Rule as Repertory and the Compound Essence of Authority

Abstract

These brief comments reflect on several of the interrelated themes that are raised in the various articles featured in this issue, including (1) their acknowledgement of the synthetic, always-plural techniques of rule that, both historically and today, are available for deployment within the Chinese political system at any one time; (2) that powerfully informing and often-recurring ideal of governance in China that privileges a seamless blending and mixing of state with society and of formal institutions with informal practices; and (3) that consequently still-frustrating difficulty, so often experienced by serious contemporary scholars and writers in the China field who understand they must seek to, but may never quite manage fully to, transcend such quintessentially “modern” and now, therefore, equally profoundly informing conceptual binaries as state versus society, formal versus informal, thought versus practice, and representative democracy versus authoritarianism.