Zhao Dingxin: An Interpretation of Political Parties and Their Development from the Perspective of Historical Sociology

On the night of October 10, 2016, National High-end Think Tank Series Academic Lecture of National Academy of Development and Strategy was successfully held in Renmin University of China. The lecture was given by Zhao Dingxin, a famous scholar in the circle of ethnic Chinese, Lifetime Professor of Department of Sociology University of Chicago and a scholar of the national “Thousand Talents Program”, with the theme of “Political Parties and Their Development from the Perspective of Historical Sociology”. The activity was organized by NADS, RUC and was chaired by Prof. Yang Guangbin, Vice President of NADS.

Before the lecture, Mr. Yang Guangbin briefly introduced the legendary academic research career of Prof. Zhao Dingxin: he graduated from the major of biology with a doctoral degree, engaged in pure biological research and then research on human society, and finally becomes an outstanding talent in today’s international sociology circles. Afterwards, Prof. Zhao Dingxin introduced the findings of his latest research on party politics and its development from the perspective of historical sociology.

In respect of the concept of political parties, Prof. Zhao first emphasized the attribute of the times of political parties and said “factions and parties have been there since ancient times, but party politics is a modern phenomenon”. More exactly, modern political parties are a result of British and American politics and the oldest political parties in the world were born in Britain and the USA: the one is American Democratic Party, which can be dated back to Democratic-Republican Party founded by Jefferson in 1790 and is the world’s oldest political party; the other is American Republican Party, which was founded in 1854. In comparison, Whig Party and Tory Party of Britain were merely two fractions in the parliament around “Glorious Revolution”, not strictly the earliest modern political parties.

From the perspective of historical evolution course, Prof. Zhao also pointed out the four historical stages of the development of political parties in the world, i.e., being liberal or conservative (from the18th century to mid-19th century), being class or national (from the19th century to mid-20th century), political party “crisis” under the Cold War (in 1950s-1980s) and political parties in the context of the third wave of democracy. He believed that world history development was significantly unbalanced in three respects: firstly, the Europe continued to be deeply affected by secularization; secondly, Mainland China and its neighbors still remained at the earlier stages of the third wave of democracy; thirdly, resurgence of nationalism in the USA and other western countries was also affected by economic globalization and de-industrialization.

With respect to the relation between liberalism and political parties, Prof. Zhao indicated that liberalism and its corresponding systems could provide an arena for any “legal” political parties, including extreme anti-liberalism parties, but it could not ensure that liberalist political parties and liberalism would not be marginalized after other political parties were well established (this is why liberalism is adopted mainly in institutional environment in western societies and a pure liberalist political party is often not dominant among all political parties in a country).

Finally, Vice President Yang Guangbin made wonderful comments on the report by Prof. Zhao. He appreciated Zhao’s incisive analysis of political parties and their development from historical and social perspectives and appealed to Chinese academia to establish theoretical confidence and make their own contributions to the development of China’s social sciences based more on macro-history and macro-structure.