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Abstract
As a pioneer and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese political culture study, Lucian Pye is well known for his psycho-cultural interpretation of Chinese political culture. Not only does his study of Chinese political culture provide a methodological direction for the later researchers, his profound insights of, and comments on, Chinese political culture also deeply enriched and expanded our understanding of that nation and its culture. However, some flaws in his works, such as successive imagination without reliable evidences, selective use of materials, reductionism, and loopholes in his logic, and so on, should not be ignored while commenting on his contribution to the study of Chinese political culture.
Keywords. Lucian Pye, Chinese political culture, psycho-cultural analysis
JEL classification : ? 26, Z10
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1. Introduction
Lucian W. Pye is generally acknowledged as a member of the first generation of scholars of Chinese political culture since the concept of political culture was come up with by Gabriel Almond in 1956. He is also well-known for two things. One is for his good at borrowing concepts, theories and methods from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, especially the psychiatry of psychology, which placed him among the most outstanding representatives of the school of psycho-cultural analysis of political culture. Another one is for his consistently raising questions and brought up arguments in a very challenging way, making his research both original and controversial.
In this paper, the author is going to introduce briefly Pye's important works on Chinese political culture study, followed by explaining why he is interested in Chinese political culture and take psycho-cultural analysis as his research approach, and the buck of this paper will focus on what contributions he made to the study of Chinese political culture, his influences on the subsequent scholars, as well as some flaws in his study of Chinese political culture.
Pye's study of Chinese political culture began with his monograph The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development, published in 1968, which made his reputation in the field. Disagreeing with the optimistic attitude concerning China's prospect prevalent among many Western scholars at that time, Pye pointed out great tensions beneath the seemingly calm...