Prospects for civil society in China: a case study of Xiaoshan city (original) (raw)

Civil Society in China in the Eyes of a Polish Researcher of Civil Society

This article is situated in the humanistic sociology and social anthropology approach. In this approach, civil society is viewed as a society's style of culture with respect to individual participation in group life based on common moral order. Its objective is to try to determine the extent to which western conceptions of civil society can be transferred to Chinese culture. It also strives to reconstruct civil behaviour patterns in China from a historical perspective. The basic tenet of this article is that, in the course of its evolution, Chinese culture developed various motivation and action patterns which may be the beginnings of a civil engagement. It is possible to formulate such a tenet on the assumption that civil society in contemporary China is largely based on tradition. It is tradition which defines the forms of non-institutional, self-organizing "second society." One of the consequences of the adoption of this tenet is this article's focus on analysis of the barriers against, and opportunities for, further development of civil society in contemporary China.

Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe

International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), 1990

State Socialism 3 international developments into the next century, an understanding of reform takes on added urgency. It is at this moment, then, that the length of reform in a country like Hungary and its breadth across settings as culturally and historically diverse as China and Eastern Europe provide a critical mass of evidence for analyzing the problems endemic to centrally planned economies and the dilemmas faced in efforts to reform them. This book takes the first steps toward such a comparative analysis by presenting the results of new research on reforms in China and Eastern Europe. Its contributors include Wlodzimierz Brus and Janos Kornai, economists who have contributed to each stage of the reform debates in Eastern Europe and whose works are now stimulating much discussion in China, as well as representatives of a younger generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists, many of whom report on field research recently conducted in factories, cities, and villages in China and Eastern Europe. This set of essays is brought together, however, not simply to reach across the boundaries of disciplines and area studies or to publish a compendium of related findings, but because the research and analysis in these papers exemplify an emerging new perspective in the study of state socialism. This new perspective, whose broad contours will be outlined in this introduction, is developing as an alternative to the two major traditions-the theory of totalitarianism and modernization theory-that have dominated the specialized study of socialist societies in the postwar period.

The Question of Socialism in China: An Introduction

Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2023

Heady days of the Soviet revolution mooted questions of the contours of socialism. However, following World War II, questions of socialism would reappear on the Left agenda as indications spread of the Soviet Union not living up to Marx’s sketches of what a socialist society should look like. Following the Soviet collapse, the global Left was forced to both rethink basic questions of socialism and consider whether other societies self-identifying as socialist could be upheld as really existing exemplars of Marx’s vision for the human future. China, under Mao, was initially embraced by the Left as the new representative of really existing socialism. But, following the 1978 reforms of its economy towards markets and opening to international capital it fell out of favour in Left circles. Yet, China’s unparalleled successes among Third World economies in economic growth and poverty alleviation had, by the early twenty-first century, placed it once again in the crosshairs of Left debate over socialism. While vigorous debate swirled around the question of socialism in the erstwhile Soviet Union there has been less sustained debate over the question of socialism in China. What follows in this article and the Feature Section of the journal is an attempt to remedy this deficit by bringing international Left scholarship to bear upon the important question of the kind of society and economy that is represented by China.

Civil Society in China: The Search Continues

Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014

A common conception of civil society tells us that civil society should be at a minimum autonomous from the state. Some scholars have labeled this conception of civil society the ''political'' definition. 1 According to those who subscribe to this definition, civil society is ''the realm of organized social life that is…autonomous from the state.'' 2 More importantly, a civil society should be in ''permanent tension'' with the state.'' 3 In this manner, this conception suggests that a genuine civil society cannot be found in non-democracies, where civil society actors are ''more an instrument of state control than a mechanism of collective empowerment.'' 4 In his book about contemporary China and Vietnam, Andrew Wells-Dang voiced his disagreement with this characterization. Other scholars have made a similar observation long before Wells-Dang's book was published. In their book, which was published in 1996, Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan wrote that China's civil society in the reform era is an ''intermediate associational realm situated between the state on the one side and the basic building blocks of society on the other…, populated by social organizations which are separate, and enjoy some degree of autonomy, from the state and are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and are not those of AECOM or any other member of the AECOM organization.

Organizing Civil Society in Russia and China: A Comparative Approach

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013

Despite their authoritarian tendencies, the current regimes in Russia and China have both actively promoted stronger civil societies. This article explores this apparent paradox for insights both into the meaning of civil society and into the nature of governance in these two regimes. It argues that the social organizations that make up civil society both inhabit and construct a public sphere where individuals assist in their own governance. Recognizing that administered societies cannot compete in a globalizing economy, these regimes look to social organizations to perform functions previously left to the state, but at the same time use similar repertoires of regulation, revenue control, and repression to ensure such organizations do not transgress acceptable boundaries. Still, different notions of statesociety relations in the two countries have led to different patterns of social organizations in the two countries. In Russia, a sharp distinction between state and society has contributed to a government strategy that seeks to dominate the public sphere leaving little room for autonomous civic action. In China, by contrast, deeply embedded institutionalized accounts see state and society as overlapping spheres of activity, creating pyramid-like structures encompassing both state-based and more autonomous organizations, and allowing more room for negotiation between the two. Keywords Civil society. Market reform. Authoritarianism. Russia. China Ever since the velvet revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the term "civil society" has been intimately associated with democratic consolidation (see especially Diamond 1994). A robust civil society, it was argued, empowers citizens to participate in their own governance, express their demands more effectively, and keep states accountable. It seems curious, then, that the regimes in both China and Russia, not known for their commitment to democracy, should actively promote a stronger civil society in their own countries. Leaders in the Chinese Communist Party have praised the virtues of a "small government, big society"

China in Between Varieties of Capitalism and Communism

2016

This paper is challenging mainstream views about the contemporary Chinese system as a developmental state and a variety of capitalism. Based on a comparative analytical model (Csanadi, 1997, 2006) I will demonstrate that in China the general features of a communist system prevail to date, and that the „Chinese specifics” is a structural variety of those general features. I will point out why the Chinese system is neither capitalist nor post-socialist. Instead, it is a complex party-state system in the process of transformation comparable, but not identifyable - to all other party-state systems in their period of operation and transformation. Mainstream concepts of Chinese developmental state, state capitalism, socialist market economy, emerging system, hybrid system variegated capitalism, polymorphous state, centralized developmental autocracy, entrepreneurial state, instrumental development state and clientelist state may be detected embedded in and accomodated to this complex and ...

(2002) Civil Society in China: A Dynamic Field of Study

China Review International, 2003

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 ...