Principles of Political Science

Author: Jing Yuejin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-02-01
Features: The writing of this book took a considerable amount of time from proposal to completion, and yet, even when delivering it to the publisher, we still felt the pressure to revise. Writing is not like unraveling a cocoon—once you grasp the thread, the rest follows smoothly—but rather an interactive process between thinking and writing. In many cases, it is precisely during the process of selecting and arranging words that the mind becomes clear. Therefore, for the author, writing is not just a process of reading, synthesizing, and digesting, but also a process of learning and reflection. Through writing, we have come to understand our own limitations and clarified the direction for further thinking. In this sense, we are on the same journey as the readers. During the writing process, the authors of this book referred to a large number of academic works and similar textbooks, and it is impossible to list them all in the references. Considering the conciseness of a textbook, we have tried to select versions that are more suitable for beginners to read and minimized unnecessary citations, for which we apologize. Nevertheless, the notes in this book may still be more numerous than those in a general textbook. To this end, the authors can only offer a small measure of self-consolation: they may help the readers in further reading and reflection. This book is the result of collective collaboration. The basic framework of the entire book was determined after several rounds of discussions by the editors, while the specific topics and content of each chapter were developed with full autonomy and initiative by the individual contributors. In this enjoyable collaboration, the authors brought in different styles, leaving their own marks in the book in various ways. The final editing did not pursue rigid consistency in language and style, as long as it did not affect the expression of the content, and respected the basic writing style of each chapter's author.