[MUSIC] Now we will talk about society and the ways in which Chinese people pursue their political interests and press their demands on the State. As we address this question, there actually are two key questions I want to talk about. One is, is there something about Chinese culture that effects the extent to which Chinese people engage in political activity? Are Chinese people particularly passive, or does the impact of culture change as education, wealth, and political institutions change? Second, what are the modes or methods employed by citizens of China to press their claims? Why do they employ the modes that they do? And how effective are these different modes. Now we need to define political culture. And the definition that we use of political culture is quote, a particular distribution of political attitudes, values, feelings, information, and skills that affects the behaviour of a nation's citizens and leaders throughout the political system. So what we're saying is, what people know or feel about the political system affects their behaviour towards it. How much information do they have? We can look at different variations among different countries. We can measure the variations, the amount of knowledge, how motivated they are to participate. We can measure these through surveys. Which then allow us to compare across different countries. Now in the field of political science, there basically are three views of Chinese political culture. The first view, the one that here is a system-wide characterization, or what is often referred to as a culturalist approach. Second is political culture as determined by rules and incentives within organizations. I'll go through each of these in greater detail. So don't worry about it right now. And the third is political culture as a characteristic of an entire society. So let's look at the first one in here, which is the one that is highlighted here in yellow. Which is the system-wide characterization, or what we call a culturalist approach. Now, some political scientists argue that each society has a unique political culture based on its historical development, the national experiences, the religion, maybe the location of the country. And, in the case of China, this becomes a view of Chinese politics, and attitudes towards politics that's based on a traditional peasant and Confucian culture under which citizens accept hierarchy. They have respect for political authority. They avoid conflict. All right, these are important characteristics. The leadership, as in the days of the empire, is based on the virtue of the emperor, not on some kind of political institutions as we would have in the west, that set the rules and the laws and limit the political authority of the leader. But somehow, this view that the leader has to behave morally and justly and that if he does this, that's good, that's enough. And in the Chinese case, you can then talk about people having a passive political culture. And that this gives rise to limited leadership accountability. Because the culture is passive, the people are relatively passive in their politics, the leadership doesn't have to be very accountable to the society. Now what do we think of the anticipated results of this culturalist approach? How would we see, what would we be looking for, if this approach is really the dominant approach in Chinese society? What should we see? Well, first thing we would see is that the popular demands for participation should be quite low. So, this shouldn't put great demands on the state. They should be comfortable with authoritarian rule, right. This Confucian idea that the emperor is powerful and all powerful and we should accept him and we're not going through democratic procedures. So, we're cool with having a powerful emperor. Third, would be that people can easily be bought off by increasing wealth. That the wealthier the system becomes, people, if they're relatively passive, will say, hey, I don't need to get involved in politics. I'm getting more money, my family's doing well, that's cool, and I'll live with that. Another characteristic would be that China should be unable to establish modern, political institutions, particularly democracy, largely because people don't have the right values. People don't have the values that demand. So with the population level, the popular level, the people do not have the demands and their own values that would say, we want democracy. So these would be important for the individual members of society. Now if we look at the same anticipated results of a cultural approach for Elite Politics then the Elites, the leadership, shouldn't feel pressured to respond to social demands. Right? Those demands aren't coming up from society and they, feeling authoritarian, having power, feeling superior, they don't feel the need to interact or respond to society's demand. They also could be quite distrustful of each other. If we go back to the court politics in the Ching Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty, these were very conflictual. There would be different factions within the court, each trying to get power. And so, if we accept that that's the way it was in the years of the empire and that automatically gets transferred into modern times, we would expect those kinds of confrontations. Another characteristic would be that Elites just don't accept diverse opinions. And because they don't accept diverse opinions, they have no interest in democracy. They don't want to hear different voices. They want to have a uniform, a united viewpoint. That's how the state will be powerful. And to hell with democracy, right? They're just not interested. And they would be unwilling to yield authority when they have the power, partly because they don't trust each other. And so they'll be fearful of reprisals. They would be nervous that if they made some kind of concession of power to their opponents within the top leadership, that those guys or girls, the men or women, will try and get even with them. Now as we look at the empirical data, we find that some of these anticipated results just do not materialize, and therefore we have to think about are there other ways that we can look at political culture? So another way, second way is this one here, where political culture is determined by rules and incentives within organizations. Now what do I mean by that? Every organization, if you're students, if you're working in a company, if you're in a business, some kind of large organization. Those organizations have rules, they have incentives, they have rewards systems, they have punishments that will effect how you will behave within that organization. Individuals then take keys, they sort of take hints from the organization from the rules of the organization and they will respond to those rules, those incentives within the organization. And so, we could argue that, there are certain kinds of business cultures. You know, you talk about an IBM culture, which use to be very stiff and people had to dress up for work, versus a Microsoft business culture where people can come be casual, much more relaxed, right? Maybe talking about Americans in the same people, but the company creates a different kind of incentive work environment. And therefore the behavior of the people will change based upon that kind of tradition that's established, or rules and norms, that's established within the organization. And what that means is that even if you have traditions, and this kind of negative traditions within Chinese politics, they can be overcome. And they can be overcome by creating new organizations with positive incentives. So reform, we'll see this later when leadership in China, the reform leaders in China wanted to reform China. One of the things they thought about was sort of creating these small organizations with different rules, different norms, different incentives. And they would hope that those would affect the way people changed, and then that would spillover to neighboring organizations and in that way sort of start from the bottom and build up a new kind of reformed political culture. In a second, we will go to the next clip which will talk about political culture as an empirically measurable variable.
