Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere

Abstract

The question of whether China ever had a public sphere or civil society attracts our attention, but has also become vexed, because it is relevant to the contemporary issue of how (or whether) democratic reforms can be introduced into the People's Republic of China. Other problems arise from the specific associations of these terms with the histories of modem Europe (especially Western Europe) and the United States. Civil society did not develop along one path even in Western democracies, and one cannot expect any of the Western patterns to be duplicated in the very different Chinese historical contexts. This is liot, however, to say that state dominance was complete or inevitable. I will argue that from the late Ming onward there was a continuous, slowly developing, public sphere in China involving both state and social power, but it was different from the beginnings of civil society in the West. Some institutions and practices characteristic of civil society appeared in the late nineteenth century and expanded during the first three decades of the twentieth century. A full civil society did not emerge, in part because of the extremely unfavorable historical context of the 1930s and 1940s. Even if it had been successfully established, however, the form would have diverged from those in Western democracies.