On The Political Study Of David Lanpton In The United States

David M. Lampton is a famous American political scholar specialization in Chinese studies, who has been labeled as the most influential one studying China according to China Foreign Affairs University. His impacts lies not only in the academic field, but are also reflected in US government policy to China. Apart from Chinese domestic politics, such as policy process and political elites, David Lampton also cares about Sino-America relationships. As previous scholars have emphasized Lampton’s research of the relationship between the two great powers, this paper will concentrate on his insights about Chinese domestic politics.With the help of Oksenberg, David M. Lampton began his research career from Chinese public health policies in the communist era. He used policy arena approach to study Chinese health policy during The Great Leap Forward, and named policy-making "the divided system". Moreover, the time between 1949-1974 saw the changes of policy system:from "the bureaucratic system" to "the divided system" and "the central coordinate system".In the reform and open era, David Lampton’s knowledge about Chinese policy-making system changed a lot. "Bargaining system" was used by him to describe the Chinese policy-making system, including policy formation and policy implementation. Based on the bargaining system, David Lampton, along with Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg developed the concept of "fragmented authoritarianism", and applied it to Chinese foreign policy-making.However, the concept faced some challenge later, some Chinese scholars criticized and changed it with "consensus system of policy making" to explain Chinese policy process post-2000. Some other foreign scholars updated the " fragmented authoritarianism" to a 2.0 version, in response to the new circumstance in China.In addition of policy process, David M. Lampton also cared about Chinese elites, including their evolution and mobilization. As for Lampton, the Chinese elites have different paths to power with different strategies, sometimes with some luck. And from communist period to open era, the Chinese leaders have changed from traditional and charisma ones to legal-rational ones, in Max Weber’s perspective, and from transformational ones to transactional ones, in James MacGregor Burns’ perspective.One of the approaches David Lampton used to study Chinese politics is the "ethnographic" tradition of interviewing, through which David Lampton has interviewed lots of Chinese officers and citizens, and has built a big database for Chinese studies. Besides, case study and comparative method are also David Lampton’s important tools to observe and study China.