Forty Years of Chinese Political Science: Agenda Setting and Political Development

Since comrade Deng Xiaoping put forward the statement of “making up deficiencies in social science” in 1979, political science has been revived as an independent discipline. In the past four decades, Chinese political science has made significant progress in faculty construction, talent training, translation and introduction of foreign theories, indigenous research, international exchange and cooperation, and academic community cultivation. The development of Chinese political science and the process of reform and opening up complement each other. Practices of reform provide a number of major issues for political science research, meanwhile, the research results of political science assist reform in overcoming difficulties and moving forward to a deep-water zone. With the coming of New Era, a new state morphology based on pervasive organization and strong technology is gradually emerging, which is bound to become the primary issue of political science research.