ABSTRACT
Since its inception following World War II, the field of contemporary Chinese studies has been confronted by a series of extraordinary events. The first generation of specialists, schooled in a classical sinological tradition that stressed China's unique cultural continuity, was immediately challenged by what seemed—at least on the face of it—a major rupture with the past: the Communist Revolution of 1949. The Cultural Revolution constituted a crisis in political development whose origins could be traced back to peculiarities of Chinese culture-particularly as embodied in conflictual authority relations. The simultaneous fading both of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and of the disciplinary interest in political culture drew scholars of contemporary China back to more prosaic styles of comparative analysis. Chinese political culture gives shape to recognizable but flexible patterns of protest can be seen by comparison with Taiwan, another Chinese society recently rocked by popular unrest.
