Civil Society in China- A Dynamic Field of Study-2003

Features  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press features Civil Society in China: A Dynamic Field of Study Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth Perry, editors. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . ix,  pp. Hardcover,  . Paperback,  . Deborah S. Davis, editor. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, . xiii,  pp. Hardcover,  . Paperback,  . Randy Kluver and John H. Powers, editors. Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities. Stamford, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, . xii,  pp. Hardcover,  . Paperback,  . Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, editors. Civil Society in China. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, . xii,  pp. Hardcover,  . Paperback,  . Richard Madsen. China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, . xiii,  pp. Paperback,  . Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan. In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . x,  pp. Hardcover,  . Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, editors. Chinese Society: Change, Con- flict and Resistance. London: Routledge, . xii,  pp. Hardcover,  . Paperback,  . The seven books under review here were not chosen in any well-planned way to reflect all the major recent achievements in research on civil society in China. Some of them happened to be sent by the publishers for review; a few came at my request. While this short list is far from complete, it provides an adequate starting Mary Botto  China Review International: Vol. , No. , Spring  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press point for a general review of the field. Much of my discussion will refer to these books but will not be limited to them. My main goal is to delineate the achieve- ments and challenges of this new field. I will start with a brief discussion of the initial academic interest, followed by a survey of the first major debate in this area. I will then devote three separate sections to the four central components of civil society: public sphere, social organizations, individual autonomy, and popu- lar resistance. The classification of civil society into these four components is based on my understanding of how the concept is defined and used in the current literature. Some scholars may focus more on associational life than on individuals. Others may be more interested in the public sphere than in popular protest. But it is helpful, if only to structure the analysis that follows, to think of these as inter- related elements of a civil society, a more or less organized public realm for the protection of the rights of citizens and the construction of civic values, sometimes through collective protest. In the concluding part of this essay, I will make several general observations about the state of the field and describe some future research areas. My general con- clusion is that the study of civil society in China has been a dynamic field and will remain so because many new research questions invite explorations and answers. Initial Interest Academic interest in civil society in China arose in response to the world-histori- cal events of : the student protests in China and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe. Xin Gu provides a useful review of the initial interest. He credits the Danish scholar Clemens Strubbe Ostergaard as the first to introduce the con- cept of “civil society” into this academic discourse and the American scholar Craig Calhoun as the first to use the related concept of “public sphere.” In both cases these concepts were used to analyze the  student movement. Ostergaard argues that the significant changes in Chinese society before  had created a “nascent civil society” of citizen groups and thus provided a social basis for the movement. While Calhoun’s analysis focuses on how the movement itself trans- formed Tiananmen Square from an official ceremonial space into a public sphere of critical discourse, he suggests that the cultural debates and mass media dis- course (especially that surrounding the TV series River Elegy [Heshang]) before the movement had an impact on the rise of the movement. In both cases, then, the concepts of civil society and public sphere were used to explain the emergence of the student movement. The starting point of the analysis is the existence of some form of civil society and public sphere before . Following the two essays mentioned above, numerous other works on the student movement appeared within a period of about five years that directly or indirectly addressed issues of civil society and public sphere. These included stud- ies of civil society activities before and during the movement, the transformation Features  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press of the Chinese media during the movement period, organizations and citizen groups during the movement, and the dynamics of the protest. These works set the agenda for the rise of a dynamic field in studies of contemporary China: the study of Chinese civil society. The  Symposium “Public Sphere” / “Civil Society” The initial interest in Chinese civil society culminated in an influential symposium on civil society and public sphere in volume  of Modern China, published in . The symposium consists of six articles representing some very different views. Mary Rankin and William Rowe argue that a Chinese civil society and public sphere existed in late imperial China, although they were not exactly the same as their counterparts in eighteenth-century Europe due to the differences in histori- cal context. Adopting a stringent concept of civil society and public sphere, Frederic Wakeman dismisses these arguments, arguing that the so-called civil so- ciety and public sphere in late imperial China were never quite autonomous from state power. On the same basis, Wakeman rejects the view of a reemerging civil society in China in the years before the  student movement. Philip Huang agrees with Wakeman that the concept of public sphere is value-laden and his- torically specific and therefore hard to apply to Chinese realities. At the same time, however, Huang recognizes that insofar as Habermas’ concept of “public sphere” is used to address changing state-society relations, it is potentially important. To render it useful for studying China, Huang proposes to substitute “third realm” for “civil society” and “public sphere.” For him, the concept of the “third realm” is a value-neutral category referring to a third space distinct from state and society. While Wakeman and Huang both start with Habermas, Heath Chamberlain’s conceptual starting point is Tocqueville. Chamberlain emphasizes civil society as a civic and moral community working together for the common good. He argues that by this standard much of the academic attention to civil society in China is misplaced. China’s civil society is not at the barricades nor in the world of intel- lectual activity, but in the industrial workplace and the realm of civil law. Cham- berlain is especially interested in the development of legal procedures and in whether Chinese citizens resort to formal procedures rather than informal social mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. Richard Madsen shares Chamber- lain’s concern with civic and moral communities. He argues that not all kinds of associations and organizations are civic, noting that “some are certainly more ‘civil’ than others. . . . Those with the quality of ‘civility’ might eventually contrib- ute to the creation of a democratic public sphere. Those without it may simply push China closer toward anarchic fragmentation.” Overall, this symposium exerted an important influence on the study of civil society in China. The authors’ careful problematization and reexamination of con-  China Review International: Vol. , No. , Spring  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press ceptual issues must have been instrumental in cautioning researchers to take a more nuanced and historically informed approach to the study of Chinese civil society. The Chinese Discourse on Civil Society Even before the Western debates on Chinese civil society began, Chinese intellec- tuals were already starting to use variants of the concept. As Shuyun Ma, Baogang He, and Yijiang Ding have shown, Chinese intellectuals have made many at- tempts to use the Western concept of civil society to analyze Chinese realities, producing what may be called a Chinese discourse on civil society. The mere ex- istence of such a discourse indicates the continuing relevance of the concept. More interesting, however, are two distinct features in this Chinese discourse. First, while Western scholars debate the feasibility or unfeasibility of transplanting the concept to China and the presence or absence of civil society in China, this did not seem to be much of an issue for Chinese intellectuals. Following the tradi- tion of their May Fourth predecessors, many Chinese intellectuals in the s were still adamant proponents of a Chinese enlightenment modeled on the ideals of the European Enlightenment. The initial focus of China’s domestic discussion of civil society was on individual rights and freedom. The political culture of the PRC had condemned individual rights as “bourgeois.” In the mid-s, Chinese theoreticians reimported the notion of individual rights through ingenious rein- terpretations of Marx’s classical writings. Shen Yue, for example, argues that the term “bourgeois rights,” a standard Chinese translation of Marx’s German term bürgerliche, should be translated as “townspeople’s rights.” Because “towns- people” (shimin) includes both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, townspeople’s rights would be a class-neutral concept applicable to both classes. The political import of such an interpretation is clear: it was an attempt to reintroduce the no- tion of individual rights. To accommodate this notion to China’s political context, Chinese intellectuals did not go so far as to reject collective values or the role of the state in fostering such civic virtues. They stressed the importance of citizen rights, but also maintained that citizens in a civil society would be in a harmonious relationship with the state. This moderate view among domestic intellectuals forms a contrast with a more radical view propounded by intellectuals who went into exile after the re- pression of the  student movement. The radical view holds that the most im- portant function of a civil society is to challenge and oppose the state. From this perspective, underground and secret organizations would be considered as part of civil society, a view that is absent in the original Western concept of civil society. The contrasting views of China’s domestic intellectuals and those in exile no doubt reflect differences in the authors’ political situations and personal experiences. They also reflect two very different visions of civil society. As Madsen Features  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press puts it, the Anglo-American vision based on thinkers like John Locke, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith mistrusts the power of the state and emphasizes the independence of civil society. In contrast, the Continental European vision based on the work of thinkers like Montesquieu and Hegel takes a more positive view of the state and emphasizes the role of the state in the fostering of community and civil society. Although both visions underlie the Chinese discourse on civil soci- ety as much as the debate in the Modern China symposium, they are not explicitly stated, so that at least part of the disagreements among scholars are due to differ- ences in their visions of civil society. Following the conceptual terrain opened up by earlier studies of Chinese civil society, I will divide the following discussion into three parts, focusing, respect- ively, on public sphere, social organizations, and individual rights and protest. Public Sphere Two of the seven books under review here, both edited volumes, devote consider- able space to the public sphere in China: The Consumer Revolution in Urban China and Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities. The latter con- tains nineteen essays in four parts: () civic discourse and national identity, () emerging patterns of discourse in Chinese civil societies, () modes of civic dis- course in Chinese communities, and () civic discourse between China and the world. Although most of the essays deal with the PRC, a few are concerned only with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities in North America. The only one that explicitly uses the concept of public sphere is a study of call-in talk shows in Taiwan. The most distinct feature of this volume is, as the title suggests, its focus on civic discourse. This probably reflects the disciplinary orien- tations of the two editors (Randy Kluver is a scholar of speech and rhetoric while John Powers specializes in communication studies), but it also represents a broader view of the public sphere—not the public sphere of Habermasian ratio- nal discourse among citizens and social groups only but that of civic communica- tion among social groups as well as between citizens and the government, among government agencies, and between governments. Their guiding assumption in broadening the discussion is that “civil society is created through the discursive practices of the people who identify with the society.” Thus, for the authors in this volume, civic communication may be about explicitly political issues, but it may also be about movies, literature, TV shows, and even kan dashan (daily con- versations or chats). Their analysis of communication in informal social settings shows that the public sphere has not only the political function of forming public opinions but also the social function of strengthening communities. To a certain extent, the authors in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China share this interest in the social functions of the public sphere. This book contains fourteen essays divided into two parts. Part  is devoted to the consumer revolu-  China Review International: Vol. , No. , Spring  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press tion in the domestic sphere. The essays in this part focus on how changing con- sumption patterns are related to individuality. I will come back to these later. Part  focuses on how economic changes have created new forms of consumption, which are simultaneously new spaces for public communication and socializing. With the exception of a chapter by David Wank, where he argues that new access to goods and services in markets does not necessarily enhance individual or group autonomy from authorities, all the contributions in this part point to one con- sistent conclusion: the new spaces for consumption and communication have al- tered the social experiences of Chinese citizens such that they can explore new identities and experience more individual autonomy. The authors are aware of the dark shadows of commercialization and the state, but by and large they see China’s consumption revolution as liberating for Chinese citizens. This thesis is expressed most clearly in Yunxiang Yan’s “Of Hamburger and Social Space.” Based on ethnographic research conducted in , Yan argues that McDonald’s attraction for Chinese customers does not come from its food but from the soci- ality of the space it provides to consumers. The space is sociable, because it gives customers a sense of public accessibility, a sense of equality between customers and restaurant employees, and, among women customers, even a sense of gender equality. For these reasons, while McDonald’s in the United States is a place for grabbing some fast food, in Beijing it is a place for friends and colleagues to hang out and communicate. The two books just discussed provide a basis for making some general obser- vations about the study of the public sphere in China. First, it seems that re- searchers are now careful to avoid the explicit use of the concept of public sphere, reflecting an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the concept. Instead, more value-neu- tral terms such as “social space” and “public space” are frequently used. Even where the “public sphere” is used explicitly, its definition is loosened and freed from its Habermasian origins. Thus, in his contribution to The Consumer Revolu- tion in Urban China, Krauss argues that “All societies have a public sphere.” For Krauss, the public monuments and parks in Nanjing, built by the state, are public spheres for the morning tango dancers, because the graceful steps of the dancers gradually push back the boundaries of the state by extending private pleasures into the public arena. In this sense, there is no telling “the difference between dancers and demonstrators” (p. ). Related to the relaxed use of the concept of public sphere is a broader con- cern with a variety of areas of social life as public spaces. The discussions about public sphere following the  movements centered on the official media and intellectual activities. These two volumes have brought the topic down to earth. Living-room conversations, hamburgers, greeting cards, telephone hotlines, discos, bowling alleys, and the like become the center of analysis and are shown to Features  © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press have socializing and communicative functions. They are spaces for public expres- sion and social networking. In light of this shift of attention away from the Habermasian concept of pub- lic sphere, is it time to jettison this concept? This appears to be a de facto practice among the authors just reviewed, but it is not really so upon closer examination. Whether the authors admit it or not, they are implicitly guided by the nor- mative meanings of Habermas’ concept. They may use alternative terms such as social space and public space, but they all imply that for the development of a Chinese civil society, it is better to have these spaces than not. The distinct contri- bution of these studies is the combination of the two visions of civil society re- ferred to above. The emphasis is no longer just on the political role of an inde- pendent public sphere, but also on the role of the public sphere in integrating social groups and communities. Social Organizations Four of the books reviewed here are explicitly concerned with social organizations: Civil Society in China, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society, and In Search of Civil Society: Mar- ket Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China. Three of the seven essays in Civil Society in China seek to answer the question of whether the concept of civil society is applicable to China. The other four are case studies intended to test the concept against situations in that country. The editors of the volume intend to showcase how scholars are coming to terms with the issue of civil society there. The result is unclear. The authors of the three con- ceptual studies differ in their views as wildly as those of the case studies. Such dis- agreements do not encourage readers to think that the debaters have come to terms