China's Development and Model Thinking

Summary Harald Bøckman, ‘China's Development and Model Thinking’, Forum for Development Studies, 1998:1, pp. 7–37. In development studies, different models may be applied in order to gain better understanding of the processes involved, especially for comparative purposes. In traditional Chinese thinking, we find a rather unique phenomenon which may be called ‘model thinking’. This is a different way of conceptualising models, namely by judging a phenomenon according to traditional indigenous moral socio-political models. This article shows how this mode of thinking applies examples, analogies and correlations in assessing new phenomena. It is asserted that this way of thinking is still very much alive in China, and that it constitutes an important part of how Chinese think about modern development and change. The article also discusses the difference between Western propositional thinking and Chinese model thinking, and attempts to characterise this mode of thinking in terms of Western epistemology.