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Bill Brugger (1941-99) made a major contribution over the last quarter of the twentieth century to the study of Chinese government and politics. The first of Brugger's books was Democracy and Organisation in the Chinese Industrial Enterprise 1948-53, published in 1975. His modern Chinese political history was published as Contemporary China in 1977, then revised and expanded into the two volumes, China: Liberation and Transformation 1942-62 and China: Radicalism to Revisionism 1962-79, both published in 1981. During the 1990s, two jointly authored books appeared: Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era (1991) and Politics, Economics and Society in Contemporary China (1994).
Bill Brugger was the anchor of a local group of China scholars sometimes referred to as the `Adelaide school', a slightly misleading designation since most (though not all) of its adherents were associated with Flinders University rather than the University of Adelaide. The group, as inspired by Brugger, was distinguished by its analytical and ideological interest in Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution, debates within the Chinese Communist Party about the grand socialist project, and the transformations of the post-Mao era. Doctoral graduates, supervised by Brugger, who wrote theses on these and related subjects now occupy positions at universities around Australia and Asia. They were among the contributors to Brugger's edited books: China: The Impact of the Cultural Revolution (1978), China Since the `Gang of Four' (1980) and Chinese Marxism in Flux (1985).
Bill Brugger's interest in China dated from his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of London. In the mid-1960s, between the completion of his undergraduate degree and his postgraduate enrolment in the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), he spent two years in China teaching at the Beijing Second Foreign Languages Institute. He graduated with a doctorate from SOAS in 1972, the same year he was appointed to Flinders University as a Lecturer in Politics. His erudition and academic productivity led to rapid internal promotion at Flinders up to the rank of Reader and then, against international competition, to his appointment as Professor of Politics in 1980. He remained in that position until his death in August 1999. He was 58 years old.
A longstanding interest in contemporary Western political philosophy also marked Brugger's academic career, and his...