CHINA STUDIEStargeted as an underdeveloped discipline (com-
pared to, say, history, literature, and political sci-
ence) deserving of special priority. Stimulated by
this developmental effort, during the 1960s and
1970s the number of Western sociologists active in
the study of China increased from a handful to
perhaps two dozen.
Prior to the early 1970s, with a few minor
exceptions (e.g., Geddes 1963), it was impossible
for foreign sociologists to travel to China, much
less to do research there. Even when such travel
became possible during the 1970s, it was initially
restricted to very superficial ‘‘academic tourism.’’
In this highly constrained situation, foreign soci-
ologists studying China developed distinctive re-
search methods.
Much research was based on detailed culling
of Chinese mass media reports. Special translation
series of Chinese newspapers and magazines and
of monitored radio broadcasts developed in the
1950s and became the mainstays of such research.
The Chinese media provided fairly clear state-
ments about official policy and social change cam-
paigns. By conveying details about local ‘‘positive
and negative models’’ in the implementation of
official goals, the media also provided some clues
about the difficulties and resistance being encoun-
tered in introducing social change. In a few in-
stances the media even yielded apparently ‘‘hard’’
statistical data about social trends. A minor indus-
try developed around scanning local press and
radio reports for population totals, and these were
pieced together to yield national population esti-
mates (typically plus or minus 100 million).
Some researchers developed elaborate schemes
to code and subject to content analysis such media
reports (see, for example, Andors 1977; Cell 1977).
However, this reliance on media reports to study
Chinese social trends had severe limits. Such re-
ports revealed much more about official goals
than they did about social reality, and the research-
er might erroneously conclude that an effort to
produce major changes was actually producing
them. The sorts of unanticipated consequences
that sociologists love to uncover were for the most
part invisible in the highly didactic Chinese media.
It was also very difficult to use media reports to
analyze variations across individuals and commu-
nities, the staple of sociological analysis elsewhere.
Studies based on media reports tended to convey
an unrealistic impression of uniformity, thus rein-
forcing the prevailing stereotype of China as a
totalitarian society.Partly in reaction to these limitations, a sec-
ond primary method of research on China from
the outside developed—the refugee interview.
Scholars in sociology and related fields spent ex-
tended periods of time in Hong Kong interviewing
individuals who had left the PRC for the British
colony. Typically, these individuals were used not
as respondents in a survey but as ethnographic
informants ‘‘at a distance’’ about the corners of
the Chinese social world from which they had
come. Although the individuals interviewed obvi-
ously were not typical of the population remaining
in the PRC, for some topics these refugees provid-
ed a rich and textured picture of social reality that
contrasted with the unidimensional view conveyed
by Chinese mass media. Elaborate techniques were
developed by researchers to cope with the prob-
lems of atypicality and potential bias among refu-
gee informants (see Whyte 1983).By combining these methods with brief visits
to China, sociologists and others produced a large
number of useful studies of contemporary main-
land society (Whyte, Vogel, and Parish 1977). Even
though the arcane methods they used often seemed
to nonspecialists akin to Chinese tea-leaf reading,
the best of these studies have stood the test of time
and have been confirmed by new research made
possible by changes in China since 1979. However,
the exclusion from meaningful field research in
China did have unfortunate effects on the intellec-
tual agendas of researchers. Much energy was
focused on examining the ‘‘Maoist model’’ of de-
velopment and whether or not China was succeed-
ing in becoming a revolutionary new type of social
order. Since the reality of Chinese social organiza-
tions in the Maoist period was quite different from
the slogans and ideals upon which such construc-
tions were based, this effort appears to have been a
waste of scarce intellectual resources. Both this
unusual intellectual agenda and the distinctive
research methods sociologists studying China were
forced to use reinforced the isolation of these
researchers from ‘‘mainstream’’ work in sociology.The year 1979 was significant in two ways for
the sociological study of China. First, as already
noted, that was the year in which China’s leaders