"Public Sphere "/"Civil Society" in China?

Abstract

The concepts of bourgeois public sphere and society as they have been applied to China presuppose a dichotomous opposition between state and society. If we adhere to such a presupposition, we run the risk of reducing the debate here to little more than an argument over whose influence was greater in the phenomena under discussion, society's or the state's. I suggest here that Habermas himself in fact proposed a more sophisticated alternative construct that can be developed into a resolution of the issues at hand. The binary opposition between state and society, I argue, is an ideal abstracted from early modern and modern Western experience that is inappropriate for China. We need to employ instead a trinary conception, with a third space in between state and society, in which both participated. This third realm, moreover, took on characteristics and institutional forms over time that need to be understood on their own terms. I discuss briefly some examples of this third realm in imperial, Republican, and contemporary China. The ideas and empirical information come from my two current projects, on civil justice and on the changing rural community, as well as from my past work on rural North China (Huang, 1985) and the Yangzi delta (Huang, 1990).