A Matter of Choice: Critical Policy Studies of China

Jing Wang and David S.G. Goodman

PDF Version of the Founding Document

What is meant by Critical Policy Studies?

The bringing together of academics from two ‘fields’ of China Studies – cultural studies and policy studies – who appreciate that the other field may be of interest intellectually in tandem and are prepared to work together toward an experimental fusion of the two designated fields of knowledge despite differences in perspective and creative tensions in the process.

How is Cultural Studies relevant to policy studies? However divergent the array of theoretical positions that the term may cover today, Cultural Studies is associated with a progressive politics of critique. This is a politics that engages practitioners in a shared commitment to examining cultural practices as situated and embedded in relations of power. More often than not, that wing of politically engaged theorists in Cultural Studies is committed to critiquing power and presupposes a source from which power emanates. There are two major paradigms addressing the source question: locating it in the state apparatus, or deconstructing it into centrifugal, normalizing mechanisms of power that function outside, below, and alongside the state on a micro, everyday level. In either case, the discursive reconstruction of instances of power constitutes the staple of the critical scholarship linked to Cultural Studies. The priority given to the issue of representation, important as it is, yields scholarship that disembodies power, despite cultural theorists' emphasis on the materiality of domination.

In the case of Chinese cultural studies, the metaphorical association of power with an `over-arching’ system (tizhi) is often taken for granted. Rarely examined is the concrete instrument of statist domination and control: that is the public policy agenda, seen in its pluralistic manifestations as it traffics through the state, its agencies and various embodiments. In short, a grounded, judicious critique of tizhi is predicated on Critical Policy Studies that combines the analytical focus of policy studies and the critical vision of cultural studies.

A fusion of these two fields may trigger a double methodological breakthrough. First of all, it opens up the possibilities of studying culture from the policy perspectives, and at the same time, it inserts critiques and the ideology/value question into a quantitatively oriented policy science.

What interactive relations exist between Culture Studies and Policy Studies?

‘Culture’ is inseparable from ‘policy’ because cultural production in post-socialist China is heavily bound to national cultural policies. For Policy Studies, policy-making is quite clearly essentially contested by its own forms of cultural construction. What binds those two fields together is the abiding problematic of the institutional conditions of regulation and control, and the twin issue of the possibilities of counter-measures and agency in the characteristically Chinese culture and policy framework.

Critical policy study implies research on specific policy areas and the policy environment alongside efforts of theorization, as a collective endeavour, built around teamwork and workshops.

Policy is the outcome of governmental decision-making. Mention of the ‘Policy environment’ refers to the whole of the socio-cultural, economic, and political habitat within which a policy initiative was grown, implemented, contradicted, or debated.

Because neither policies nor policy analyses and policy analysts are value-free, the examination of the material processes of policy making and implementation incorporates the study of values and interests that underwrite or block policy legislation and implementation.

What is ‘critical’ about Critical Policy Studies?

A ‘critical’ policy studies does not necessarily dictate the ultimate performance of ‘critiquing’ policies. There are other means of critical thinking than simply critiquing literally. For instance, being critical means not taking for granted either the value-blind hypothesis about policy sciences or its reputedly ‘problem’-oriented nature.

The following areas for further investigation are suggested as providing a starting point for the discussion of a framework for critical analysis:

  1. How do policy players in the policy process (of the state in all its ramifications) construct their own participation in that process and its outcomes?
  2. How does the Chinese framework of ‘There are policies above, counter-measures below’ (shang you zhengce, xia you duice) work in terms of the plurality of governmental-based policy locations ? Is this framework viable ? What kind of value can we assign to the cardinal issue of ‘agency’ placed at the heart of this dichotomous framework that prioritizes policy implementation at lower level sites of government?
  3. What counts as ‘critical vocation’ for each policy analyst (some are players as well) sited at a given locale ? In particular, how are the critical vocations of those working within central government (as for example, the State Council’s Western Region Development Office); those from think-tanks in (the provincial and Beijing) academies of the social sciences; and those of us academic intellectuals located outside China, articulated?
  4. The concepts of ‘development’ and ‘sustainable development’ should be open to further consideration without taking either a negative or positive face-value of each discourse for granted. What are the interactions between social and economic change, between social and economic development?
  5. Who are the policy-makers at the Centre and at each lower level of government? This includes inquiries of both the structural and institutional composition of the policy-making agents (for example: class, gender, faction, party, place) and inquiries of their personal and ideological identity formations within a wider social history. In addition, what is the role of the CCP and its social constructs?
  6. How does the presence of NGOs in China change the configuration of the historical equation between ‘policies’ and the ‘nation-state ’ ? What policy fields and geographical areas attract Chinese NGOs the most, and why ? What roles do NGOs play in the process of local policy implementation and formulation?

What are the aims of this proposal to establish a project for Critical Policy Studies of China?

To open the minds of those concerned with policy to the ranges of choice that are available. Analysis of China’s policy process and its outcomes is necessarily politicized, both inside and outside the PRC. Understandably that politicisation is also most usually determined by specific state interests and their articulation, whether of the People’s Republic itself, or other states. The values at issue are those of the state or states involved; assessments of outcomes are almost totally determined by reference to state agendas. Alternative political positions are not only possible, they may also add to the understanding of the policy process and its outcomes in the PRC. By stepping away from the sole perspectives of the Chinese state itself, and indeed other specific states, a wider and more contested policy environment is likely to be observed.

To develop an experimental Critical Policy Studies designed to widen the critical horizons of both Policy Studies and Cultural Studies through exploring their interactive investigation of the mutually constitutive relationship between the cultural, the socio-economic, and the political in the PRC during a period of rapid transformation.