Civil Society in China and Taiwan

Agency, Class and Boundaries

Taru Salmenkari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367209193
• eBook ISBN: 9781317373865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The concept of 'civil society' has often been used as a devise for differentiating China from other cultures. Though sometimes portrayed as a growing phenomenon, Chinese civil society is frequently said to be non-existent. Definitional deficiencies have, therefore, led to both a simplification and a narrow appreciation of societal developments in China.

By examining various forms of activity, such as NGOs, residential movements, and alternative spaces, this book, however, reassesses the idea of Chinese civil society. Through questioning current methodological, theoretical and structural assumptions, it uses an empirical approach to criticize and expand upon existing understandings of civil society as it is applied in the field of Chinese Studies. Based upon ethnographic research undertaken among activists in both mainland China and Taiwan, it examines issues such as inequality, the mobilizing skills needed for civil society activities, and the technologies which exist to maintain the boundary between state and society.

Offering an analysis of Chinese civil society in the context of modernization, social and economic liberalization, and international civil society promotion, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies, as well as development studies and civil society studies.

1 On the fragmented nature of civil society

Autonomous spaces, resistance and social mediation

Civil society is no simple concept. It has a history of over 2000 years, during which it has been applied to various activities and conditions. Although the concept generally contains the idea of collective pursuits involving principles of self-organization, pluralism, non-violence, and individual freedom, its connotations are many (Kocka 2006). Krishan Kumar (1993), for example, finds that civil society has been used to refer to social order of citizenship, the arena of self-seeking economic actors, a principle of ethical life, a process of mediation in the society as a whole, and voluntary association in social space. According to Mary Kaldor (2003), civil society can refer to a political community safeguarded by the rule of law, the arena of ethical life between state and family, active citizenship and self-organization outside the state, a non-profit sector providing social services, and an arena of plurality and contestation. For John Ehrenberg (1999), civil society manifests itself as a politically organized community, as a legally protected sphere for pursuit of economic interest and freedom, or as a solidary community oriented toward the common good. Alison van Rooy (2000) finds that scholars talk about civil society as civic values and norms, as a sum of organizations in the voluntary sector, as a space for action, as a moment in historical development, as anti-hegemonic social mobilization, and as a counterweight to the state. For Michael Edwards (2004), civil society, in its various references to associational life, the good society, or the public sphere, has economic, social, and political roles to play. In addition to all these alternative conceptualizations of civil society, China could use East European dissidents’ understanding of civil society as oppositional social enclaves autonomous from state control and official ideology (Smolar 1996). Not all of these understandings come neatly together. For example, civil society can refer to both the realms of solidarity and of selfish interests (Alexander 1997).

The variety of issues discussed under the rubric of civil society is also reflected in various translations of that term into Chinese. There is not one term for civil society in Chinese, but at least five commonly used ones. Of them, ‘citizen society’ (gongmin shehui) emphasizes that civil society is an arena where people practice their citizenship. The aspects of civil society connected to this idea include rights for free speech, association, and other activities that make it possible to perform one’s citizenship. According to Western understanding, these civil society activities should be protected legally against state intrusion. Citizenship naturally refers to the political nature of civil society activities. Because civil society is an arena for citizen involvement in public affairs it naturally gravitates toward the state. A related term, ‘public society’ (gonggong shehui) emphasizes the role of civil society in the formation of public opinion, but could also include less political public activities and a promotion of the public good through social activities. The Chinese term underlining organization outside the state is ‘minjian society’ (minjian shehui), literally expecting that activities are organized “among the people,” and not by officials. ‘Urban society’ (shimin shehui) refers to a special organizational form of voluntariness, openness, and equality that is possible in society, but not typical for traditional communities where social ties are burdened by personal obligations, hierarchies, and reputations. Finally, ‘civilized society’ (wenming shehui) refers to civic virtues so central for civil society, in opposition to uncivil societies that might be outside of the reach of the state but do not qualify as civil society for their lack of civility. This aspect correctly warns against adopting non-state as the only criterion for civil society, as some non-state organizations, such as criminal gangs or violent hate groups, do not belong to civil society.

Obviously, civil society is much more than just the autonomous social organizations China studies often consider it to be (e.g., Knup 1997, Ma 2002, Zhang and Baum 2004, Chan 2012). There are various ways people can come together to be active in civil society. Civil society comes into existence through fragmented activities across society and through networks between various actors (Wood 1990, Walzer 1992, Fatton 1995, Mischea and Pattison 2000). To use a description by Jürgen Habermas, various publics in civil society have “fluid temporal, social, and substantive boundaries” and, despite partly relying on the existing associational framework, they “resist organization as a whole” (Habermas 1996, p. 307). Vivek Bhandari (2006) goes so far as to question the singularity of civil society because its ability to accommodate multiple publics and diverse political repertoires and discourses and its evasion of any particular institutional and topographic space rather appears to him as if there were multiple civil societies at work simultaneously. Plurality in civil society contributes to pluralism of activities, voices, and organizations (Diamond 1994, Glasius et al. 2004). Not only are the organizational forms in civil society diverse, but they are also constantly changing and variably reacting to and hybridizing with the spheres of state and business (Lewis 2004, Wijkström 2011). Therefore, there is considerable disagreement on what kind of associations are advantageous for civil society depending on what civil society is presumed to do. Depending on whether civil society is hoped to be an arena of interest representation, a base for the public sphere and social movements, an arena of social integration, or a foundation for social cohesion, scholars respectively turn to interest groups, advocacy NGOs and social movement organizations, service organizations, or community organizations (Wollebæk and Selle 2008).

Truncating civil society to certain limited forms of organizations only runs the risk that civil society would not have the capacity to do everything that is understood to take place in a dense and pluralistic civil society. According to critics, this indeed has happened in many third world countries where Western donors have promoted only certain types of civil society organizations and ignored local organizations, which have traditionally fulfilled many roles central for civil society. The resulting simplistic organizational arena has failed to provide platforms for local participation, contribute to the public sphere and represent local interests (Kasfir 1998, Edwards 2004, Rooy 2000, Mercer 2002). Some of the donor-promoted criteria, such as autonomy, have proven not to be important organizational characteristics to produce the expected democratic effects in a civil society organization (Uhlin 2009). Along with many Western donors, these simplistic organizational criteria also inform mainstream Chinese studies. Many of their demands for Chinese civil society are challenging even for many democratic West European countries, even if these countries can show dense associational memberships and strong social organizations involved in policymaking (Selle and Wollebæk 2010, Strachwitz and Zimmer 2010, Trägårdh 2010). This is not surprising because civil societies are diverse and their institutional contexts and historical trajectories encourage different forms of self-organization. Similarly, it is not surprising because for much of its history, civil society has been a normative concept used to discuss desirable political societies rather than a tool to describe a society as it was. Therefore, the gaps between the ideal and practice are only to be expected even in Western civil societies.

This chapter will look into fragmented activities in civil society.¹ No individual case makes a civil society, but there is no civil society without plentiful individual cases of social activity. This chapter will show that these individual cases do not help building civil society with all of its characteristics, but only with some. Therefore, it challenges attempts to detect some kind of general civil society development, such as civil society as a whole being underdeveloped or becoming stronger, based exclusively on the observation of certain types of civil society activity. In China studies this expectation is common (Nevitt 1996, He 2003, Shieh and Deng 2011).

Elsewhere scholars have shown that such a simplistic approach is faulty. Civil society as social organization does not always coincide with civil society as civic virtues (Whitehead 1997). Civil society as associational activity does not always support civil society as a counterweight to the state nor as a representative of ordinary people (Mercer 2002, Hearn 2001). No single type of civil society actors contribute simultaneously to democratic transitions, democratic consolidations and to market-oriented reforms, which all rely on different types of civic association (Jenkins 2001). Civil society as a counterweight to the state provides fewer opportunities for democratic participation by an active citizenry and for learning democratic values than republican ideas of civil society as complementary to the state (Hahn-Fuhr and Worschech 2014).

This chapter argues that China studies should recognize that civil society is much more than just non-state activity. In fact, all real civil societies have heterogenous relationships to the state (Allen 1997, Fisher 1997). Activities fitting to different conceptualizations of civil society have different relations to the state, some opposing and others supporting it, others having either dialogue or partnership with it, and some others even working apart from it or beyond it (Chambers and Kopstein 2008). The concept ‘civil society’ refers to a wide variety of societal organization and activities contributing to the formation of this specific sphere. The pluralistic and non-centralized nature of civil society means that it becomes constituted through fragmented, localized, and temporal forms of social association, which oftentimes are in tension with one another. Various activities and processes can be analyzed as civil society development in China and Taiwan, but diverging characteristics of these activities and processes likewise mean that one type of development does not automatically contribute to civil society development on all fronts. Therefore, civil society development is necessarily an uneven process without a definite outcome.

My research warns against unidimensional investigation, which lumps together various civil society developments that are separate and can be in tension with one another. Horizontal links within civil society (as well as vertical links to the state) take different forms depending on whether civil society refers to voluntary association, active citizenship, non-profit charitable activity, recluses of moral autonomy under totalitarian governments, social spheres for pursuing interests, social movements struggling against hegemonic powers, activities for protecting legal rights and freedoms, or spheres of social and deliberative power. This chapter will show that one type of civil society activity seldom contributes to all other types and can be in discord with other forms of sociability characterizing civil society.

Chinese studies and civil society

In China studies, civil society is examined as social space for autonomous activities, as associational space, as collective activities for protecting private interests, and as social opposition to the government. In addition, those (Zhang 1997, Unger and Chan 1995) investigating the possibility of societal corporatism in China are suggesting that civil society could mean social negotiation of interests. All of these functions of civil society are assumed to expand social space beyond state control. However, there can be conflicts between these various actualizations of civil society.

China studies commonly pay attention to business associations (Alpermann 2006, Wank 1995, Yep 2000, Foster 2002, Yu et al. 2012) and homeowners unions (Yip 2014, Shi and Cai 2006, Wang et al. 2012, Wang et al. 2013, Merle 2014) as potential building blocks for civil society. The background assumption is that civil society emerges from the efforts to defend property interests. This approach perceives civil society as a social field of competing private interests. However, other China scholars study nongovernmental organizations working with public-interest issues such as environment, education, and disaster relief (Hsu 2008, Lu 2007, Jacka 2010, Roney 2011, Hildebrandt 2013). The interest in these organizations arises from a different conception of civil society. It perceives civil society as a field of solidarity and voluntary activity for doing good and for opposing inequalities created by dominant state and market structures. Civil societies are pluralistic places where there is space for articulating both interests and visions of common good. However, it is naive to think that there is never conflict between them and that tensions never lead to non-public strategies or social invitations for applying state power to constrain others.

Some China scholars include in civil society any non-state space, even if it is familist (Lagerkvist 2015), religiously sectarian (Leung 2002), or unorganized (Solinger 1993). In these writings ‘civil society’ becomes awkwardly close to ‘society,’ which in contemporary analysis is a separate concept. Clans, for example, can be vehicles for actual social organization and interest representation (Tsai 2007), but many of the principles that characterize civil society, such as voluntariness, openness, and equality (Tönnies 2001), are missing. Familist, localist, and sectarian organization can obstruct a development of civil-society-type of sociability and association. They will not contribute to building civil society as a shared public sphere, but to “anarchic fragmentation” (Madsen 1993, p. 190). In civil society theory, civil society is demarcated not only from the state but also from traditional community. Civil society consists of individuals who are free from social pressures and obligations of a small community and therefore able to associate for causes they themselves choose. In village clans and religious sects, members often have no such freedoms but become subjected to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 On the fragmented nature of civil society: autonomous spaces, resistance and social mediation
• 2 Encountering the state in Taiwan: driving home the state-society boundary
• 3 Maintaining and manipulating boundaries: how Chinese advocacy NGOs encounter the state
• 4 Rising against evictions in Taiwan: rights, property, and collective action
• 5 Entrepreneurial civil society in Shanghai: when economic independence fails to produce political demands
• Conclusions
• Index