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Ideology in the west and the search for analytical rigour in China
Frans Vandenbosch 方腾波 17.12.2025
Sociology in crisis: China’s alternative paradigm.
This article examines the profound crisis in Western sociological and liberal art education and the vigorous debate within Chinese academia concerning the development of a socially relevant, scientifically rigorous sociological tradition. Drawing on an extensive email conversation between academics with various backgrounds, it analyses the deterioration of Western sociology into a state propaganda tool that has abandoned analytical rigour. The article further explores Professor Liu Jianjun’s critique of the “false faith” prevalent among Chinese scholars who uncritically apply Western social science methodologies to Chinese society. While acknowledging China’s own challenges with Western academic influence, the article argues that China’s strong STEM foundation, distinct civilizational perspective, and ongoing “subjectivity turn” position it to develop a unique sociological paradigm that balances analytical rigor with cultural appropriateness, offering an alternative to the declining Western model.
The ideological capture and analytical decline of western sociology
The discipline of sociology, once regarded as a vital analytical framework for understanding modern societies, has during the past decade undergone a profound transformation in its Western heartlands of North America and Western Europe. Over the past four decades, and with a notably accelerated decline throughout the past decade, what was conceived as a science of society has largely devolved into what critics describe as an ideological apparatus. This section examines this troubling trajectory, tracing how Western sociology has increasingly abandoned its scientific pretensions in favour of doctrinal instruction and ideological conformity, ultimately compromising its intellectual integrity and utility.
The fundamental shift identified by academics including Professor Han Dongping involves sociology’s movement away from cultivating critical analytical skills toward what might be termed a pedagogy of belief. Where once students were equipped with methodological tools to dissect social phenomena, they are now increasingly instructed to “believe this source” based on predetermined judgments about reliability rather than through independent critical evaluation. This transition represents nothing less than the discipline’s epistemological surrender, transforming sociology from a field of open inquiry into one of received wisdom. The analytical rigour that once characterised social scientific training has been substantially replaced by an uncritical acceptance of approved narratives, creating generations of graduates skilled in ideological repetition rather than independent sociological investigation.
This intellectual decline cannot be understood in isolation from broader geopolitical contexts and institutional pressures. The professionalisation of academia, particularly in the Anglo-American world, has created powerful incentive structures that reward conformity rather than originality. The peer review process, tenure decisions, and research funding allocations increasingly favour work that operates within established ideological parameters, creating what critics term an “echo chamber” effect. Simultaneously, the growing integration of university humanities departments with government and corporate funding sources has further constrained the intellectual independence of sociological research. The result is a discipline that has largely become what can be regarded as a “propaganda tool of western regimes,” though not necessarily through overt coercion but rather through more subtle processes of institutional capture and professional self-censorship.
The methodological consequences of this ideological capture are both profound and readily observable. Quantitative methodologies have frequently been reduced to instrumental tools for confirming predetermined conclusions rather than means of genuine discovery, while qualitative approaches often serve as vehicles for anecdotal justification of established ideological positions. The rich tradition of sociological theory, once characterised by vigorous debate between competing paradigms, has frequently been flattened into a monotonous recitation of approved perspectives. This intellectual narrowing is particularly evident in the study of non-Western societies, where Western sociological frameworks are routinely applied without adequate consideration of their cultural specificity or applicability, an issue that will be explored further in relation to China’s experience with imported methodologies.
The manifestation of this crisis is perhaps most visible in the classroom, where the spirit of critical inquiry has often been supplanted by doctrinal instruction. Students report an atmosphere where challenging certain ideological orthodoxies, even with empirical evidence, can result in academic penalty. The concept of “reliable sources” has been weaponised to exclude dissenting perspectives, creating an intellectual environment where sociology students encounter only approved viewpoints. This pedagogical approach produces graduates who may be proficient in the terminology of critical theory but lack the fundamental analytical skills to evaluate sociological claims empirically or think independently about social phenomena.
The international dimension of this decline deserves particular attention, especially in light of evolving global knowledge dynamics. As geopolitical tensions reshape international academic collaboration, Western sociology finds itself increasingly isolated from important developments in other civilisational contexts. The discipline’s progressive ideological homogenisation has impaired its ability to understand and engage with societies that operate according to different philosophical premises or social organisation, particularly China. This intellectual parochialism represents a significant regression from sociology’s aspirations to be a universal science of society, leaving Western scholars poorly equipped to comprehend the rapid transformations occurring outside their own cultural sphere.
The culmination of these developments is a discipline in a state of profound crisis, though this reality remains largely unacknowledged within its mainstream institutions. The transformation of Western sociology from a scientific endeavour to an ideological project has compromised both its intellectual credibility and its social utility. This decline forms the essential background against which we must understand the vigorous debates currently occurring within Chinese academia about the proper direction for sociological study, to which we will turn in the next section. The crisis of Western sociology represents not just a regional academic problem but a fundamental challenge to how societies understand themselves, creating an intellectual vacuum that new approaches must inevitably fill.
刘建军 Liu Jianjun, Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University and President of the Shanghai Yilian Centre for Social Governance.
Fudan University ranks among China’s top three institutions and wields profound influence across government, business and academia. As a C9 League member, it stands alongside Peking and Tsinghua universities as an elite force shaping the nation’s intellectual and political leadership.
Photo credit: Prof. Liu Jianjun
For a better understanding of Professor Liu’s radical viewpoints, please read:
Liu Jianjun: the false faith in social sciences
The “false faith” in western methodologies within China’s academic community
The crisis in Western sociology has not merely been an object of distant observation for Chinese academics; it has framed an urgent intellectual dilemma within China’s own scholarly community. As Western social science progressively abandoned scientific rigor for ideological conformity, its simultaneous dominance within global academia created what prominent Chinese scholars have identified as a pervasive “false faith” among their colleagues. This section examines this critical internal debate, focusing particularly on Professor Liu Jianjun’s seminal critique [1]of the uncritical adoption of Western methodological frameworks and the consequent epistemological subordination that threatens to distort China’s understanding of its own social reality.
The concept of “false faith” represents a fundamental challenge to the prevailing approach to social science within many Chinese institutions. Professor Liu identifies this not as a simple methodological preference but as a deep seated epistemological problem, specifically a blind belief in the universal applicability and scientific superiority of Western originated social science methodologies. This faith manifests in the automatic privileging of quantitative models, theoretical frameworks, and research agendas developed primarily in North American contexts, without sufficient regard for their suitability for analysing Chinese society. The phenomenon reflects what critics describe as a colonial mentality within academia, where knowledge produced in the West is automatically accorded authority while indigenous ways of knowing are systematically marginalised.
Liu’s powerful metaphor of “using fake gold to buy real goods” captures the profound consequences of this intellectual dependency. The “fake gold” represents the imported methodologies and theoretical frameworks that gleam with the appearance of scientific rigour but lack substantive value when applied to Chinese conditions. The “real goods” constitute the complex, living reality of Chinese society with its distinct historical trajectory, cultural patterns, and social formations. The transaction, attempting to purchase understanding of the latter with the former, inevitably produces distorted knowledge that misrepresents Chinese social reality while creating the illusion of scientific understanding. This methodological mismatch generates findings that may satisfy international publication standards while offering little genuine insight into the society they purport to describe.
The manifestations of this false faith are readily observable across Chinese humanities and social science departments. Research proposals routinely justify their approach through extensive citation of Western theorists while demonstrating minimal engagement with Chinese intellectual traditions. Quantitative studies mechanically apply measurement instruments developed for Western populations without establishing their cross cultural validity. Theoretical frameworks derived from particular Western historical experiences are treated as universal templates against which Chinese social development is measured and found wanting. The result is what some critics term “academic neo colonialism“, a voluntary intellectual submission that prevents Chinese scholars from developing explanatory frameworks adequate to their own society’s complexity.
The Ministry of Education’s reported scepticism toward sociology programmes must be understood within this context of epistemological critique. Rather than representing simple anti-intellectualism or purely utilitarian concerns, this stance reflects profound dissatisfaction with a discipline that has too often privileged methodological sophistication borrowed from abroad over genuine understanding of Chinese society. When sociological education becomes a process of training students to apply foreign frameworks rather than developing their capacity to analyse their own society, its social utility and intellectual legitimacy naturally come into question. This scepticism forms part of a broader reassessment of humanities education that prioritises relevance to China’s conditions and development needs.
The solution, as Professor Liu and like-minded scholars propose, requires what they term a “subjectivity turn” in Chinese social science. This represents neither anti-Western reaction nor nostalgic traditionalism but rather the conscious development of frameworks, theories, and standards rooted in China’s historical practice and civilizational logic. It demands that Chinese scholars treat Western methodologies as potential resources for selective adaptation rather than as universal standards to be slavishly imitated. More fundamentally, it requires reconstructing the epistemological foundations of social science to acknowledge that valid knowledge production must begin from specific civilizational contexts rather than pretending to a false universality that invariably reflects particular Western experiences.
This intellectual reorientation connects with broader discussions about the role of faith in social stability and historical development. Just as the socio-historical role of faith involves creating bonds that unite societies around shared values and purposes, the development of a distinct Chinese sociological paradigm represents an effort to ground social knowledge in the lived experience and civilizational consciousness of the Chinese people. The critique of “false faith” in Western methodologies thus forms part of a larger project of intellectual decolonisation that seeks to align knowledge production with civilizational identity and national development needs.
The struggle against this “false faith” represents one of the most significant intellectual battles within contemporary Chinese academia, with this disloyalty to the Chinese society among certain academics being most prevalent at Shanghai’s Fudan University and Nanjing University (Nanda). Its outcome will determine whether Chinese sociology evolves into a genuinely innovative discipline capable of generating distinctive insights from China’s unique social experience, or remains perpetually in the shadow of Western paradigms, applying increasingly discredited methodologies to a society it fundamentally misunderstands. However, CPC representatives at these two universities remain relatively unconcerned about this phenomenon, viewing it as primarily confined to older generation professors whose excessive admiration for American sociology education is unlikely to influence younger scholars.
As Western sociology continues its decline into ideological assertion, Chinese scholars face both the obligation and opportunity to construct an alternative approach that balances analytical rigor with appropriate cultural embeddedness, a challenge that the next section will explore through examining the demographic and cognitive dimensions of sociological practice.
Demographic and cognitive differences: the STEM sociology divide
The intellectual crisis in sociology extends beyond methodological debates to encompass fundamental questions about the demographic composition and cognitive patterns of those who practice it. Our email correspondence of the past few weeks highlights striking data that suggests a correlation between academic background and critical engagement with certain geopolitical issues, providing quantitative support for long standing observations about disciplinary differences. This section examines the demographic evidence, analyses the cognitive divide between STEM and sociology graduates, and explores the implications of China’s distinct approach to technological and social scientific education.
The statistical evidence presented in our emails merits careful consideration. According to the membership data of most international service organisations in Western Europe 68 percent of members were classified as sociologists while only 24 percent possessed STEM backgrounds.
This disproportionate representation becomes particularly significant when viewed alongside the observation that “the four troublemakers were all sociologists”. While such limited data cannot support sweeping generalisations, it does align with broader patterns noted in academic literature regarding disciplinary concentrations in certain advocacy organisations. The demographic imbalance between sociological and technical backgrounds in such contexts suggests potential homophily effects where certain disciplines cluster around specific ideological orientations.
The cognitive differences between STEM and sociological approaches form the crux of this analysis. Sociologists tend to be “believers” who are “less skilled in rigorous analysis techniques than STEM graduates” and consequently “more likely to follow the propaganda of their fellow sociologists in the media and politics”. This characterisation, while stark, points to genuine epistemological differences between disciplines that employ predominantly quantitative and empirical methods versus those relying more heavily on interpretive frameworks. STEM education typically emphasises problem solving through verifiable data, reproducible experiments, and falsifiable hypotheses, cultivating what might be termed a “reality first” orientation. In contrast, contemporary Western sociology often prioritises theoretical alignment and ideological consistency, often at the expense of empirical rigor.
China’s distinctive educational landscape presents a revealing contrast to Western patterns. The remarkable statistic that almost all politicians in China are STEM graduates reflects a deliberate national strategy that merits understanding beyond superficial interpretation. This preference stems not from anti-intellectualism but from a philosophical orientation that prioritises technical competence, systematic thinking, and evidence based decision making in governance. The dominance of engineers and scientists in Chinese leadership positions represents a conscious commitment to what might be termed the “engineering mindset” applied to social challenges methodical, practical, and oriented toward tangible outcomes rather than ideological abstraction.
The global distribution of STEM graduates further illuminates China’s strategic positioning. Since the mid 2000s, China has surpassed the United States in the number of STEM PhD graduates, creating a substantial foundation of technical expertise that informs its approach to social and economic development. This educational emphasis has produced a political and administrative class equipped to evaluate complex technological systems, infrastructure projects, economic and social models with a degree of technical literacy rarely found in Western governments dominated by legal and sociological backgrounds. The cognitive style cultivated by advanced STEM education systematic, quantitative, and oriented toward practical problem solving has profoundly shaped China’s governance model and development outcomes.
The relationship between disciplinary background and analytical capability is often misunderstood. While any field has varying levels of practitioner quality, the foundational training in STEM disciplines provides a distinct and powerful framework for systematic problem-solving and evidence-based reasoning. It is this rigorous methodological core that the original email rightly highlights. Although accomplished sociologists can certainly employ robust analysis, the structural incentives and ingrained epistemological standards within STEM fields are uniquely focused on cultivating objective analytical capability, making such skills a fundamental and reliable outcome of a STEM education. STEM fields generally enforce much stricter accountability to empirical reality through mechanisms like experimental replication and mathematical verification. Meanwhile, the peer review processes in contemporary Western sociology have sometimes evolved to enforce ideological conformity rather than methodological rigor, creating environments where scholarship can become detached from evidentiary standards.
The pedagogical implications of this divide are substantial.
The criticism that Western sociology education has abandoned analytical skills development in favour of teaching students to “believe this because this is a reliable source” highlights a fundamental divergence from STEM education’s emphasis on deriving conclusions from evidence. This difference in educational philosophy produces graduates with distinct cognitive approaches to information evaluation. STEM graduates typically learn to verify claims through independent analysis, while sociology students in the Western model are often trained to defer to designated authoritative sources, creating what critics term a “priesthood” model of knowledge transmission rather than one based on demonstrable mastery of analytical techniques.
China’s approach to sociological education appears to be evolving in conscious distinction from this Western model. Rather than rejecting sociology entirely, Chinese institutions seem to be pushing toward what might be termed a “harder” sociological science one that incorporates more quantitative methods, empirical verification, and analytical rigor closer to STEM standards. This alignment with scientific approaches reflects the broader integration of technical thinking into Chinese administrative culture and educational philosophy. The result is an ongoing transformation of sociological practice in China.
The demographic and cognitive patterns explored in this section reveal fundamental differences in how societies structure knowledge production and decision making. China’s STEM dominated leadership and technically oriented approach to social science represents a distinctive model that contrasts sharply with Western patterns where sociological and legal backgrounds predominate in leadership positions. These differences in educational emphasis and cognitive approach have profound implications for how societies understand and address complex challenges, setting the stage for the final section’s exploration of how China might develop a unique sociological paradigm that integrates technical rigor with social understanding.
Building a distinct Chinese sociological paradigm: the path forward
The critiques examined previously demand a constructive vision for the future of sociology in China. This final section outlines a viable path beyond Western theoretical dependency, focusing on the “subjectivity turn” as the foundation for a discipline balancing scientific rigor with cultural relevance.
Professor Liu Jianjun’s “subjectivity turn” offers the crucial epistemological shift required. This approach rejects the universal application of Western frameworks, instead advocating for analytical tools derived from China’s philosophical traditions and social practices. It represents neither anti-Western reaction nor traditionalist revival, but rather a confident reorientation toward indigenous knowledge production. This transformation acknowledges that valid social understanding must emerge from a society’s own conceptual vocabulary rather than imported theoretical constructs.
Methodological innovation forms the practical core of this transformation. The development of “sinicized methodologies” requires recalibrating both quantitative and qualitative approaches to ensure they capture what is socially significant within Chinese contexts. Quantitative methods must move beyond mechanical application of Western indicators, while qualitative approaches need sensitivity to distinctive Chinese social patterns. The objective is creating research frameworks that are simultaneously scientifically rigorous and culturally appropriate, generating knowledge that resonates with Chinese social reality.
This reconstruction demands systematic engagement with China’s intellectual heritage. Classical Chinese social thought, particularly Confucian analyses of social harmony, provides substantial resources for theoretical development when integrated with contemporary analytical approaches. The synthesis of Marxist methodology with Chinese cultural resources offers particularly promising avenues for innovation that remain largely unexplored in Western sociology.
Forging an independent path
Western sociology’s ideological decline creates both challenge and opportunity for China. Whilst imported methodologies have fostered epistemological dependency amongst Chinese scholars, the nation’s strong STEM foundation and civilisational perspective enable development of a rigorous alternative. The path forward requires neither wholesale rejection nor uncritical adoption of Western approaches, but selective integration within frameworks rooted in Chinese philosophical traditions and social realities. As Western sociology abandons analytical rigour, China’s “subjectivity turn” signals emergence of a genuinely plural global knowledge landscape where diverse civilisational traditions contribute authentic sociological understanding.
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本文中文版：
Dit artikel in het Nederlands: De grote sociologische divergentie
Endnotes
[1] Liu Jianjun: The false faith in social sciences 14/06/2025 https://www.eastisread.com/p/liu-jianjun-the-false-faith-in-social
