Tracing the evolution of Chinese Sociology from the late 1970s to the present day, the book aims to record the path of reconstruction, localization, change, and reform of Chinese Sociology through interviews with 40 Chinese top sociologists such as Su Guoxun, Zhou Xiaohong, Bian Yanjie, Zhao Dingxin, Zhou Xueguang et al. Divided into three sections, this insightful book is the best proof of the rapid development and overall improvement of the discipline since the reform and opening-up in China. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the restoration and reconstruction of Chinese Sociology, this book is expected to inspire the younger generation of sociology researchers and deepen public’s understanding of sociology.

"A lucid and fascinating work about Chinese society and values. Fei's account of how China differs from the West is every bit as telling now as it was when this book was first published almost half a century ago."--Orville Schell "What are the fundamental characteristics of Chinese society and how does it differ from the West? In From the Soil, China's foremost sociologist offered his insights, based on fieldwork in China and residence in the West, into this fascinating question. Vivid and clearly written, it has long been a classic of Chinese sociology, widely read by Chinese. It is wonderful finally to have it available in English."--David Arkush, University of Iowa

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.

Dobbin presents twenty classic, representative articles in the field of economic sociology and organizes them according to four themes. He thus introduces the field and its history to students and establishes a schema for interpreting the field based on what it hopes to achieve.

Within a movement towards the circulation and globalisation of knowledge, new centres and new peripheries form and new hierarchies appear - more or less discretely - producing competition and rivalry in the development of “new” knowledge. Centres of gravity in social sciences have been displaced towards Asia, especially China. We have entered a period of de-westernization of knowledge and co-production of transnational knowledge. This is a scientific revolution in the social sciences which imposes detours, displacements, reversals. It means a turning point in the history of social sciences. From the Chinese experience in sociology the author is opening a Post-Western Space where after Post-Colonial Studies, she is speaking about the emergence of a Post-Western Sociology.

This book is an antecedent study on the task facing China's legal science, more strictly speaking — China's legal philosophy, in post-Cold War world structure. In broader terms, this is an academic study of China's own “identity” and future in the world structure. The author believes that from 1978 to 2004, in spite of its great achievements, China's legal science has at the same time had some of its grave problems being exposed. A fundamental problem is its failure to provide a “Chinese legal ideal picture” as the standard of and direction for evaluating, assessing and guiding China's law/legal development. This is an age of law without China's own ideal picture(s). However, why has China failed to have its own legal ideal picture(s)? Apparently this question in and of itself implies a question, both more directly and fundamentally, of China's legal science, namely why China's legal science has failed to provide China's own legal picture(s)? Or, as an internal critical approach may suggest (namely to critique China's legal science from the perspective of its promised objectives), where is China's legal science heading? Based on this, this book attempts to expound a standard to evaluate China's legal science through a theoretical discussion of this issue, and to further explore the possible direction for China's legal science beyond this age.

Within this text, the contributors provide a historical perspective on the development of anthropology and sociology since their introduction to Chinese thought and education in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1980s. The authors offer different windows on theoretical and research agendas of anthropologists and sociologists of the PRC and Taiwan, shaped as much by their political context as by disciplinary training. In examining the careers of several individual scholars, they also make note not only of their creative contributions, but also of the resonance of their intellectual concerns with contemporary issues in sociology and anthropology (culturalism, frontiers, women). Finally, the volume is organized loosely around the problem of how to translate these disciplines into a Chinese context(s), the issues of "indigenization" (bentuhua) or "making Chinese" (Zhongguohua), which have haunted the two disciplines since their establishment in the 1930s because of the contradictory expectations that they generate. This is where the case of China resonates with similar concerns in other societies where the disciplines were imported from abroad as products of a Euro/American capitalist modernity, conflicting with aspirations to create their own localized alternative modernities.