Philip C C Huang
Biographic Data
| ID | 292809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip C C Huang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip C C |
| FAMILY NAME | Huang |
| SIGNATURE | HUANG P C C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 749 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 104 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Either/Or or Both/And Paths of Change
The English and Chinese languages evince fundamental differences in modes of thought and expression. One leans strongly toward either/or, the other both/and. This can be seen in the differences between the two over a long period of time, and even in the Chinese understandings and usages of the terms “Communism” and “Communist Party.” Looking to the future, we can expect even stronger and more apparent evidence of the fundamental tendencies of the…
A Chinese-Style “Humanics
Different from modern physics, traditional Chinese “humanics” focused on the human world, not the physical world. Its main emphasis was on “people” and not on “things,” and on co-existence and not on pushes and pulls. The former led finally to the development and use of nuclear weapons, including the imperialism and colonialism that preceded it. The latter, however, always focused on human co-existence and interaction, not on physics. To be sure,…
The Journals Zhongguo xiangcun yanjiu and Rural China: Retrospect and Prospect
Rural China has long been a rather sensitive subject within China. For that reason, our Chinese journal Zhongguo xiangcun yanjiu , published inside China, has faced some serious difficulties. By contrast, the bilingual international version of our journal Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science , published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands, has long been very stable. In recent years, the Chinese countryside has in fact…
Why Is Involution (Not Evolution or Revolution) the Central Concept in My Understanding of Chinese History
Involution has been the key concept in my studies of Chinese history over the “longue durée.” It spotlights the reality of relatively high population pressure on farmland, with ever-decreasing farm size per capita throughout later imperial Chinese history, especially in the Ming-Qing era. Distinguished from gradually changing evolution and radical revolution, involution is characterized by mainly stationary technologies and methods of farming und…
My Research on China: Objective Scholarship and Subjective Emotions
Looking back at the advanced age of 84 on my own lifelong research, I can see that deep-seated emotions are certain to influence a researcher’s choice of problem, viewpoint, and depth of engagement. Only if we confront such realities can we hope to both derive creative energy from them and rise above them. Emotions can become hindrances to understanding and analysis, but can also lend them greater motive force and multi-dimensionality than “pure …
Mao Tse-tung and the Middle Peasants, 1925–1928
Against the background context of the First United Front between the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang, the main significance of Mao Zedong’s “Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” was to affirm the place of mass movements in the countryside, which was a clearly different position from that of the leadership of the United Front. It was also different from the emphasis on cities of the Communist Party led at the ti…
Revisiting “Involution” versus “Development” in China and in the West
Involution, or diminishing output per unit input, necessarily occurred sooner or later under the mounting population-to-land pressures of China from the Ming and Qing periods on. It could be countered for a time by enhanced inputs, as, for example, through the use of more or higher-quality fertilizer, or by pre-modern technological advances, such as the earlier switch from dry rice farming to wet rice farming, but would then resume under continue…
China’s Research on China is Already Severely Self Semi-Colonialized
In a global context, scholarly monographs occupy the most basic and important position in virtually all fields of scholarly endeavor, but China’s policy has been to discourage, even eliminate, the production of scholarly monographs, its intention being to make journal articles the fundamental literature in all fields of study. The result is that monographic studies of China have come to be dominated completely by foreign English-language works, w…
The Theories of “Differential Optimums” and “Vertical Integration” and Their Implications for China
Chayanov, outside of his theoretical analysis of how peasant households are distinctive for being at once a production and a consumption unit, and the multiple implications of that fact, has made two other major theoretical contributions, one making clear that peasant economies observe the logic of “differential optimums” rather than the simple logic of economies of scale, the other having to do with the need for co-operatives for “vertical integ…
Whither the Chinese Peasant Economy?”: An Introduction
The Fundamental Differences between Chinese and American Modes of Thinking and of Discourse
In the face of binaries, American scholars and officials will characteristically view them as either/or opposed dualities, such as democracy vs. autocracy, good vs. evil, rational vs. irrational. On that basis, American scholars typically view themselves as democratic and free, but view China as “dominated” and controlled, using the word “totalitarianism” to characterize China. China, on the other hand, tends instead to view the U.S. and China no…
Subjective Theory, Objective Behavior, and Practice Born of the Interaction of the Two
Subjective theory is one thing, objective behavior another, but practice born of the interaction of the two is yet another thing
Promoting More High Quality Chinese Studies of China and Their Translation into English Is a Matter of Great Urgency
Because the present-day Chinese academic system gives little value to monographic studies, and non-Chinese scholars are very, very rarely able to compose in Chinese, Chinese studies today severely lacks high quality monographic research in Chinese. At the same time, most Chinese scholars in China (distinguished from Chinese-origin scholars abroad) are generally only able to translate from English into their mother tongue Chinese, and seldom able …
Whither Economics in China? A Comment on Professor Jia Genliang’s “Reflections on Economics Education in China and Suggestions for Its Reform
In socialist China today, neoliberal economics has actually come to wield institutionalized hegemonic power in academic evaluations of economic studies, while in neoliberal America, there is ironically considerably more pluralism in the practice of academic evaluations of economic studies. The origins of this state of affairs lie not in just a simple matter of ideology or policy choices, but rather in different tendencies in the operative practic…
Fifty Years of Modern China: An International Journal of History and Social Science
Looking back at the past half-century since the founding of the journal Modern China in 1975, we can see that in the beginning non–Chinese American scholars accounted for fully 73 percent of all articles. That figure remained at a fairly high 64 percent at the end of the century, but has declined greatly since, first down to 26 percent by 2005-2009, and further to just 11 percent in 2020-2022. That decline has been partly countered by the increas…
Whither Economic Studies in China: A Comment on Professor Jia Genliang’s “Reflections on Economics Education in China and Suggestions for Its Reform”
In socialist China today, neoliberal economics has actually come to wield institutionalized hegemonic power in academic evaluations of economic studies, while in neoliberal America, there is actually considerably more pluralism in the practice of academic evaluations of economic studies. The origins of this state of affairs lie not in just a simple matter of ideology or policy choices, but rather in different tendencies in the actual practices of…
Revisiting “the Great Divergence”: Clarifying the Two Major Modes of Agricultural Change in China and the West
Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong have recently conceded that they had been wrong that “the great divergence” between China and the West occurred only after 1800, but they continue to insist that when it came to agriculture and its labor productivity, their earlier argument still holds. This article summarizes the broad differences between eighteenth-century England’s crops cum animal husbandry agriculture and China’s crops-only agriculture to demo…
The Theories of “Differential Optimums” and “Vertical Integration” and Their Implications for China
Chayanov, outside of his theoretical analysis of how peasant households are distinctive for being at once a production and a consumption unit and the multiple implications of that fact, has made two other major theoretical contributions, one making clear that peasant economies observe the logic of “differential optimums” rather than the simple logic of economies of scale and the other having to do with the need for co-operatives for “vertical int…
Revisiting “the Great Divergence: Clarifying the Two Major Modes of Agriculture in China and the West
Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong have recently conceded that they had been wrong that “the great divergence” between China and the West occurred only after 1800, but they continue to insist that when it came to agriculture and its labor productivity, their earlier argument still holds. This article summarizes the broad differences between eighteenth-century England’s crops cum animal husbandry agriculture and China’s crops-only agriculture to demo…
The “Social Science of Practice: An Introductory Summary and Analysis
The “theory of practice” was developed mainly in order to rise above the common tendency to treat the subjective and the objective as an either/or binary. We might rely mainly on subjective presuppositions to arrive at our scholarly conclusions, or engage only in the compilation and accumulation of empirical evidence, but practice is unavoidably born of the interaction between the two dimensions. Precisely for this reason, we suggest that scholar…
Theory of Practice and China Research: Legal and Social Science Studies
This article reviews the theory of practice that the author has employed for many years, including a discussion of my understanding of the ideas of its original founder Pierre Bourdieu, and my borrowing, expanding, and reinterpreting of his theory. I have long advocated the development of a new “social science of practice,” which is to say, to begin our research from the study of actual practice, on that basis re-examine and reformulate existing …
A Critique of Marketism: Varieties of Exchanges in China’s Past and Present
The theory and ideology of mainstream Anglo-American “marketism” do not accord with reality. Its core idea—equating all trade with equal and mutually beneficial market exchanges, and believing that such exchanges are certain to lead to division of labor and transformative changes in labor productivity—is a one-sided, idealized construction. It erases unequal exchanges under imperialism and ignores the realities of the use of cheap informal labor …
From Dualistic Opposition to Dyadic Integration: Toward a New Political Economy of Chinese Practice
This article argues for the construction of a new political economy based on Chinese practices. It begins with an explanation of the research approach of starting from practice, and from a distinctive mode of thinking that is akin to that of medicine, rather than Newtonian physics and mathematical logic. Then it discusses the present-day Chinese practices of combining socialism with market economy, state enterprises with private enterprises, the …
Agricultural Involution and Bureaucratic Involution: Types, Concepts, Empirical Generalizations, and Theoretical Mechanisms
The article reviews the history of the word “involution,” the empirical basis of the concept of “agricultural involution,” and the mechanisms operating behind that phenomenon. It then considers the very different empirical bases and mechanisms of “bureaucratic involution.” State and peasant might interact in a positive way that leads to development – as when the state in the Reform era gave peasants the power and right to respond to market stimul…
The Theory of Peasant Economy and Involution and De-involution
Today, thirty-five years after this author first wrote about involution, and at a time when that term and concept have come to be commonly used by many people, this article revisits that term to explain more clearly and succinctly its meaning and also to add to it contributions made by other scholars as well as by this author’s own further research, including new research on the de-involution of the past few decades in China, and analyses of the …
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct …
Public Sphere "/"Civil Society" in China: The Third Realm between State and Society
The concepts of bourgeois public sphere and society as they have been applied to China presuppose a dichotomous opposition between state and society. If we adhere to such a presupposition, we run the risk of reducing the debate here to little more than an argument over whose influence was greater in the phenomena under discussion, society's or the state's. I suggest here that Habermas himself in fact proposed a more sophisticated alternative cons…
Capitalization without Proletarianization in China's Agricultural Development
Marxist as well as classical and neo-liberal theories expect that the development of capitalist agriculture will be accompanied by the spread of an agricultural proletariat. That was what happened in eighteenth-century England; it is also what is happening in contemporary India. This article asks, first of all: just what is the size of China’s present agricultural proletariat? And how do we understand and explain those dimensions? Our finding is …
China's Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory
The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the reason for the neglect is the misleading influence of mainstream economic and sociological theories, which h…
China’s New-Age Small Farms and Their Vertical Integration: Agribusiness or Co-ops
The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suit…
Chongqing: Equitable Development Driven by a “Third Hand
Chongqing’s experience suggests that while Janos Kornai is surely correct about shortage in a planned economy, he is mistaken that market signals may only be employed under an economic regime of private property. Chongqing has called instead on government-owned firms, and their market earnings and appreciation, to fund social equity programs and infrastructural construction. This “third hand” is different from Adam Smith’s “invisible” first hand,…
China’s Hidden Agricultural Revolution, 1980–2010, in Historical and Comparative Perspective
China finally underwent its modernizing (i.e., with increased labor productivity and incomes) agricultural revolution in 1980 to 2010, through dynamics unlike those of most other previous agricultural revolutions. It is “hidden” because the revolution has not come so much from the conventional and readily apparent increases of certain crops’ output by weight due to new inputs, but rather mainly by the switch from grain production to more and more…
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of China’s Development Experience: The Role of Informal Economic Practices
China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the "new institutional economics," emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engi…
Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution
The Paradigmatic Crisis in Chinese Studies: Paradoxes in Social and Economic History
Centralized Minimalism: Semiformal Governance by Quasi Officials and Dispute Resolution in China
Existing theories of governance generally focus on formal institutions, conceptualized in an either—or binary of state versus society. Recent archival research, however, has demonstrated that local Chinese administrative practice drew widely on semiformal governance through the use of quasi officials nominated by communities. They were not salaried and generated little or no paperwork. Once confirmed by the magistrate, they were largely left to f…
Profit-Making State Firms and China’s Development Experience: State Capitalism” or “Socialist Market Economy
State-owned “enterprises” from the planned era, converted into profit-making state firms in the 2000s, have been playing a major role in the continued spectacular growth of China’s GDP. This fact, however, has been obscured by hegemonic neoliberal economic discourse with its assumption that only private firms can drive economic development, thereby turning what is a major dynamic into a major failing. At the same time, by a variety of abstract co…
Divorce Law Practices and the Origins, Myths, and Realities of Judicial “Mediation” in China
Using archival records of 216 court cases, this article argues that divorce law practices lie at the core of the tradition of “Maoist justice” that remains profoundly influential in the present-day Chinese civil justice system. These practices were born of a distinctive set of historical circumstances: the need to steer a middle course between an early radical promise of divorce on demand and the reality of peasant opposition, and the merging of …
Court Mediation in China, Past and Present
What is called “mediation” in China today includes a wide variety of actions, ranging from the purely facilitative to the substantially adjudicative and yet still mediatory (those that are mainly adjudicatory and imposed regardless of the will of the litigants should be excluded). They show that contemporary Chinese court mediation as it has been practiced is very different both from Qing court practices and from current alternative dispute resol…
The Modern Chinese Family: In Light of Economic and Legal History
Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to …
Morality and Law in China, Past and Present
This article focuses on the combining of morality and law in China’s past and present, and in theory and in practice, to analyze both its positive and negative dimensions. The point is to make clear not only that such a combination is both historically true and currently necessary but also that it need not be fuzzy, but rather can be made precise and clear, with definable, rational principles. The intent here is to search for an approach to law t…
Theory and the Study of Modern Chinese History: Four Traps and a Question
I think of myself as an empirical historian above all else. The starting point of my own work has always been to identify a substantial body of hitherto unexplored or little explored materials and to generate new empirical information from such materials. I have turned to theory mainly as an aid to develop, through engagement and dialogue with it, my own concepts based on the empirical findings. Epistemologically, I have consciously tried to proc…
Civil Adjudication in China, Past and Present
Qing and post-1949 Chinese courts adjudicated civil disputes far more than Confucian or Maoist representations or formalist-modernist expectations might lead us to expect. Qing law placed the moral ideals of societal mediation and no litigation in the foreground but then included many practical provisions that diverged from those to guide adjudication. Contemporary Chinese law, similarly, has emphasized the ideal of mediation, and in the reform e…
Between Informal Mediation and Formal Adjudication: The Third Realm of Qing Civil Justice
Analyzing the Twentieth-Century Chinese Countryside Revolutionaries versus Westem Scholarship
Biculturality in Modern China and in Chinese Studies
How a “New Legal History” Might Be Possible: Recent Trends in Chinese Legal History Studies in the United States and Their Implications
Dispatch Work in China: A Study from Case Records, Part I
This article employs all basic-level court cases adjudged in 2012 involving “labor disputes” over “dispatch work” 劳务派遣 (in the Supreme People’s Court’s large database of court judgments) to clarify the practical and theoretical implications of the new legal category of “dispatch work relationships” 劳务关系, as opposed to the old-style “labor relationships” 劳动关系. The article examines also disputes between the new dispatch agencies and the workers the…
Whither Chinese Law
Current Chinese debates about “modernity” focus on what Chinese law was and is, and where it should go from here; this article argues that the answer should be sought in historical processes involved in the pursuit of modern ideals—such as scientific knowledge, industrial development, and citizen rights—and not in any one theory or ideology. The essay attempts to excavate from the past century's history of Chinese legal practice components of wha…
Dispatch Work in China: A Study from Case Records, Part II
On the basis of case records from Xinjiang and Shanghai between 2013 and 2016, this article examines how dispatch work law has changed in practice and in theory during that period. It demonstrates that in using dispatch agencies as legal “protective shields” to dispose of obligations to workers, the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have behaved much as what the case records from 2012 used in my earlier study (Part I) showed. What has changed is tha…
Should Social Science and Jurisprudence Imitate Natural Science
Scientism—the belief that social science and jurisprudence can discover universal and deterministic laws about the human world in the same way as natural science has about the physical world—carries enormous influence today. It is most evident in the “formalist” traditions of social science and jurisprudence, which have managed to occupy “mainstream” positions, despite an abundance of contrary evidence and “alternative” theoretical challenges. Th…
Liberalism and Nationalism in Liang Ch'i-Ch'ao's Thought
Liang Ch'i-ch'ao g£ $ Jg was profoundly influenced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century English liberal thinkers. His writings, especially those between the years 1898 and 1903, abounded in references to Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), John Stuart Mill (18061873), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and to the favorite phrases of these men the greatest happiness of the greatest number, liberty of thought and discussion, struggle for existence, and survival …
Analyzing the Twentieth-Century Chinese Countryside Revolutionaries versus Westem Scholarship
Mao Tse-tung and the Middle Peasants, 1925-1928
On December 25, 1947, in the midst of the great land reform movement, Mao Tse-tung directed all cadres to follow two fundamental principles: 1. Satisfy the demands of the poor peasants and agricultural workers; this is the basic task of the land reform. 2. Firmly unite with the middle peasants; do not attack their interests (Mao, 1972: vol. X, 105). This strategy of relying on the poor peasants and agricultural workers while allying with the midd…
Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism
Current Research on Ming-Qing and Modern History in China
For three decades American and Chinese historians dismissed each other's research as irrelevant ideological exercises. To American scholars, Chinese historical scholarship seemed only to echo latest party line, or line dispute. The debates over periodization, over proper moral judgment of historical figures, and, most recently, over supposed struggle of two lines between legalism and Confucianism seemed to have little academic substance. To Chine…
County Archives and the Study of Local Social History: Report on a Year's Research in China
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small famil…
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct …
A Reply to Ramon Myers
The central theme of my book, reviewed in the previous article by Ramon Myers, is that, contrary to the expectations of the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, commercialization does not necessarily bring modern development to the countryside. China before 1950 saw six centuries of vigorous and protracted commercialization, but rural underdevelopment persisted, so that the great majority of the population remained tied to the land and t…
The Paradigmatic Crisis in Chinese Studies: Paradoxes in Social and Economic History
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangtzi Delta, 1350-1988
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
Public Sphere "/"Civil Society" in China: The Third Realm between State and Society
The concepts of bourgeois public sphere and society as they have been applied to China presuppose a dichotomous opposition between state and society. If we adhere to such a presupposition, we run the risk of reducing the debate here to little more than an argument over whose influence was greater in the phenomena under discussion, society's or the state's. I suggest here that Habermas himself in fact proposed a more sophisticated alternative cons…
Between Informal Mediation and Formal Adjudication: The Third Realm of Qing Civil Justice
Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies, II
CHAPTER SIX Codified Law and Magisterial Adjudication in the Qing
Civil Law in Qing and Republican China
This pioneering volume shows that contrary to previous scholarly understanding, the courts in Qing (1644-1911) and Republican (1911-1949) China dealt extensively with civil matters such as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance; and, moreover, did so in a consistent and predictable way. Drawing on records of hundreds of cases from local archives in several parts of China, it considers such questions as the relation between codified law and …
Editors' Foreword
Political science (85 works) · China (79 works) · Law (77 works) · Law (66 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (63 works) · Sociology (58 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (52 works) · Economics (50 works) · History (28 works) · History (26 works)