Re-situating Weber-reception in the circulation of knowledge: analyzing the intermediation of Chinese sociologists with overseas trajectory

ABSTRACT

Research on Max Weber’s reception in Chinese contexts has often focused on the formative period (1980s–90s) and its changing political-economic circumstances. However, attempts to bring the reception process back into the broader circulation of knowledge and investigate the intermediations of the Chinese sociologists with overseas experience are scant. Therefore, the aim of this article is to deploy the “circulation of knowledge” approach to examine a selection of influential Chinese sociologists with international experience from three generations (born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1950s). The representatives sampled include Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008), Yang Ching-kun (1911–99), Ambrose King Yeo-Chi (1935–), Zhao Dingxin (1953–), and Zhou Xueguang (1959–). Dialoging with Rodriguez Medina’s analytical framework and his concept of “subordinating object,” this paper narrates and compares the explicit and implicit effects of the cohorts’ intellectual and political-ethical interventions. The results of this study show not only the asymmetric “dual gaze” between center and periphery, but also that generation and discipline are two crucial factors in the circulation of sociological knowledge. To conclude, this study may be of importance in explaining the asymmetries and intermediaries facilitating Weber’s reception process, as well as providing a base for alternative Weber-relevance that might go beyond the canonical image.

RESUMO

A pesquisa acerca da recepção de Max Weber em contextos chineses tem amiúde se concentrado no período formativo (décadas de 1980–90) e suas distintas circunstâncias político-econômicas. No entanto, são escassas as tentativas de trazer o processo de recepção de volta para a circulação mais ampla do conhecimento e investigar as intermediações dos sociólogos chineses com experiência no exterior. O objetivo deste artigo é, portanto, utilizar a chamada “abordagem da circulação do conhecimento” para examinar alguns sociólogos chineses influentes com experiência internacional, oriundos de três gerações (nascidos nas décadas de 1910, 1930 e 1950). Dentre os representantes incluem-se Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008), Yang Ching-kun (1911–99), Ambrose King Yeo-Chi (1935–), Zhao Dingxin (1953–) e Zhou Xuuguang (1959–). Dialogando com o sistema analítico de Rodriguez Medina (2014) e seu conceito de “objeto subordinado,” este artigo narra e compara os efeitos explícitos e implícitos das intervenções intelectuais e ético-políticas das coortes. Os resultados deste estudo mostraram não apenas o ‘duplo olhar’ assimétrico entre centro e periferia, mas também geração e disciplina como dois fatores cruciais na circulação do conhecimento sociológico. Em conclusão, este estudo pode ser importante para explicar as assimetrias e intermediários que facilitam o processo de recepção de Weber, bem como para fornecer uma base para uma relevância alternativa de Weber que pode ir além da imagem canônica.

RESUMEN

La investigación sobre la recepción de Max Weber en contextos chinos a menudo se ha centrado en el período formativo (1980–1990) y sus cambiantes circunstancias político-económicas. Sin embargo, hay pocos intentos de traer el proceso de recepción a la circulación más amplia del conocimiento y de investigar las intermediaciones de los sociólogos chinos con experiencia en el extranjero. Por lo tanto, el objetivo de este artículo es utilizar el llamado “enfoque de circulación del conocimiento” para examinar a algunos sociólogos chinos influyentes con tres generaciones de experiencia internacional (nacidos en las décadas de 1910, 1930 y 1950). Los representantes incluyen a Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008), Yang Ching-kun (1911–99), Ambrose King Yeo-Chi (1935–), Zhao Dingxin (1953–) y Zhou Xuuguang (1959–). Dialogando con el sistema analítico de Rodríguez Medina (2014) y su concepto de “objeto subordinado,” este artículo narra y compara los efectos explícitos e implícitos de las intervenciones intelectuales y ético-políticas de las cohortes. Los resultados de este estudio mostraron no solo la ‘doble mirada’ asimétrica entre centro y periferia, sino también la generación y la disciplina como dos factores cruciales en la circulación del conocimiento sociológico. En conclusión, este estudio puede ser importante para explicar las asimetrías e intermediarios que facilitan el proceso de recepción de Weber, así como para fundamentar una relevancia alternativa de Weber que traspase su imagen canónica.

KEYWORDS:

• Max Weber
• social theory
• reception processes
• circulation of knowledge
• overseas Chinese sociologists

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Max Weber
• teoria social
• processos de recepção
• circulação de conheciment
• sociólogos chineses

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Max Weber
• teoria social
• procesos de recepción
• circulación de conocimiento
• sociólogos chinos en el exterior

1. Weber-reception studies and the circulation of knowledge approach

Since the 2000s Max Weber studies have entered a new stage in which Weberian scholars are not only elaborating Weber’s insights in the new century, but also show interest in the “global reception” (Hanke 2016; Strazzeri 2016). Although studies of Weber’s reception over the past few decades have mainly focused on the transatlantic interactions, the geographical scope of the new scholarship has been widely extended, ranging from Latin America to Russia and East Asia (Li 2015; Su 2007; Tsai 2016; Villas-Bôas 2014). However, the spread of Weber-reception studies seems to have been conducted and confined under the framework of “National sociology,” which implies an import-export mode between the advanced and latecomer countries, and hence mainly emphasizes the intermediations during the formative reception period among key academics, translators, or publishers. This conventional viewpoint prevents researchers from contextualizing the reception process back into the circulation of knowledge where the two-way exchange of intellectual communications might be broader than the one-way path between exporter and importer. Taking the reception of Weber in the Chinese context as an example, the “Confucian ethics and economic development” thesis in the 1980s–90s can be seen as a counter-discursive move in order to both echo the economic performances of the four East Asian “tigers” and establish an academic equivalence to Weber’s famous “protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism” thesis (Barbalet 2014). This example also highlights the “reciprocal framing” between exporter and receptor during the reception process in which the mainstream understanding of Weber promoted by Euro-American academic exporters not only determines the framework of native receptors, but also the receptors’ struggle to strike back within the parameters defined by the exporters. More seriously, this dual gaze might hinder the potential for developing alternatives after the native scholars have figured out the reception process. Therefore, to overcome the shortcomings of confining Weber-reception studies within the national-sociology framework, those working in the field would arguably benefit from adopting the “circulation of knowledge” approach.

Coincidentally, like the spread of Weber-reception studies, the “circulation of knowledge” approach has also come of age after the 2000s (Alatas 2003, 2006; Collyer 2018; Connell 2007; Keim 2011; Keim, Çelik, and Wöhrer 2014; Rodriguez-Medina 2014; Sapiro, Santoro, and Baert 2020). In contrast to the conventional reception studies, scholars emphasize two crucial factors determining the circulation of knowledge between the center and periphery: asymmetries and intermediaries. Asymmetries are rooted in various forms, ranging from the political-economic histories (ex: colonial past) that oriented the inter-institutional transplantations to academic cooperation through pursuing the PhD degree and career paths that decide the intellectual preferences and problematic agendas of the evaluating systems (ex: reviewing, citation, and publishing) that re-enforced inequality in scholarly performance. The long-term consequences of asymmetries are incorporated into “academic dependency” or the “canon in sociological theory” (Alatas 2003; Alatas and Sinha 2017), and accordingly irritate the advocates of “southern theories” (Connell 2007). In addition to the asymmetries factor, intermediaries refer not only to academics, but also to semi- or non-academic agents, such as publishers and translators, governmental branches and think tanks, or international and regional foundations. Although scholarship on the circulation and production of knowledge usually trace the asymmetries from center to periphery, recently, some researchers have found the reverse pathway. By examining the translation process and the role of publishers, Ruvituso (2020) demonstrates the circulation of southern theories in the global North with the case of Latin American dependency theories. In other words, both asymmetries and intermediaries as analytical focuses fill the vacuum of reception studies with methodological nationalism.

Studies of Weber-reception in the Chinese context have reappeared again since the start of the new century, but their main interest has been either the intellectual milieu of the humanities and social sciences, or the “formative period” of the 1980s–90s (Caldwell et al 2014; Folster 2017; Tsai 2016, 2020). Viewed retrospectively, sociology, as one of the various disciplines engaged in Weber’s China studies, performs a crucial role in the interdisciplinary landscape. However, the multiple knowledge flows between the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking sociological communities and the institutional variety of sociology among different Chinese societies problematize the mainstream explanation of Weber-reception. Focusing merely on the currents opposed to both the structural-functionalism and the modernization paradigms leads to an explanation from academic politics, but comes at a price, as the differences between the Anglophone and Sinophone academic worlds are obscured. Within Anglophone academia, sociologists turn to Weber partly because of their dissatisfaction with Marxist analysis or their competitive expectations with Marxism (Antonio and Glassman 1985; Löwith 1982; Sayer 1991). The situations of Chinese sociologists within Sinophone academia were different yet more complicated because of the diversified circumstances during the 1970–90s (a reformed socialist China, colonial Hong Kong, and authoritarian Taiwan), the split identities in Chinese culture, and the subsequent indigenization debates (Tsai 2022). In other words, Weber’s reception in the Chinese context cannot be reduced to a mirror of Marxism as orthodoxical thought or official ideology during the last three decades in the twentieth century, but needs a scholarly analysis that adopts the “circulation of knowledge” viewpoint with a longer time-scale. Through the lens of the “circulation of knowledge” approach, Chinese sociologists who did not become involved in the narrowly-defined “reception” efforts such as teaching, translating, or researching Weber, but contributed to the reception process with their own sociological interventions, come into sharper focus. In her typology of how knowledge circulates, W. Keim (2014, 97) recommends that the first type – reception processes – “should be understood as sequences in a broader and longer circulation process, out of which a limited time period and a selection of actors, practices and texts are isolated for detailed analysis.” The research question of this paper is thus how can we resituate the “formative period” of Weber-reception in the longer circulation of sociological knowledge?

Although the “circulation of knowledge” approach has various intellectual origins, ranging from its global and entangled history with postcolonial studies (Keim et al. 2014, ch1) to the history of science and science and technology studies (Rodriguez-Medina 2014, 21–22), and back to the sociology of knowledge, we need Karl Mannheim’s insights of “ideology and utopia” and his concept of generation (Mannheim [1927] 1952, [1929] 1936) to enhance the analysis of the “broader and longer circulation process.” His distinction between ideology and utopia delivered a crucial message about knowledge that maintains existing establishments and knowledge that challenges them. On both sides of Weber’s reception, Weberian concepts flowed from Anglophone to Sinophone academics while native scholarship on Chinese societies, from community studies or historical studies, went in the opposite direction. To contextualize Weber’s reception in knowledge circulation therefore means examining the mainstream and its counter flows over a longer term. On the other hand, Mannheim’s concept of generation also sheds light on the collective characteristics of the social carrier of ideas. More advanced generational analysis not only refers to the social-historical environments reflected among the different strategies deployed by people belonging to the same cohort, but extends to the discursive and habitus features that are revealed when individual scholars are dislocated by the generations that followed or compared with previous generations (Aboim and Vasconcelos 2014; Eyerman and Turner 1998).

In order to bring the “circulation of knowledge” approach into Weber-reception studies, this paper follows and elaborates on the insights of Rodriguez-Medina’s (2014, ch2-3, ch4) “historically focused case-study,” which brought together the two sociological implications of Manheim’s legacy. Rodriguez-Medina’s research on Luhmann-reception in Latin America contains both a specific and a general explanation. The specific explanation based on the generation factor, especially the shared differences and similarities, indicates that we could contextualize the reception process in a broader scope, circulation of knowledge, through comparing the (dis)continuity among these cross-generation academics. To shift Rodriguez-Medina’s generation factor from synchronic to diachronic analysis would benefit our study of the roles overseas Chinese sociologists played in Weber-reception. The general explanation based on his classification of reception studies suggests three variables – time span, intellectual intervention (in various forms), and awareness (of the international and intellectual division of labor) – which could be elaborated in advance. First, although he suggests that “the longer the period studied, the more differences there are … ” (Rodriguez-Medina 2014, 91), I take the longer period into consideration not to trace the differences, but to foreground the formative period and its alternative within the before-and-after periods. Second, once the period studied is lengthened, it is necessary to consider the wide variety of interventions: not only the non-regular intellectual interventions (ex: echoing writing without citation or writing serial comments in blogs), but also the politico-ethical positioning that underpinned scholars’ longer career-paths (Baert 2012).¹ Third, with a longer period studied and a wide-various definition of interventions, awareness of receptors as a variable can be complemented with analysis of the impacts interpreted by researchers, thereby ensuring accessibility while maintaining inter-subjectivity among the six sociologists discussed here and the researcher.

By extending Rodriguez-Medina’s generational analysis, I argue that the “circulation of knowledge” includes more information than the commonly-seen reception studies can provide, and hence provides an opportunity for examining the transnational process more than the national factors. Firstly, including both the first-cohort scholars who played their roles as experts in China study before the 1970s and the third cohort scholars who revealed their subfield-focused Weberian works after the year 2000 extends my analysis beyond the conventional focus on “religion and economy” (or modernity) in the Chinese discussion on Weber. Secondly, these scholars in three different cohorts respectively circulated the knowledge of Weber through their professional trajectories, which were not only geographical (between China and the USA), but also temporal (before the 1960–70s, during the 1980–90s, and after the 2000s) processes. These experiences can be seen as a kind of circulation of knowledge, the articulation of which allows this study to overcome the exclusive focus on national tradition in the history of sociology.

Equipped with an elaborated version of Rodriguez-Medina’s (2014) framework, in the following four sections I will (a) describe the sampling rationale of including six Chinese sociologists from three different generations and review their professional trajectories among different sociological communities relevant to Weber-reception. Based on their text-based positionings and personal engagements in the Sino-USA sociological connections, I first (b) analyze the explicit intermediation of Yang Ching-kun and Ambrose King Yeo-Chi through their responses to Weber’s treatment of China and extensions of modernization and its critics to modernity paradigms, then (c) reconstruct the implicit intermediation of the first generation, Fei Xiao-tong and Chu Tung-tsu, through their influential works translated or published in English, thereby connecting with the newer elaborations of Weber’s theory in the third generation, through Zhao Dingxin and Zhou Xueguang. Lastly, I (d) conclude with a reflection on the factors that converged in the mainstream perception of Weber’s relevance to Chinese society, the exchanges between English-based and Chinese-based sociological communities, and the potentials of shifting Weber’s implications from the religious-economic to the political-organizational using the lens of the “circulation of knowledge” approach.

2. The Chinese sociologists with in-between engagements

Max Weber is regarded as the Western classical sociologist who has most relevance to Chinese societies, and hence the Weber-reception process might partially reflect the development of sociology in the Chinese context. In order to re-contextualize the formative period of Weber-reception in the 1980s–90s, this study sampled representative Chinese sociologists in terms of generational variety, cross-cultural engagements with Chinese and English-speaking academics, and scholarly relatedness to or effect on Weber’s reception.

I selected six Chinese sociologists from three generations in which the birth-cohorts were the 1910s, 1930s, and 1950s.

Before introducing their professional trajectories, there are two points worth mentioning. Firstly, while none of the six sociologists were narrowly-defined “Weber scholars” engaged in full-fledged examination of all Weber’s works, they did have dialogue with or rely on Weber during different periods. They have not engaged in translating or reconstructing Weber’s collection but this does not prevent them from playing roles of intermediation with their elaborations of Weber. Their research on Weber was rarely viewed as a mere “by-product”; on the contrary, it was a crucial influence in Chinese contexts. Secondly, all of the six sociologists apart from Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008) identified themselves as scholars who were heavily involved with Weber’s insights. However, the criteria used to distinguish their explicit and implicit intermediations lies is whether their self-identification and the scholarly recognition occurred within the same period. In the case of C. K. Yang and Ambrose King, it did; in the case of the other four sociologists, it did not, yet happened as somehow delayed intermediation. In short, my sampling rationale indicates the fact that not only were most of them sociologists academically engaged with key aspects of Weber’s work, but also the co-occurrences between subjective identity and objective recognition can be used to distinguish their explicit and implicit intermediations.

The first cohort includes Fei Xiao-tong (1910–2005), Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008), and Yang Ching-kun (1911–99) three of the first generation of sociologists in modern China, but whose foreign experiences differed. Fei (specialty in ethnography) went to the LSE to pursue his PhD degree in the 1930s, while Chu (specialty in Chinese social history) was a visiting research fellow at Columbia University from 1945, and Yang (specialty in community study) was awarded a PhD by the University of Michigan in the 1930s and held a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh until 1981. They were the earliest Chinese sociologists who not only had PhD degrees or positions in the global North, but also had their Chinese works translated into English. More importantly, they all came back to China, sooner or later, to facilitate the re-establishment of sociology under the PRC regime. However, the way their life trajectories shaped their scholarship differed. Fei had two waves of successful achievements: as an excellent Chinese student studying abroad he first earned a reputation as an expert in China studies during the 1930s and into 1950s with his early Chinese written works translated into and published in English, while he regained importance comprised of his endeavor in re-establishing sociology in the PRC and in his native observations on Chinese society. This close resonance between career path and scholarly achievement cannot be found in either Chu or Yang’s biographies. Chu suffered from interruptions to his professional career, no matter from the invitation to the US or the return to the PRC, and hence experienced his under-estimated scholarship with the separated distance from sociology and decade-long delayed translations of his two influential works between Chinese and English. In this regard, Yang could be located between Fei and Chu: he had plied his expertise in Chinese religion and society since the 1960s, around the same time he was engaged as a sociological connection between Pittsburgh and Hong Kong.

As for the second cohort, I have selected one representative scholar, Ambrose King Yeo-Chi (1935–), who earned his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh and joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the 1970s. Although King excelled in sociology, I view him as both an international connection with the shift from the modernity to the multi-modernity paradigm and a crucial intellectual linkage with Yang in terms of Weber-reception from the 1970s to 1990s. The third cohort includes Zhao Dingxin (1953–) and Zhou Xueguang (1959–), both of whom earned their PhDs and spent their early careers in US sociology departments. Like the previous two cohorts, Zhao (specialty in historical and political sociology) and Zhou (specialty in economic and organizational sociology) began their intellectual engagement and institutional affiliations with the Chinese sociological communities in the last decade. Although Yang belonged to the first generation, his typical trajectory can also be found in King’s professional development: pursuing a PhD in the US with a BA/MA degree in Chinese society, holding academic positions in Western-style universities, and occupying a structural node connecting the American and Chinese sociological communities. The similarities between Yang and King show that they were more aware of their dual scholarly audiences, while the differences merely indicate that King might have faced more competition from an interdisciplinary scene since the 1990s. But when it came to the third generation, if we take Zhao and Zhou as examples, we can see that the typical professional trajectory had changed slightly. Staying at and holding an academic position in a prestigious university, after doing a PhD in the US, became the way to preserve connection and balance the in-betweenness. Therefore, both Zhao and Zhou spent decades of scholarship engaged in American-style subfields in sociology, and as a consequence their analyzes of Chinese society were carried out through the lens of comparative-historical or economic-organizational sociology. The differential influences that professional trajectory cast on their scholarship is what separates the second and third cohort of sociologists. To some extent, the latter’s academic training and practice, especially the viewpoints from their sociological subfields, functioned as a middle layer inserted between the theoretical orientations and empirical studies. Their brief trajectories are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Brief trajectory of six Chinese sociologists.

Scholar	Education	Professional position
Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005)	BA (1933) in Sociology and MA (1936) in Sociology and Anthropology, Yenching University (later Peking University) PhD (1938) in Social Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science	Yunnan University, 1938–44 National Southwestern Associated University, 1945–46 Tsinghua University, 1947–51 (sociology banned, 1952–79) Peking University, 1982–2005
Chu Tung-tsu (1910–2008)	BA (1933) in Sociology, Yenching University MA (1935) in Sociology, Tsinghua University	Columbia University, 1945–55 East Asian Center in Harvard University, 1955–62 University of British Columbia, 1962–65 (Back to China in 1965) Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 1978–2008
Yang Ching-kun (1911–1999)	BA (1932) and MA (1934) in Sociology, Yenching University PhD (1939) in Sociology, University of Michigan	Assistant Professor, the University of Washington, 1944–48 Associate Professor to Professor, 1953–81, University of Pittsburgh Head of Sociology, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), 1968–70 Visiting Professor, Sun Yat-Sen University, 1982–99
King Ambrose Yeo-Chi (1935∼)	BA (1957) in Law, National Taiwan University MA (1960) in Political Science, National Chengchi University PhD (1971) in Sociology, University of Pittsburgh	Senior Lecturer, 1974–1978, Reader, 1979–82, Professor of Sociology, 1983–2003, CUHK Emeritus Professor, CUHK, 2004–
Zhao Dingxin (1953∼)	BA (1982) in Biology, Fudan University MA (1984) in Insect Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences PhD (1990) in Insect Ecology, McGill University PhD (1995) in Sociology, McGill University	Assistant Professor to Professor, University of Chicago, 1996–2017 Visiting Professor, Zhejiang University, 2012–17 Professor, Zhejiang University, 2017–
Zhou Xueguang (1959∼)	BA (1982) in International Politics, Fudan University MA (1985) in Sociology, Stanford University PhD (1991) in Sociology, Stanford University	Assistant Professor, Cornell University, 1991–94 Assistant Professor to Professor, Duke University, 1994–2006 Professor, Stanford University, 2006–

In addition to their generational differences and similar inter-cultural involvements in sociological communities, this paper will also analyze their influential works, which have both contributed to sociology and are sequentially relevant to Weber-reception. Considering the variety of their interventions, both the explicit and implicit relatedness to Weber should be included as the object of research. Firstly, Yang and King’s works on Weber appeared as an explicit intermediation: Yang’s (1961, 1964) comprehensive introduction of Weber’s The Religion of China (hereafter RoC) and Religion in Chinese Society seen as an important elaboration of Weber in the field of sociology of religion; King’s (1986, 2018a) works from the 1970s to the 1990s ranged from introducing modernization theory through the Asian development model and then the multiple-modernity paradigm. Secondly, both Fei's ([1949] 1992, 1953) and Chu’s ([1947/1981] 1961, [1962] 2003) work can be related to Weber’s treatments of imperial China after the publication of Weber’s RoC, either in an ethnographical or a historical sense, and have somewhat related effects in Weber-reception owing to the fact that it was mainly confined to neighboring fields such as rural studies or China studies. Thirdly, it is debatable whether Zhao (2001, 2015) or Zhou (2004, 2017) developed their views on Chinese society echoing the implicit yet engaging Fei-Chu legacy rather than the explicit and mainstream perception of Weber left by the Yang-King connection. More importantly, Zhao and Zhou developed their respective influences from within a specialized subfield of sociology, yet established broader cross-disciplinary discussions by engaging with Weber’s treatment of China. Overall, the intergenerational connection between the first and third cohort via the second cohort indicates the attempted breakthrough with not merely the modernity/multiple-modernity paradigm, but also the conventional Weberian “ethical-economic affinity.”²

Although they were not narrowly-defined specialists in Weber studies, across three different generations each of these six sociologists for a time performed an essential role, intermediating Weber’s reception between Anglophone and Sinophone academics, a role which is even more apparent when a “circulation of knowledge” approach is adopted. From the conventional viewpoint of national sociology, the sociologists who introduced, taught, and translated Weber’s works and the relevant secondary literature would be the protagonists in the reception process (Tsai 2016, 2020). However, when it comes to the question of asymmetry between the mainstream scholarship of Weber studies and the native scholars’ responses to their English-speaking colleagues, the limitations of a viewpoint based on national sociology are revealed. In this regard, the “circulation of knowledge” approach helps by shifting the focus onto the changing “structural hole” or “connective node” before, during, and after the formative period of Weber’s reception in the Chinese context. Therefore, this paper purposely singles out the six sociologists: not only for the interdependences between their professional trajectories and recognized scholarship, but also their intended and unintended, explicit and implicit relatedness to Weber. Their crucial works related to Weber are shown in Table 2. The following sections should not merely be regarded as an analysis of their responses to Weber’s interpretation of China, but as an examination of their intellectual interventions and positional advantages in the intermediation of cross-cultural asymmetry.

Table 2. The crucial works related Max Weber’s reception in Chinese context.

Scholar	Key publications concerning Max Weber	Effect period
Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005)	Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley. London: Routledge, 1939 [1986 in Chinese]. China's Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953 [1948, 1988, 2006 in Chinese]. From the Soil: the foundations of Chinese society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992 [1948, 1967, 1985, 2006 in Chinese].	40s–60s; 80s–2000s∼
Ch'u T'ung-tsu (1910–2008)	Law and Society in Traditional China. Paris: Mouton 1961 [1947 1981 in Chinese]. Local Government in China under the Ch’ing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1962 [2003 2022 in Chinese].	60s–70s; 2000s∼
Yang Ch'ing-k'un (1911–99)	“Introduction” of Weber Max 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. 2nd New York: Macmillan 1964 [1989 1998 2008 in Chinese]. Religion in Chinese Society: a study of contemporary social functions of religion and some of their historical factors. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1961 [2006 in Chinese].	60s–80s
Ambrose King Yeo-Chi (1935∼)	From Tradition to Modern. Commercial Press 1966. (in Chinese). Heidelberg Musings. Linking Publisher 1986. (in Chinese). China's Great Transformation: Selected Essays on Confucianism Modernization and Democracy. Chinese University Press 2018.	70s–90s
Zhao Dingxin (1953∼)	2009. The mandate of heaven and performance legitimation in historical and contemporary China. American Behavioral Scientist 53 (3): 416–433 The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory for Chinese History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2015 [2022 in Chinese]. Personal reflections on Weber (Social Media)	2010s∼
Zhou Xueguang (1959∼)	The Institutional Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach. Beijing: Sanlian Press 2017. (in Chinese) 2010. The institutional logic of collusion among local governments in China. Modern China 36 (1): 47–78. Personal reflections on Weber (Social Media)	2010s

3. The explicit intermediations: the connection between Yang and King

Yang’s (1964) introduction to the second edition of RoC opened up an important portal through which both English and Chinese academics could realize Weber’s research design of world religions, especially his initiating problematic of comparing Confucianism and Protestantism. Although he cited Talcott Parsons several times in his introduction, Yang highlighted the ongoing direction following Weber’s “sociological foundations” in terms of two issues, the bureaucracy and the literati, to which Fei, Chu, and his own publications had already contributed. However, he indicated that a proper focus on the dynamic tension of the Confucian literati could be found in neither Weber’s unfair treatment of Chinese society nor the Weberian scholars’ subsequent endeavors. Instead of elaborating further on these two issues, Yang (1961) in his functional conception of “religion in society” borrowed one of Parsons’ pattern variables, “diffuseness – specificity,” to re-describe the religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular cults) in Chinese society; the concept of “diffused religions” that captured the characteristics of Chinese religion has influenced researchers in the following generations. To correct Weber’s misunderstanding of Confucianism and Daoism from a sociological rather than a sinological viewpoint relied heavily on the distinction between “institutional/diffused religion.” Namely, Yang’s functional analysis of Chinese religions strikes a cross-cultural balance between the institutional-like religions (e.g. Buddhism and Daoism in Chinese society or Catholicism and Protestantism in the West) and diffused-like religions (e.g. Confucianism and popular cults). King and Fan (2007, 59–60) point out Yang’s achievement based on the recognition during the 1960s–70s that: “this conceptual innovation provided a powerful interpretative scheme under which the plural, complex, seemingly chaotic religious phenomena all became intelligible. As a result, a clear understanding of the religious order in China emerged.” Viewed retrospectively, Yang’s intellectual positioning not only mitigated the academic doubts about Weber’s comparison cast from the native’s viewpoint to foreign scholars, but at the same time also satisfied (separately) both Chinese and Western scholars’ concerns regarding the difference between the two civilizations.

Echoing Yang’s intellectual positioning starting from the 1960s, King’s works during the 1970s, 80s and 90s provided an intermediation that was less substantially engaged with Weber but was yet more sensitive to the times and circumstances of the social sciences. Different from his early studies or the scholarly works based on historical data, King addressed the issues through his contemporary and empirical observations and research covering different Chinese societies (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China). As an exemplar, King’s shift in focus, which even involved referring to intellectual resources in traditional China, might have carved out a legitimate position where social scientists with both native and foreign educations competed with scholars from the humanities (King 2018b, 231–235). The influential and exact effects were his theses on the transformation of Confucianism and Weber’s contribution to Chinese society. Firstly, he paralleled the cultural fact that “State Confucianism” or “Institutional Confucianism” had transformed into “Intellectual Confucianism” with the social fact that the economic progress in Chinese societies brought liberalization and democratization. Therefore, neither the “culturalist” nor the “institutionalist” in the debate over China’s failure to develop modern capitalism independently followed Weber’s uncompleted works on the role of the modern state.³ King seldom engaged with the details of Weber’s conceptual or historical complex; he instead emphasized the way that the “state-centered approach” brought back Weber’s insights on the idea of “state” to correct structural-functionalism. Secondly, for King and the other Chinese sociologists who were not engaged in the debate on the “Confucian ethic and economic development,” the essential consequence of Weber’s contribution did not lie in the economic or cultural question, but rather in the political question: is there a possibility of seeing a Weberian fourth type yet CCP-based legitimation rather than the “plebiscitarian leader-democracy” Weber predicted? As King (2018a, 239) once mentioned, “ … to understand more fully the question of developing a modern state in China, it is necessary to make explicit the Weberian interactive perspective on the state–society relationship.” As Yang successfully shifted the different view on the status of Confucianism as religion to the institutional/diffused distinction of religion in the 1960s–70s, King successfully brought the modernization paradigm and its critics into the “humanities and social sciences” interdisciplinary landscape while going beyond the debate on the “Confucian ethic thesis” with Weber’s emphasis on the culture-initiated yet political-orientated research issues, such as the role of the modern state, the new type of legitimation, or the state-society relationship. In short, King might not have directly engaged in Weber-reception as much or as well as Weberian scholars did, but he did have a crucial intermediating effect on the English and Chinese academic communities during the 1980s–90s.

Aside from their intellectual positioning on Weber, both Yang and King once played crucial roles in the knowledge flows between the USA and China after World War II. Generally, sociological institutes in Hong Kong before the 1990s were a common platform where they both devoted themselves to Chinese sociology; specifically, Yang enacted the two-way exchange between the USA and China through fostering and facilitating sociological expertise, while King introduced new theoretical paradigms and connected Chinese sociology to the regional and international sociological communities.

Yang’s early academic training in China and professional career in the USA made him not merely a sociologist equipped with both a classical Chinese education and knowledge of the American social sciences; his uniqueness also became an important bridge between East and West during the post-war decades (Chen 2018, 32–33; Holzner 2007, 27–29). Before the rebuilding of sociology in the post-Mao PRC, Yang had already encouraged Chinese students to pursue PhDs in the USA, whether at the University of Pittsburgh or not, and American students to specialize in Chinese studies and international education. He also committed to the faculty development and teaching resources in Hong Kong during the 1960s and 70s, mainly in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), realizing his intellectual contributions at an institutional level. Moreover, during the founding years preparing for the rebuilding of sociology in China, Yang accepted Fei’s invitation to deliver a series of seminars at the Chinese Academy of Social Science. His engagement was expressed both in his own teaching endeavors and through disseminating the sociological expertise of his Pittsburgh colleagues. His efforts made him a key node in the circulation of sociological knowledge, especially during the banned period (1952–79) of Chinese sociology and before the re-establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relations in 1979.

While it is not surprising that King held his first professional position in CUHK with a sociology PhD from Pittsburgh, the intermediations brought about by King were different from those of Yang and his contemporaries. King (1966, 2018a) formally introduced the modernization paradigm and its critics in terms of empirical research. For example, the modern personality with Chinese characteristics; the East Asian developmental mode in both economic growth and political democratization; cultural transformations in Confucianism with a “modern turn.” During the 1980s and 90s, King’s international vision turned him into a key connector not only in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, but also between English and Chinese communities in the social sciences. On the other hand, King’s excellence was not confined to academia. Taking two popular works, From Tradition to Modern and Heidelberg Musings, as examples, he addressed the middle-classes and elite students as enquiring audiences concerned with the fate of modern China and Chinese identity (King 1966, 1986). Beside his academic achievements, King’s reputation enabled him to function as a “public intellectual” during the decades of change for Chinese societies, which were often labeled the “latecomer’s exogenous modernization” (Chen 2018, 54–60).

It is only by acknowledging the role played by Yang and King, both in intellectual and political-ethical positioning, a function once performed by the circulation of knowledge concerning Weber’s works and Chinese societies, that we can fill the vacuum which existed before the formative period of Weber-reception during the 1980s. Although Hanke’s “profound or radical change” thesis⁴ implies that the rediscovery of Weber might happen under circumstances of “scientific change of paradigm, socioeconomic change, or legitimacy crisis in the political order” (Hanke 2016, 80–81), Weber scholars are still interested in the social and knowledge conditions that can explain the ambivalence of Weber’s reception, which confused the positive and negative emotions toward Weber at the same time. With the “circulation of knowledge” approach, the continuity and shift shared in common by Yang and King provide us with a more empathetic understanding of Weber’s implications for both traditional and modern Chinese societies. During the first two to three decades after Weber’s RoC was first translated into English, the so-called “Chinese society” was conceived as a kind of “village-centric society,” which could be studied through either the legacy yet nostalgia scholarship conducted during the early Republican period of China (1920s–40s) or the contemporary proximity or substitute for the PRC regime during the 1950s–70s. Yang’s distinction between institutional/diffused religions and endeavors as an institution builder allowed Weber’s sociological followers to deploy not only their sociological-anthropological viewpoint on the historical or textual materials remotely, but also their fieldwork or surveys of Hong Kong or Taiwanese societies directly. Moreover, King’s introduction and criticism of modernization theory during the cold-war geopolitics echoed the classical question in sociology, the great transformation of a specific civilization rather than a society; Weber’s insight would not lie in the origin but the development of capitalism in Chinese society, especially referring to the concrete situations of Chinese societies. In other words, Yang and King prepared Chinese sociologists for a proper usage of Weber: Weber’s research on imperial China has contemporary relevance and embodies the sociological virtues of combining primary and secondary materials, and investigating the transformation from traditional to modern societies.⁵

During the formative period of Weber’s reception, the explicit intermediation continued from Yang to King; however, this also partly explains the asymmetry between the two-way circulation of Weber’s sociology and its criticisms. Conventional understandings from a “national sociology”-based viewpoint see both the intensive import of Weber studies from the Anglophone to Sinophone academics and the Chinese Weber scholars’ criticisms or elaborations in response to Weber’s treatment of China. Nevertheless, the “circulation of knowledge” viewpoint helps us recognize Yang and King’s explicit intermediation as a key factor that somehow delayed the endeavors of Chinese scholars in Weber studies.⁶ S. F. Alatas’ (2003) concept of “academic dependency” outlines the dimensions of this one-sided hysteresis, but he also suggests the need for “a third category, that of the semi-peripheral social science power” (Alatas 2003, 606). The case of Yang and King’s explicit intermediation extends our understanding of this “third category” and demonstrates that it need not be a concrete academic community rooted in national-based sociology. On the contrary, the intermediary node, as exemplified by the congregation around Yang and King’s reception of Weber, can be found within either the core or the periphery, yet still perform its intermediary function as a “third category” somewhere in-between.

4. The implicit intermediations: the detoured and specified ways

Unlike the explicit effects of Yang and King, the other two scholars of the first cohort, Fei and Chu, performed their intermediations of Weber-reception in the circulation of knowledge in an implicit and detoured way. The situation was more complicated because of their different professional trajectories and their delayed translations in English or Chinese. By contrast, Zhao and Zhou, as the representatives of the third cohort in this study, have been able to overtly intermediate through the academic publishing system and their specific subfields in sociology. Even though Zhao or Zhou might deploy some of Fei or Chu’s improvements of Weber’s treatment of China, they elaborated their own thesis in a new vision that departed from the zealous Weber-reception in the 1980s and 90s. Only when contrasting the intermediations from different cohorts can we find the formatting process of Weber’s reception in the Chinese context, which echoes Rodriguez-Medina’s (2014, 20, 24–26) concept of “subordinating object.”

While Fei’s well-known expertise on Chinese society was based on his works published before the banned period of Chinese sociology (Fei 1939, 1953; Fei and Chih-I 1945), one important work, XiangtuZhongguo in 1948 yet translated from Chinese into English as From the Soil in 1992, remained a crucial influence on Chinese sociologists. During the 1950s to the 1970s, this book was regarded as a theoretical achievement in Chinese-speaking sociological communities outside the PRC, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The critical point lay in Fei’s famous concept “chaxugeju” (差序格局), translated as “differential mode of association,” which described the characteristics of human relations within Chinese society (Fei [1949] 1992). Whether proposing this concept with his long-term and native observations or referring to Weber’s deliberation of “ideal type” (Hamilton and Zheng 1992, 1–8), Fei’s “chaxugeju” indeed represents an important concept-tool for Chinese sociologists in both the methodological and ontological senses. When facing Weber’s treatment of Confucianism, Chinese sociologists would rather deploy “chaxugeju” and its elaborations as their anchoring device than engage in debates about the nature or details of Confucianism with humanities scholars. In this sense, Fei’s “chaxugeju” could have created a detoured pathway for Weber-reception differing from Yang’s moderation.⁷ Interestingly, Chu’s intermediation took another atypical route, whereby the circulation of his works between Chinese and English versions was a determining factor. Chu’s two important themes on Chinese society – the “Confucianization of law” since the Han dynasty and the “Confucian literati’s local governing assisted by private legal specialist” in the Qing dynasty – deeply influenced scholars in Chinese history during the 1960s (Chu [1947/1981] 1961, 1962). However, the former was proposed in his Chinese monograph in 1947 and restated as an added chapter in the 1981 second edition, while the latter was widespread in overseas China studies before the Chinese translation in 2003. To some extent, this decades-gap between different languages or editions had delayed Chu’s elaborations of Weber’s analysis of “sociological foundations” in RoC, even if Yang once mentioned Chu’s two works in his introduction to RoC. Considering the hysteresis and influences through the circulation of knowledge, Chu not only corrected Weber’s “orthodoxy-heterodoxy” framework of Confucianism-Daoism to Confucianism-legalism, but also indicated the internal differentiation of Confucian literati during the last three centuries of imperial China. Retrospectively, Chu’s detoured intermediation of Weber-reception in the Chinese context could only have happened through the channel of scholarship in the field of Chinese legal history. Contrasting Fei and Chu, through their similar starting point yet different departing point on professional trajectories, demonstrates the non-typical intermediations worthy of notice.

Since the year 2000, sociologies in Chinese contexts have entered a new stage, experiencing both institutionalized establishments at the professional level and the “sinicization” or “indigenization” movements at the intellectual level. Under the auspices of this new vision, Weber-reception also passed the zealous importing stage, yet remained in a moderate scenario in which the dominant framework shifted from religious/rural through ethical/economic to political/organizational. Both Zhao and Zhou performed as exemplars and representative overseas sociologists with their long-term reflections and subfield-specified elaborations of Weber.

Encountering Weber’s works before 2000, Zhao re-opened his dialogue with Weber based on his research of the inter-state wars in ancient China (from 11 BCE to the Qin dynasty). His intellectual intermediation, however, contained a noteworthy feature in that it was conducted not only under the subfield of historical-political sociology, but also the influence from Weberian-oriented scholars such as Charles Tilly and Michael Mann. Zhao deliberately recoded the war-related information in Chinese classical texts to demonstrate the war-driven dynamism, and then proposed his “Confucian-Legalist State” thesis: the long-history and resilience of Imperial China should be interpreted as a crystallization that has absorbed the irritations of military or economic powers and maintained the stability of the political-ideological regime since the Han dynasty.⁸ Attempting to be comprehensive in historical period yet specific in analytical framework, Zhao engages with Weber in terms of conceptual typology, and hence seldom needs to draw on the textual criticisms of Weber’s works. He transformed Weber’s three legitimacies into legal-procedural, ideological, and performance-based legitimacy (including economic performance, moral conduct, and territorial defense) as charismatic legitimacy “can be supplementary to any kind of legitimacy, but it tends to be an extreme form of ideological legitimacy” (Zhao 2015, 38), and performance-based legitimacy can be “interactive and dynamic” on the one hand, yet a “mix of sentiment and rationality” on the other (Zhao 2001, 21). His inspirations came from the Chinese experience, both historical ideas, e.g. “the mandate of the heaven” and contemporary social movements, e.g. the 1989 Tiananmen protest. Zhao’s elaborations of Weber foregrounded the contemporary relevance of Weberian analysis of imperial China that can function as a historical legacy rooted in modern Chinese societies. This idea can also be found in Zhou’s concept of “institutional logic” or “logics of governance” in modern China. Before the year 2000, Zhou’s usage of Weber was conventional and lay in the subfields, either social stratification or organizational sociology (Zhou 2004); Starting from his fieldwork in southern China in 2004–05, Zhou paid more attention to the issues concerning both the center and local governance. Based on various case-studies with historical reflections, he re-organized and published a monograph on the institutional logic of China’s governance (Zhou 2017). Through the lens of organizational sociology with a Weberian approach, he examined the “unification – efficiency” contradiction and the coping mechanisms used in central-local relations that manifested in different kinds of government behaviors, such as “collusion,” “muddling through,” and “inverted soft budget.” In Zhou’s elaborations, Weber’s ideal type of legitimacy should be viewed as a “legitimacy – authority – domination” continuum (from abstract to concrete), in which bureaucracy responds to the various governing issues in conflicts among authorities through both the respective organizational agents at center-local levels and as an institutional mechanism collectively (Zhou 2017, 56–62). Once he foregrounds the organizational analysis of bureaucracy, the difference between imperial and modern China merely lies in the transformations from traditional authority to Charismatic authority (in the Mao era) to a routinized yet mixed authority (in the post-Mao period); nevertheless, the attempt to establish bureaucracy (a form of domination) on legal-rationality (authority) has been unsuccessful, due to the flaws of the over-expanded bureaucracy and its historical legacy. Similarly with Zhao’s elaborations, we find in Zhou’s analysis the continuity of bureaucracy from imperial to modern China – patrimonial bureaucracy to routinized-charismatic bureaucracy – and the competitive game between bureaucrats in local government and authority in central government.

Departing from Yang and King’s explicit intermediations, Fei and Chu detoured through an atypical style, yet Zhao and Zhou performed in subfield-specified style during Weber’s reception. The crucial difference might plausibly lie not in the intellectual intervention alone, but rather in the question: to what extent the intellectual and the political-ethical interventions interacted, or in Baert’s (2012) terms were “intertwined, blurring, and merging,” with each other? As far as Fei and Chu are concerned, their political-ethical interventions did not resonate in their own time, but left time-lags in the reception of their intellectual elaborations of Weber, regardless of their distinctive professional trajectories from the 1960s to 1990s. After the banned period (1960s–79), Fei rapidly became an influential figure in his last two decades due to his international reputation and cultural self-awareness, whereas Chu remained relatively inactive academically after his return to China in 1965 until the post-Mao era. However, neither Fei’s over-estimated nor Chu’s under-estimated status since the 1970s caught up with their pre-1980s academic achievements in improving Weber; they respectively left us with their own detoured and implicit intermediations. Fei and Chu might not directly aim at Weber’s concepts, but served as crucial resources for Chinese sociologists of the later generations. On the other hand, Zhao and Zhou’s intermediations of Weber’s reception after the formative period (1980s–90s) helped maintain Weber’s relevancy, especially when the “indigenization” movements since the 1990s mitigated Weber’s theoretical insights in terms of their empirical verifiability or social commitment. Nevertheless, as overseas Chinese sociologists with enthusiasm for contemporary China, they not only constantly engaged in faculty development among reputational universities (e.g. visiting in HKUST, Tsinghua, Peking, and Zhejiang University, then published their lecture-based monographs on social-political movements and organizational sociology), but also responded to the puzzle of China from the US perspective of their specialties, which may have led to Zhao’s book on Tiananmen (since 1989) and Zhou’s book on Governmental Logic (since Covid-19 pandemic) being banned in China. Comparing Fei and Chu as the first cohort of Chinese sociologists on a cross-cultural trajectory with Zhao and Zhou as the third cohort indicates two different intervals between the intellectual and political-ethical interventions and their intertwined solutions: the delayed or detoured intermediations of Fei and Chu were revived by their followers after decades, while the subfield-focused intermediations of Zhao and Zhou were achieved cross-discipline by themselves.

Examining the cases of Fei, Chu, Zhao, and Zhou in terms of their detoured or specialized intermediations provides us with a broader context to realize the mainstream effects of Yang and King. A successfully intermediated circulation of knowledge, expressed in the continuity of Yang and King, served as a crucial condition and intellectual milieu for the concrete efforts of Weber’s reception in areas such as translating, interpreting, and teaching. Rodriguez-Medina’s (2014) concept of subordinating object, which “is able to (re)structure the peripheral field by forcing the local actors to react to it” or “compel peripheral scholars to make intellectual interventions that are responsive to the knowledge embedded in them,” clearly describes Weber’s reception in the formative period from the 1980s to the 1990s; however, the reception happened in both a broad context where the circulation of knowledge constituted an important precondition and a narrow process where the exact receptions were conducted through the efforts of translators, publishers, and academics (cf: Tsai 2016, 2020), hence achieving its obvious and successful formation.⁹ The implicit intermediations, whether detoured or specialized ones, could not create this kind of condition owing to their untimely or blocked interventions in a political-ethical sense, but their intellectual contributions still had an effect eventually.

Viewed retrospectively from the “circulation of knowledge” approach, the delayed effects of these implicit intermediations provide illustrations of a kind of “non-obvious semi-periphery” that dwells and performs in both the core and the periphery, yet cannot be reduced to explanations of national-based sociology. The detoured intermediations of Fei and Chu, in spite of the differences in both their professional trajectories and scholarly specialty, were revived as native or indigenized resources that can be utilized to elaborate Weber’s treatments of China decades after their original publication. They seem to have encouraged a productive and responsive “virtual dialogue” with Weber. On the other side of the debate, the crucial effects of Zhao and Zhou’s specialized intermediations have been to reconstruct the research object, the special characteristics of Chinese society, with the help of subfield viewpoints. If the point where Weber misfired on China was not cultural mentality, but historical legacy or organizational logics, then Zhao and Zhou can access contemporary society through their positions in universities in China and perform as avatars for US-style sociology. The workings of these two kinds of “non-obvious semi-periphery” thus reveal the intellectual effects brought about by implicit intermediations, which cannot be explained solely by sociologists’ scholarships in the USA or in China, and must also take into consideration their cross-cultural trajectories and professional performances. The implicit intermediations provide an alternative to the explicit and mainstream effect yet still constitute a factor contributing to the one-sided asymmetry.

5. Conclusion

This article analyzed Weber’s reception in the Chinese context using the “circulation of knowledge” approach to the paradigmatic case of Chinese sociologists with cross-cultural trajectories. Resituating the boom period of Weber’s reception during the 1980s and 90s into a broader knowledge context, the analysis focused on the various intermediations Chinese sociologists from three generations performed in terms of both their intellectual and political-ethical interventions. From an explicit perspective, Yang contributed not only to the elaboration of Weber’s treatment of Chinese religions, but also to the cultivation of expertise flows in the networks connecting the USA, Hong Kongese, and mainland Chinese sociological communities: meanwhile King’s contributions can be seen in his introduction of the modernization and its critics paradigm, which helped connect the sociological research on Chinese societies with international communities; by carving out the intellectual space for a social-science viewpoint on the question of modern China, he led sociologists’ attention away from the economic-ethical to the political-social dimension. Retrospectively, the continuity brought by Yang and King filled the vacuum before the “formative period” of Weber’s reception. By contrast, the implicit intermediations, however, were evident in the periods before or after the “formative period” (the 1980s–90s). As a native-based, heuristic, yet responsive concept to a Weberian ideal type, Fei’s “chaxugeju” was first widely accepted in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then mainland China, and hence constituted the discussions that followed; Chu’s research on legal culture and local governance in imperial China had effects on scholars interested in Weber’s treatment of China. The implicit intermediations of Fei and Chu were partially detoured by either the institutional cancelation and re-establishment or the time-gaps in circulations and translations. As for the third cohort of Chinese sociologists, although their works cannot be exclusively categorized into either explicit or implicit intermediations, Zhao and Zhou’s efforts at both intellectual and political-ethical intervention have shown a new way forward in the circulation of knowledge. Avoiding censorship by taking advantage of new channels other than publishing, while maintaining affiliations with academic institutions in China, both Zhao and Zhou successfully proved that a specific lens from different sociological subfields, comparative-historical or organizational analysis, can foreground Weberian enquiries into contemporary China.

My analysis considered three different generations in the process and various methods of intermediation used to facilitate Weber’s reception. Overall, generation played the most obviously determining factor. Given the diversified situations among sociological developments in various Chinese societies, Chinese sociologists with cross-cultural trajectories were able to amplify their influence through the key positions they held in the exchanges between Sino-US academic communities, but geo-political circumstances could be a confounding factor. Although gaining a foreign PhD degree was necessary for the elites of the three cohorts, how they decided on their early career paths or transformed them in middle age varied and hence caused distinctive yet consequent effects. Differences among the cohorts might exist in terms of personal decisions, but reflect a common asymmetry: Chinese sociologists with international engagements and reputations, especially those earned in US academia, speak louder in the circulation of knowledge. Besides, when this article scrutinized the paradigmatic cases, the disciplinary factor emerged among the exchange of knowledge flows. Before or after King’s sociological positioning in the modernization paradigm of the “humanities and social sciences” landscape after WWII, the first cohort, represented by Fei and Chu’s intermediations, did not specifically emphasize themselves in sociology and were not exclusively regarded as sociological contributors, while the third cohort, Zhao and Zhou’s intermediations, based themselves in the achievements of sociological subfields yet provoked cross-disciplinary dialogs on the uniqueness of contemporary China. Comparing the intellectual interventions of the three cohorts, sociology increasingly performed a gatekeeper role in Weber’s reception in the Chinese context through the circulation of knowledge.

Last but not least, analysis of the asymmetries and intermediations in the circulation of knowledge should not prevent scholars from developing alternative interpretations; instead, it provides a base for building counter-hegemony strategies in the future. Although scholarly advocates for escaping from the Western or Northern dominant or canonical theories have been emphasized for decades (Alatas 2006; Alatas and Sinha 2017; Keim 2011, 2014), I am convinced that bringing “the circulation of knowledge” approach into reception studies will not only re-contextualize the longer or broader conditions of both the intellectual and political dimensions, but also enrich those scholars who might be confined by the scope of the narrowly-defined and formal rules of academia in areas such as publishing, citation, translation etc. After all, developing academic alternatives is a necessary part of deepening our understanding of the past and the future, so that we can go beyond the status quo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number 110-2410-H-038 -011], and the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan [NSTC 112-2410-H-007 -098-MY2].

Notes on contributors

Po-Fang Tsai

Po-Fang Tsai is Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, College of Life Sciences and Medicine, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (R.O.C.). His main area of interest concerns legal and cultural sociology, medical education and medical humanities, and Max Weber studies. Having articles appeared in Max Weber Studies, Journal of Sociology, and Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, since 2010 he has focused on Weber’s concept of traditional Chinese law and the reception history of Max Weber in the Chinese context. In recent years, his research started from a Weberian viewpoint to analyze the evolution of citizenship in the Chinese context during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican period. During his service in medical school, he had the opportunity of engaging his sociological specialty in the scholarship of medical humanities and medical education. At present, he has been involved in two main topics: humanity concern in the Gross Anatomy Course and “discharge planning” program in medical education.

Notes

1 I have borrowed the concept of “politico-ethical positioning” from Patrick Baert’s (2012) “positioning theory,” which interprets an intellectual intervention with two ideal-typical forms: intellectual positioning and politico-ethical positioning. Although Baert notes that the two are intertwined, with a substantial amount of blurring and merging between them, here I apply the latter concept to examine scholars’ decisions shown in their professional developments and life trajectories.

2 The term “ethical-economic affinity” combines Weber’s concept of “elective affinity” in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and his unfinished Economic Ethic of the World Religions. In the fields of religion and economy or culture and economy, there has been a conventional Weberian framework comparing the relationships between (religious or secular) ethics and economic mentalities. As for the newer research, please see Ertman (2017).

3 Among the “Confucian ethic and economic development” debate in the 1980–90s, Chinese scholars attempting a Weberian explanation of economic developments in East Asian countries have gradually bifurcated into different ways of reading Weber’s The Religion of China, including the relative importance of his General Economic History. The “culturalists” who based themselves on the “ethical-economic affinity” framework, insisted on finding the cultural factors in Confucianism; on the contrary, the “institutionalist” explanation searched for the non-cultural factors, such as interpersonal trust and ties, energy in civil society, or state capacity. For a retrospective review and analysis, please see Jack Barbalet (2014, 2016).

4 In her influential article, Edith Hanke (2016) examines the world-wide distribution of Weber’s oeuvre (through translations and sales) and highlights three examples (GDR, China, and Islamic societies). Her thesis indicates that “Max Weber has played a major role in profound social, economic, and political transformative processes, and continues to do so to the present” (Hanke 2016, in abstract).

5 However, when the shared cultural legacy of Chinese-ness becomes more internally diverse, after the split of the imagined community of “Cultural China” into different societies – the authoritarian regime in Taiwan, colonialism in Hong Kong, and communism in mainland China – with rival “indigenization” movements, Weber’s contemporary relevance to Chinese sociologists who would rather focus on the concrete, issue-oriented research also decreased (Tsai 2022, 300–303).

6 According to Tsai (2016), three research groups developed in the different academic communities, which were dedicated to translating, introducing, and teaching Weber’s theory. Nevertheless, the intellectual niches of the Chinese scholars in Weber studies were mainly located in the field of social theory, which was seemingly smaller than Yang and King’s wide engagements of religious, economic, cultural, and political sociologies. Besides, the foreign Weberian scholars they connected (e.g., Gary Hamilton and Wolfgang Schluchter) were not close to Parsonian sociology at that time. Retrospectively, their contributions were increasingly valued after Yang and King’s explicit intermediation.

7 To elaborate the delayed effect of Fei’s “chaxugeju,” we need to retrospectively re-contextualize the intellectual circumstance of the 1980s–90s among the humanities, where Confucianism was regarded as a kind of “particularism” contrasting with the “universalism” of the modern Western doctrines, especially Protestantism. Most Chinese sociologists at that time, as Yang and King’s explicit intermediations, followed the Parsonian binary “pattern variable” (particularism v.s. universalism) to place Weber’s treatment of Confucianism into the particularist category. However, there were other Chinese sociologists who viewed Fei’s “chaxugeju” as the proper conceptual tool for describing Chinese people’s habits or behaviors, an interpretation which deepens and elaborates the term “particularism.” In this regard, Fei’s delayed intermediation of Weber reappeared in the scholarship of indigenous social sciences in a cross-culture context. See also the early discussion of the topic of cross-cultural comparison in the fields of psychology and sociology (Huang 2012; Lin 1994), and the late discussions of the “quanxi” (relationship) in Chinese capitalism (Barbalet 2021; Qi 2014).

8 Zhao’s main research agenda-setting is to bring the contributions of contemporary Weberian historical sociologists back in, and therefore fill the vacuum of conventional Weberian scholarship focusing on the cultural mentality and carrier strata of imperial China. In this regard, his “Confucian-Legalist State” explanation not only revised Weber’s (1951) “Confucianism and Daoism” as “orthodoxy and heterodoxy” framework, but also echoed and revived Chu Tung-tse’s ([1947/1981] 1961) thesis of “Confucianization of Law.”

9 Although this study mainly focuses on the intermediations of oversea Chinese sociologists, the circulation of knowledge still partially relies on factors such as translations, publications, and teachings. In addition to the broad context, research on the narrow process can be found in Tsai (2016, 2020) or Yu and Wang (2021).