ABSTRACT
In the United States, the study of Chinese politics has undergone a number of conceptual and methodological shifts since splitting off from the fi eld of modern Chinese history in the late 1950s.1 Initially stimulated by Cold War political dynamics, the fi eld of contemporary Chinese politics was fi rst developed by a small group of distinguished Asianists, including John K. Fairbank (Harvard); Lucian Pye (MIT), Robert A. Scalapino (U.C. Berkeley), Alexander Eckstein (Michigan), A. Doak Barnett (Columbia, Brookings, and later SAIS), George E. Taylor (Washington), John M. Lindbeck (Columbia); and Tang Tsou (Chicago).
