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This book provides a political history of China's Nationalist government through officials trained at the Central Politics School. The author examines how these officials engaged in such matters as land administrative reform, the challenges of statebuilding during World War II, and rebellions among ethnic minorities.

"This book provides a political history of China's Nationalist government through officials trained at the Central Politics School. The author examines how these officials engaged in such matters as land administrative reform, the challenges of statebuilding during World War II, and rebellions among ethnic minorities"--

The present dissertation deals with how a specific kind of modern political discourse and practice, which was associated with an American style approach to public administration, was introduced, experienced, and then adapted during the 1930s and 1940s in China. The research focuses on local officials who graduated from the Central Politics School, an institution established by the Nationalist Party to train professional public administrators. These individuals were supposed to modernize the entire system of Chinese local governance, making it more rational by bringing it inline with the precepts of scientific knowledge and the scientific method. The actions of the school's graduates in various counties expose the failure of orthodox public administration methods to deal effectively with Chinese political reality, due to a tendency to underestimate the importance of variable human factors. It was, ironically, only when some of the school's best former students broke with the precepts of their training and use innovative strategies, which took local realities into account and made use of ideas derived from China's own statecraft traditions, that they achieved success. This dissertation thus suggests that researchers need to pay more attention in future to Chinese statecraft and its assumptions regarding the importance of sensitivity to human nature and variability, as well as imported ideas concerning rationality and scientific methods, when trying to understand trends in Chinese politics and governance. Moreover, the historical meaning of the rise and deviation of public administration is by no means a story only of frustrated modernization or periodic revivals of "tradition." Rather, it represents an important case study of how non-scientific indigenous resources are deployed in the face of drives in settings outside the West to impose a form of political modernity, which has the potential to overcome the problems insurmountable in the current political conceptual framework.

AbstractThis paper aims to provide a new perspective on the relationship between Nationalist Party (GMD) cadres and Chinese intellectuals. By studying the Central Politics School, a major GMD political training institute for professional party cadres, I hope to reassess the nature of the GMD one-party state and remind researchers of the difficult choices it faced between backing party-liners needed for the political struggle and accommodating depoliticized intellectuals needed for public administration. This paper will argue that GMD political impotence in competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was due less to an inadequate recruitment of capable experts than to the over-specialization of its well-trained cadres on technical tasks. In fact, the cadres from the Central Politics School generally resembled those considered to be 'intellectuals' at educational level and in ideology. This compels us to reconsider how to define 'intellectuals' and whether they were as uniformly alienated from the one-party state as most of the scholarly literature suggests.