Enhancing the Status of Asian Studies in Comparative Politics: The Role of an Expanded Field of Postcommunist Studies.

This paper is intended to set the framework for the entire panel by tracing in broad strokes the place of Asian studies in the field of (post)communist studies and in comparative politics writ large. During the first two decades after World War II studies of China and Japan were commonly carried out within the unifying theoretical framework of modernization theory. The decline of modernization theory in the 1970s, however, led to a more attenuated relationship between specialists of Asian countries and the broader field of comparative politics. In the post-Cold War era, in spite of the common challenges faced by reformers in (post)communist Asia and Europe, there have been even fewer lines of intellectual communication and integration across Asian studies, the study of postcommunist Europe, and the field of comparative politics writ large. A handful of noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding, students analyzing transitions in postcommunist Europe have not taken advantage of the rich empirical analysis coming out of scholarship on Asian countries embarking on reform. Similarly, Asian studies remains comparatively insular, ignoring potentially insightful analyses coming out of transitional settings that emerged out of the former Soviet bloc. This paper argues that a broader, more refined field of comparative (post)communism needs to do a better job of comparing the experiences of Asian and East European reforms, and that this will also help reinvigorate the lines of communication between both fields and comparative politics writ large. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]