Faded Radical Politics and Plural Urban Society: Rethinking Modernization Studies

With the transition of research paradigms of modern Chinese history, researches on comparative modernization with a focus on general social transition came to a silence after the 1980s boom. This transition is largely related to case-selection-bias of modernization studies in the early years. The past researches usually select successful states and regions as the comparative cases to Chinese experience, thus weakened effectiveness of explanation. With a systematic review of modernization studies from the 1950s, we can find that a mixed discussion of modernization of different types and developmental stages have obvious limitations. Comparative studies of our time usually highlights comprehensive?roles of state type, trends of the times, change of international environment, and opportunity of reforms in studying modernization. By concerning facts of both time and space, as well as identifying waves of modernization, the selection of synchronic cases of the same type would form effective and mechanical explanations, and thus promote modernization studies of the time