Chinese Sociology as a Contesting Field (1986-2019): a Citation Network Analysis

Kit Man, Boston University

At a symposium on philosophy and the social sciences in China convened by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the fostering of academic research with ‘Chinese characteristics’ for the sake of the socialist development in China. In his speech, Xi explicitly referred these subjects of study as “the pivotal frontline for the Party and the People” of China, which reflects the crucial position of the academic field in the Chinese state propaganda. Among all the humanities and the social sciences, sociology offers a unique case to understand the tensions between the official political discourse and the genuine pursuit of knowledge in the post-Mao era. The discipline had been suspended from 1953 to 1979 in the ideological days of the country because of its ‘bourgeois’ inclination. Not long after its reestablishment, the Chinese sociologists have begun to ponder upon the importance of indigenizing sociology in China as the antithesis of Euro-centrism in the 1980s. In this study of citation analysis, I use papers which discuss the indigenization of Chinese sociology published in high-ranking academic journals in China between 1986 and 2019 as my data source. I examine both the networks of the papers and the sources cited to investigate whether the figures endorsed by the CCP or authentic scholars in sociology or other disciplines occupy the central position in the networks. In other words, this study operationalizes the reinstated Chinese sociology as a contesting field between the official ideological hegemony and global sociological knowledge.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 26. Computational Approaches to Epistemic Change