Contemporary Chinese Politics

Allen Carlson is an Associate Professor in Cornell University's Government Department. He is the author of Unifying China, Integrating with the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty during the Reform Era (2005) and the co-editor (with J. J. Suh and Peter Katzenstein) of Rethinking Security in East Asia: Power, Identity and Efficiencies (2004). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary China and Pacific Affairs. Mary E. Gallagher is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. She is also a faculty associate at the Center for Comparative Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (2005) and her articles have appeared in World Politics, the Law and Society Review, Studies in Comparative International Development and Asian Survey. Kenneth Lieberthal is a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and in Global Economy and Development and also is Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He has written and edited fifteen books and monographs, most recently The US Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right (2009) and (with David Sandalow) Overcoming Obstacles to US-China Cooperation on Climate Change (2009). He is also the author of about seventy periodical articles and chapters in books, as well as having published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the South China Morning Post and numerous other newspapers. Melanie Manion is a Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her publications include Retirement of Revolutionaries in China (1993) and Corruption by Design (2004). Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization and China Quarterly.

'… a milestone in the methodology for studying contemporary Chinese politics that deserves to be emulated by those conducting research on other geographical and cultural areas. … Each of the chapters is of exceptional quality and highly readable. … this excellent work is essential reading for everyone studying and researching Chinese politics.' The China Journal

• Introduction Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher and Melanie Manion; Part I. Sources: 1. State-generated data and contentious politics in China Xi Chen; 2. Why archives? Neil J. Diamant; 3. The central committee, past and present: a method of quantifying elite biographies Victor Shih, Wei Shan and Mingxing Liu; 4. Experimental methods and psychological measures in the study of Chinese foreign policy Peter Hays Gries; 5. Internet resources and the study of Chinese foreign relations: can cyberspace shed new light on China's approach to the world? Allen Carslon and Hong Duan; 6. Information overload? Collecting, managing, and analyzing Chinese media content Daniela Stockman; Part II. Qualitative Methods: 7. The worm's-eye view: using ethnography to illuminate labor politics and institutional change in contemporary China Calvin Chen; 8. More than an interview, less than Sedaka: studying subtle and hidden politics with site-intensive methods Benjamin L. Read; 9. Cases, questions, and comparison in research on contemporary Chinese politics William Hurst; Part III. Survey Methods: 10. A survey of survey research on Chinese politics: what have we learned? Melanie Manion; 11. Surveying prospects for political change: capturing political and economic variation in empirical research in China Bruce J. Dickson; 12. Using clustered spatial data to study diffusion: the case of legal institutions in China Pierre F. Landry; 13. Measuring change and stability over a decade in the Beijing area study Mingming Shen and Ming Yang with Melanie Manion; 14. Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China Lily L. Tsai; Reflections on the evolution of the China field in political science Kenneth Lieberthal; Glossary.