China’s Development and Model Thinking

If one searches for entries which start with the word ‘model ’ in indices of works on contemporary Chinese society, politics and history, one is likely either to look in vain or at best reap a meagre harvest. The index site is likely to be completely dominated by another entry, namely ‘modernisation’. This illustrates well that issues that have to do with modelling are not likely to be discussed in the context of modernisa-tion and vice versa, except when the models in case are various schemes related to development studies. This article is concerned with models in a different sense. It explores how Chinese thinking itself to a great extent has been developed through the use of models and that this tradition has continued until the present day. The article first comments briefly upon the standard schemes of development models. It then outlines the basic constituents of traditional Chinese model thinking, and proceeds to discuss the relevance of this type of thinking for China’s modern development. The article concludes that model thinking is very much alive in China today, even if significant changes are taking place. Throughout the article, Chinese and Western modes of knowledge production are compared.1 Models, Model and Models When attempting to characterise China’s modern development, mod-els have been applied in two different ways, namely as paradigmatic strategies of development and as ways of understanding socio-political phenomena of development. In the following, we will briefly review these two types of model perception, and will also offer some intro-ductory remarks to a third way of understanding the concept of mod-els, which will be the main topic of this article. Throughout the twentieth century, several paradigmatic strategies have been attempted by Chinese political thinkers and politicians, like a corporative model before the revolution in 1949, and, later, the So-viet model, the Maoist model, the Dengist model, to mention the ma