Dingxin Zhao
Biographic Data
| ID | 3810900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dingxin Zhao |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dingxin |
| FAMILY NAME | Zhao |
| SIGNATURE | ZHAO D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Confucian Legalist Stateand Theory Building Based on Ideal-Type Set
In this essay, I address two major concerns raised by the reviewers of my recent book The Confucian-Legalist State. The first is on the theory of social change that I have developed in my book, and the second is about my explanation of why an indigenous breakthrough to industrial capitalism was impossible in China, despite its highly commercialized economy. I address the first issue by explicating the nature and value of ideal-type-set based dedu…
States in the Developing World
Max Weber and Patterns of Chinese History
China under Mao
Social Movements as a Dialogic Process
In 2008, CNN’s reports on the Lhasa Riots angered Chinese students and triggered the large-scale Anti-CNN Movement. By examining posts on the movement’s website, 310 news articles, and eighteen in-depth interviews, this study identifies the prevailing mentalities of the episode’s primary actors–the U.S. media, students, and the Chinese media, and analyzes how their mentalities shaped their framing strategies and their interpretations of others’ f…
The Age of Hegemons (770–546 BCE)
The collapse of the Western Zhou political order ultimately led to the emergence of a new hegemonic system of interstate relations. This chapter analyzes the nature of this interstate system, identifying the major state actors and their changing strengths over time. It then considers the nature of warfare during the Age of Hegemons and the role of ritual in it; two very different answers to the problems posed by territorial expansion: bureaucrati…
Relations between Nomads and Settled Chinese in History
This chapter analyzes the patterns of nomad-settled Chinese relations and their impact on the Confucian-Legalist state. It shows that although dynasties of nomadic or semi-nomadic origins introduced new elements into Chinese culture and history, they did not fundamentally alter China’s Confucian-Legalist political structure. It then presents a general theory that attempts to comprehend the pattern of nomad-settled Chinese relations over the past …
The Age of Transition (545–420 BCE)
The Confucian-Legalist State
This book analyzes the history of China between the 11th century BCE and 1911 under the guidance of a new theory of social change. It centers on two questions. First, how and why China was unified and developed into a bureaucratic empire under the state of Qin in 221 BCE? Second, how was it that, until the nineteenth century, the political and cultural structure of China that was institutionalized during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE) sho…
Max Weber and patterns of Chinese history
Max Weber's The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951) has been regarded as a book containing many distortions, wrong characterizations, and politically incorrect arguments by the contemporary Western social scientists. This article, however, argues that while Weber has made his analyses based on very limited information, his arguments about the nature of Chinese cities and Chinese religions, and his explanation of China's impossibilit…
Performance Legitimacy, State Autonomy and China's Economic Miracle
Theories that explain post-Mao China's economic success tend to attribute it to one or several 'successful' policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state's economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China's economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any s…
Collective Resistance in China
Authoritarian State and Contentious Politics
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements
This article provides an initial step toward an explanatory analysis of the role of culture in social movements. It argues that culture shapes collective actions through three ideal-typical mechanisms: as problem-solving tool-kits, as scripts, and as instincts and taken-for-granted routines. While any concrete collective actions may involve the working of all three mechanisms, the relative importance of the three mechanisms in a social movement v…
Organization and Place in the Anti-U.S. Chinese Student Protests After the 1999 Belgrade Embassy Bombing
While early studies of participant mobilization in contentious politics stress the roles of organizations and networks in mobilization, more recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of place. This article treats organization-based mobilization and place-based mobilization as two mechanisms of participant mobilization and tries to find a way to understand the relationships between them. By examining different styles of student mobilization dur…
The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China
This article argues that performance legitimacy, an aspect of state legitimacy neglected by Weber in his original formulation of the theory of domination, played a particularly important role in the history of China and has shaped not only the patterns of Chinese history but also today's Chinese politics. Yet, performance legitimacy is intrinsically unstable because it carries concrete promises and therefore will trigger immediate political crisi…
Comment on Kiser and Cai, ASR, August 2003
Nationalism and Authoritarianism
The 1999 anti-U.S. student demonstrations that broke out in major Chinese cities following the U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade have been popularly regarded as a Chinese government-sponsored activity. This research shows that during the demonstrations many Beijing students were in fact very suspicious of the government’s involvement and avoided joining demonstrations that they regarded as government controlled. Much of the…
Student Nationalism in China
Peer pressure, not hatred of the United States, sent Chinese university students to the streets during the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbia
An Angle on Nationalism in China Today
It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incid…
The Power of Tiananmen
In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown. Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these hist…
The Power of Tiananmen
China's Prolonged Stability and Political Future
Contrary to the earlier political upheavals which culminated in the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement, China has achieved an extended stability in the 1990s. This paper argues that the prolonged stability resulted from a set of changes in China's state‐society relations, and much of it was related to the 1989 movement. After the 1989 movement, the CCP veterans selected younger leaders who were both reform-minded and had a Machiavellian sense of politics…
State-Society Relations and the Discourses and Activities of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement
Many writings emphasize the importance of Chinese culture to the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Comparing the 1989 movement to the May 4th movement of 1919 and to the December 9th movement of 1935–36, this study finds the rhetoric and activity patterns of the 1989 movement to be actually more traditional than those of its forerunners. This is quite a paradox, considering the scale of social change in China during the 20th century. This article ar…
Ecologies of Social Movements
Based on 70 interviews with informants who were mostly students during the 1989 Beijing student movement, the author found that the ecology of university campuses in Beijing enclosed a huge number of students in a small area with a unique spatial distribution and regulated their spatial activities. This ecology nurtured many close–knit student networks, as well as directly exposed all Beijing students to a collective action environment when the m…
The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China
This article argues that performance legitimacy, an aspect of state legitimacy neglected by Weber in his original formulation of the theory of domination, played a particularly important role in the history of China and has shaped not only the patterns of Chinese history but also today's Chinese politics. Yet, performance legitimacy is intrinsically unstable because it carries concrete promises and therefore will trigger immediate political crisi…
Ecologies of Social Movements
Based on 70 interviews with informants who were mostly students during the 1989 Beijing student movement, the author found that the ecology of university campuses in Beijing enclosed a huge number of students in a small area with a unique spatial distribution and regulated their spatial activities. This ecology nurtured many close–knit student networks, as well as directly exposed all Beijing students to a collective action environment when the m…
Performance Legitimacy, State Autonomy and China's Economic Miracle
Theories that explain post-Mao China's economic success tend to attribute it to one or several 'successful' policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state's economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China's economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any s…
An Angle on Nationalism in China Today
It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incid…
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements
This article provides an initial step toward an explanatory analysis of the role of culture in social movements. It argues that culture shapes collective actions through three ideal-typical mechanisms: as problem-solving tool-kits, as scripts, and as instincts and taken-for-granted routines. While any concrete collective actions may involve the working of all three mechanisms, the relative importance of the three mechanisms in a social movement v…
State-Society Relations and the Discourses and Activities of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement
Many writings emphasize the importance of Chinese culture to the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Comparing the 1989 movement to the May 4th movement of 1919 and to the December 9th movement of 1935–36, this study finds the rhetoric and activity patterns of the 1989 movement to be actually more traditional than those of its forerunners. This is quite a paradox, considering the scale of social change in China during the 20th century. This article ar…
China's Prolonged Stability and Political Future
Contrary to the earlier political upheavals which culminated in the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement, China has achieved an extended stability in the 1990s. This paper argues that the prolonged stability resulted from a set of changes in China's state‐society relations, and much of it was related to the 1989 movement. After the 1989 movement, the CCP veterans selected younger leaders who were both reform-minded and had a Machiavellian sense of politics…
States in the Developing World
State Power and Patterns of Late Development
The argument of this paper is that successful economic development within the 'Third World' depends on the ability of a state to lead its national society to controlled participation in the world market. The first part of the paper produces a model of the requisite state capacity. What matters is 'bounded autonomy': states need to be, at one and the same time, autonomous from and yet constrained by their societies. The second part of the paper ex…
China under Mao
Organization and Place in the Anti-U.S. Chinese Student Protests After the 1999 Belgrade Embassy Bombing
While early studies of participant mobilization in contentious politics stress the roles of organizations and networks in mobilization, more recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of place. This article treats organization-based mobilization and place-based mobilization as two mechanisms of participant mobilization and tries to find a way to understand the relationships between them. By examining different styles of student mobilization dur…
The Confucian Legalist Stateand Theory Building Based on Ideal-Type Set
In this essay, I address two major concerns raised by the reviewers of my recent book The Confucian-Legalist State. The first is on the theory of social change that I have developed in my book, and the second is about my explanation of why an indigenous breakthrough to industrial capitalism was impossible in China, despite its highly commercialized economy. I address the first issue by explicating the nature and value of ideal-type-set based dedu…
Max Weber and patterns of Chinese history
Max Weber's The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951) has been regarded as a book containing many distortions, wrong characterizations, and politically incorrect arguments by the contemporary Western social scientists. This article, however, argues that while Weber has made his analyses based on very limited information, his arguments about the nature of Chinese cities and Chinese religions, and his explanation of China's impossibilit…
Decline of Political Control in Chinese Universities and the Rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement
Political control in Chinese universities had depended mainly on the cooperation of students with nonprofessional political workers. In the process of economic reform in China, the ideological legitimation of the communist state greatly declined while other avenues of status attainment outside the realm of state control opened up. Participating actively in mutual supervision became neither moral nor necessarily profitable. As a result, a campus e…
The defensive regime and modernization
This paper argues against both conservative and liberal theories of modernization expressed in the “new authoritarianism debate” on the eve of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement. The paper argues that a defensive authoritarian regime, that is a regime that can only rely on and is able to base its survival on performance legitimacy, can lead a successful modernization. Comparing development experiences of historical Taiwan to that of the current ma…
Social Movements as a Dialogic Process
In 2008, CNN’s reports on the Lhasa Riots angered Chinese students and triggered the large-scale Anti-CNN Movement. By examining posts on the movement’s website, 310 news articles, and eighteen in-depth interviews, this study identifies the prevailing mentalities of the episode’s primary actors–the U.S. media, students, and the Chinese media, and analyzes how their mentalities shaped their framing strategies and their interpretations of others’ f…
Student Nationalism in China
Peer pressure, not hatred of the United States, sent Chinese university students to the streets during the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbia
The defensive regime and modernization
This paper argues against both conservative and liberal theories of modernization expressed in the “new authoritarianism debate” on the eve of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement. The paper argues that a defensive authoritarian regime, that is a regime that can only rely on and is able to base its survival on performance legitimacy, can lead a successful modernization. Comparing development experiences of historical Taiwan to that of the current ma…
State Power and Patterns of Late Development
The argument of this paper is that successful economic development within the 'Third World' depends on the ability of a state to lead its national society to controlled participation in the world market. The first part of the paper produces a model of the requisite state capacity. What matters is 'bounded autonomy': states need to be, at one and the same time, autonomous from and yet constrained by their societies. The second part of the paper ex…
Decline of Political Control in Chinese Universities and the Rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement
Political control in Chinese universities had depended mainly on the cooperation of students with nonprofessional political workers. In the process of economic reform in China, the ideological legitimation of the communist state greatly declined while other avenues of status attainment outside the realm of state control opened up. Participating actively in mutual supervision became neither moral nor necessarily profitable. As a result, a campus e…
Ecologies of Social Movements
Based on 70 interviews with informants who were mostly students during the 1989 Beijing student movement, the author found that the ecology of university campuses in Beijing enclosed a huge number of students in a small area with a unique spatial distribution and regulated their spatial activities. This ecology nurtured many close–knit student networks, as well as directly exposed all Beijing students to a collective action environment when the m…
State-Society Relations and the Discourses and Activities of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement
Many writings emphasize the importance of Chinese culture to the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Comparing the 1989 movement to the May 4th movement of 1919 and to the December 9th movement of 1935–36, this study finds the rhetoric and activity patterns of the 1989 movement to be actually more traditional than those of its forerunners. This is quite a paradox, considering the scale of social change in China during the 20th century. This article ar…
The Power of Tiananmen
In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown. Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these hist…
The Power of Tiananmen
China's Prolonged Stability and Political Future
Contrary to the earlier political upheavals which culminated in the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement, China has achieved an extended stability in the 1990s. This paper argues that the prolonged stability resulted from a set of changes in China's state‐society relations, and much of it was related to the 1989 movement. After the 1989 movement, the CCP veterans selected younger leaders who were both reform-minded and had a Machiavellian sense of politics…
Student Nationalism in China
Peer pressure, not hatred of the United States, sent Chinese university students to the streets during the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbia
An Angle on Nationalism in China Today
It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incid…
Nationalism and Authoritarianism
The 1999 anti-U.S. student demonstrations that broke out in major Chinese cities following the U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade have been popularly regarded as a Chinese government-sponsored activity. This research shows that during the demonstrations many Beijing students were in fact very suspicious of the government’s involvement and avoided joining demonstrations that they regarded as government controlled. Much of the…
Comment on Kiser and Cai, ASR, August 2003
Organization and Place in the Anti-U.S. Chinese Student Protests After the 1999 Belgrade Embassy Bombing
While early studies of participant mobilization in contentious politics stress the roles of organizations and networks in mobilization, more recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of place. This article treats organization-based mobilization and place-based mobilization as two mechanisms of participant mobilization and tries to find a way to understand the relationships between them. By examining different styles of student mobilization dur…
The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China
This article argues that performance legitimacy, an aspect of state legitimacy neglected by Weber in his original formulation of the theory of domination, played a particularly important role in the history of China and has shaped not only the patterns of Chinese history but also today's Chinese politics. Yet, performance legitimacy is intrinsically unstable because it carries concrete promises and therefore will trigger immediate political crisi…
Authoritarian State and Contentious Politics
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements
This article provides an initial step toward an explanatory analysis of the role of culture in social movements. It argues that culture shapes collective actions through three ideal-typical mechanisms: as problem-solving tool-kits, as scripts, and as instincts and taken-for-granted routines. While any concrete collective actions may involve the working of all three mechanisms, the relative importance of the three mechanisms in a social movement v…
Collective Resistance in China
Performance Legitimacy, State Autonomy and China's Economic Miracle
Theories that explain post-Mao China's economic success tend to attribute it to one or several 'successful' policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state's economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China's economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any s…
The Age of Hegemons (770–546 BCE)
The collapse of the Western Zhou political order ultimately led to the emergence of a new hegemonic system of interstate relations. This chapter analyzes the nature of this interstate system, identifying the major state actors and their changing strengths over time. It then considers the nature of warfare during the Age of Hegemons and the role of ritual in it; two very different answers to the problems posed by territorial expansion: bureaucrati…
Relations between Nomads and Settled Chinese in History
This chapter analyzes the patterns of nomad-settled Chinese relations and their impact on the Confucian-Legalist state. It shows that although dynasties of nomadic or semi-nomadic origins introduced new elements into Chinese culture and history, they did not fundamentally alter China’s Confucian-Legalist political structure. It then presents a general theory that attempts to comprehend the pattern of nomad-settled Chinese relations over the past …
The Age of Transition (545–420 BCE)
The Confucian-Legalist State
This book analyzes the history of China between the 11th century BCE and 1911 under the guidance of a new theory of social change. It centers on two questions. First, how and why China was unified and developed into a bureaucratic empire under the state of Qin in 221 BCE? Second, how was it that, until the nineteenth century, the political and cultural structure of China that was institutionalized during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE) sho…
Max Weber and patterns of Chinese history
Max Weber's The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951) has been regarded as a book containing many distortions, wrong characterizations, and politically incorrect arguments by the contemporary Western social scientists. This article, however, argues that while Weber has made his analyses based on very limited information, his arguments about the nature of Chinese cities and Chinese religions, and his explanation of China's impossibilit…
China under Mao
Social Movements as a Dialogic Process
In 2008, CNN’s reports on the Lhasa Riots angered Chinese students and triggered the large-scale Anti-CNN Movement. By examining posts on the movement’s website, 310 news articles, and eighteen in-depth interviews, this study identifies the prevailing mentalities of the episode’s primary actors–the U.S. media, students, and the Chinese media, and analyzes how their mentalities shaped their framing strategies and their interpretations of others’ f…
Political science (24 works) · China (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (15 works) · History (14 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (11 works) · Law (9 works)