "peasant nationalism" account of the Chinese revolution is explicitly functionalist. It attributes the rise of rural communism (or at least the 1937–45 timing) to parallel and coordinated reactions by leaders of local political systems who became patriotic—and were incidentally organized by communists—under the context of a foreign army’s violence against peasants in particular parts of China. The "capitalist developmental state" image of Japan is similarly based on a logic that links agency for structural change with a national system’s reactions to opportunities in its international and traditional environment. Johnson’s main critique of the rational actionist approach is likewise that it is based on ideologically libertarian but undependable assumptions about the norms and situations that face actors everywhere all the time, rather than on specific research about the contexts facing both individuals and collectives at particular times and places. In each of these three cases, Johnson’s critics are more eager than he to derive lessons from Asian studies that can be relevant to Western domestic structures (as distinct from Western external policies). In each case also, the ideas Johnson espouses, like those which preceded and followed his interpretations of the Chinese revolution, Japanese economic planning, or circumspect methods in comparative politics, emerged from specifiable environments. They are subject to analysis according to their settings. This paper will explore links between highpoints in the evolving uses of communism, developmentalism, and individualism for studies of Asian politics, showing ways in which these concepts have changed with their contexts.