Jean-Louis Rocca's admirably concise A Sociology of Modern China wears its scholarship lightly and paints an intimate and complex portrait of Chinese society, all the while avoiding cliches and simplifications. He delves into China's history and examines the country's many different social strata so as to better understand the enormous challenges and opportunities with which its people are confronted. After discussing the long march toward reform and the crises along the way - among them the 1989 protests which culminated in the events in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere - Rocca dedicates the second half of the book to the major questions facing the country (or, at the very least, its political elites) today: new forms of social stratification; the interaction between the market and the state; growing individualism; and the pressures exerted by social conflict and political change. In eschewing culturalist visions, Rocca thoroughly and successfully deconstructs received wisdom about Chinese society to reveal a thriving nation and its people.

This book is rooted in an epistemological approach to sociology in which the boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies are acknowledged and built on. It argues that knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces linked to paradigms and programmes which in turn are linked to ethnocentred knowledge processes; that until recently Western approaches, including Post-Colonial, French Social Science and American approaches, have dominated non-Western theories; and that Western theories have sometimes seemed incapable of explaining phenomena produced in other societies. It goes on to argue that the blurring of boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies is very important; and that such a Post-Western approach will mean co-production and co-construction of common knowledge, the recognition of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures and a "global change" in sociology which imposes theoretical and methodological detours, displacements, reversals and conversions. The book brings together a wide range of Western and Chinese sociologists who explore the consequences of this new approach in relation to many different issues and aspects of sociology.

This book examines the institutional development of Chinese sociology from the 1890s to the present. It plots the discipline’s twisting path in the Chinese context, from early Western influences; through the institutionalization of the discipline in the 1930s-40s; its problematic relationship with socialism and interruptions under Marxist orthodoxy and the Cultural Revolution; its revival during the 1980s-90s; to the twin trends of globalization and indigenization in current Chinese sociological scholarship. Chen argues that in spite of the state-building agenda and persistent efforts to indigenize the discipline, the Western model remains pervasively influential, due in large part to the influence of American missionaries, foundations and scholars in the formation and transformation of the Chinese sociological tradition. The history of Chinese sociology is shown to be a contingent process in which globally circulated knowledge, above all the American sociological tradition, has been adapted to the changing contexts of China. This engaging work contributes an important country study to the history of sociology and will appeal to scholars of Chinese history and disciplinary historiography, in addition to social scientists.

This book reexamines Chinese sociology's point of departure and boundaries of western sociology from a new academic perspective, and offers a new definition of the essence and mission of sociology, drawing and critically reflecting on the ideological and theoretical theories of the classic sociologists. On this basis, it makes a careful study of the origin of Confucian classics and western sources of Chinese sociology and analyses the origin and evolution of Chinese sociology at the intersection of Chinese and western academic history. Further, it provides a deep and thorough discussion of the social theories of Chinese sociology pioneers and founders (such as Fu Yan, Youwei Kang, and Qichao Liang) and comments on Shuming Liang’s sociological theory, which emphasizes the Chinese culture and tradition as well as the particularity of the Chinese social structure. In addition, it also offers an in-depth analysis of Xiaotong Fei’s advocacy of the idea of expanding the traditional boundaries of sociology in his later years. With regard to promoting the development of a new Chinese sociology, the book is particularly important in terms of expanding academic research and promoting discipline construction.