In Shaken Authority, Christian P. Sorace examines the political mechanisms at work in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the broader ideological energies that drove them. Sorace takes Communist Party ideas and discourse as central to how that organization formulates policies, defines legitimacy, and exerts its power. Sorace argues that the Communist Party has never abandoned its conviction that discourse can shape the world and the people who inhabit it. Sorace also demonstrates how the Communist Party's planning apparatus continues to play a crucial role in engineering China's economy and market construction, especially in the countryside.

Sorace takes a distinctive and original interpretive approach to understanding Chinese politics, and Shaken Authority demonstrates how Communist Party discourse and ideology influenced the official decisions and responses to the Sichuan earthquake. Sorace provides a clear view of the lived outcomes of Communist Party plans, rationalities, and discourses in the earthquake zone. The three case studies he presents each demonstrate a different type of reconstruction and model of development: urban-rural integration, tourism, and ecological civilization. Sorace's work emphasizes the need for a grounded literacy in the political concepts, discourses, and vocabularies of the Communist Party itself. To dismiss China's official discourse as "empty propaganda," Sorace argues, makes China and Chinese realities harder to understand, not easier.

About the Author

Christian P. Sorace is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Australian National University's Centre on China in the World.

Reviews

An excellent and detailed account of how the meaning of concepts and even of the single words of which they consist becomes tools of the [Chinese Communist Party] to advance its agenda and shape people's habits of speech and disposition.... Reading Sorace's account is truly interesting and worthwhile.... An incredibly rich account of how discourse and culture play an essential role in Chinese politics in general. The use of Chinese phrases-both in pinyin and Chinese characters for comparison in the glossary-is flawless, which also makes the book a great read and rich source of information for sinologists, native speakers, and anyone with interest in Chinese political language.

* Journal of Chinese Political Science *

This book would interest China scholars across the board, students of disaster politics, humanitarian NGO workers, and the informed public interested in China's West. Sorace's provoking research questions and detailed discourse analysis, along with the ethnographic case studies, contribute to the field of Chinese studies and political science by raising questions as to the shallowness of the dominant 'it's the economy, stupid' credo that had allegedly killed the ideology and political discourse, despite its indispensability to any complete analysis of contemporary Chinese politics.

* The China Quarterly *

Sorace's work provides important empirical correctives to several prevalent hypotheses of sociopolitical change in China after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.... Offers profound insights into how power works in China by grounding abstract Party discourse in concrete state practices. The author demonstrates how to conduct a good discourse analysis study by analyzing texts in their contexts, which requires extensive knowledge of the sociohistorical background of the data and a deep understanding of the theories revolving around the theme under study.

* Pacific Affairs *

Christian Sorace's book on the reconstruction after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake is an excellent study on Chinese communist ideology, governance and politics.... Sorace's book is robustly empirical, and its understanding of contemporary Chinese politics and the role of ideology is theoretically significant. It is easy to agree with Sorace's main argument that ideology is very much present in the way the party makes its decisions even today, and scholars would do well not to neglect the influence of ideology on the way policies are formulated, implemented, and propagated in China.

* china information *

With his detailed knowledge of the politics of Sichuan, and his ability to integrate specific policies into broader ideological formations, [Sorace] has demonstrated the vital insights that can be gained through analysing the Communist Party on its own terms.

* The PRC History Group *

Sorace's work is not only impressive in its skill; it is also powerful in its implications. He lays bare how much central government rhetoric shapes reality in such a way to mask, suppress, or warp others' lived experience.

* The Journal of Asian Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501707537
Author Christian P. Sorace
Format Hardback
Page Count 248
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 22mm