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Over the last decade, the term “civil society” seems to have become naturalized, at least in Anglo-American discourse. It is now used in everyday development talk, though mostly without a great deal of reflection. Non-government organizations are routinely referred to as “civil society” or, alternatively, as the “third sector,” an add-on to the sectors of state and private capital. Conservative commentators express concern over what they perceive as its dwindling energy in western countries. Typically, they link the recovery of civic energies to the process of democratization, not only in the new democracies of eastern Europe but across the globe…the Middle East, for example, or the People’s Republic of China. In their view, civil society is the last best hope of democracy; it is the people, acting through voluntary organizations in local communities who will take back government from corrupt politicians and impersonal bureaucrats and put it in the hands of associations they themselves control.

It is an attractive, if somewhat anarchistic, vision of the future, a neo-liberal utopia. More progressive voices on the Left who have not yet given up on the social role of the state also champion civil society. But they see it less in terms of an ill-defined “community” than of political action in progressive social movements… against the war in Iraq, for the legalization of gay marriage, to save old-growth forests, to stop whaling, to protest globalization, for human rights, and so forth in a never-ending series of struggles for a more humane world. Rather than wishing to depoliticize the world, the Left sees an active civil society as the way to make governments more responsive to shared desire for a socially and environmentally sustainable and peaceful world.

When “civil society” can be used in such contrary ways, can be used indifferently by the Left and the Right, the term itself tends to lose meaning. Or at least it obliges us to critically reflect on its use. But rather than embark upon an archaeological expedition into political rhetoric with its constantly shifting meanings, I propose to take you on a journey to South America where I first encountered the political rhetoric of “civil society” in the 1970s, when it was indeed linked to a struggle for the return of democracy and a new discourse on citizen rights. In a brief theoretical interlude, I will then propose four models of civil society – the Tocquevillean, Habermasian, Castellsian, and Gramscian – before continuing on our journey to China, or rather to the precincts of western universities where the question of a civil society in its possible relevance for China has been intensively debated ever since the tragic debacle of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, when several hundred students were senselessly killed on orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I will then ask the question which of the four models I have identified can be applied to China, if any, and with what consequences. In a brief conclusion, I will return to the underlying theme of democratization and the prospects of civil society.
I
In Spanish Latin America, talking about the “poor” is above all political talk. The very language of poverty tends to define the politics. Until quite recently, the subjects of poverty discourse were of course never asked to state their own views. The Catholic Church, however, which has an institutional concern for the “poor,” and conservative members of the political class are typically inclined to use the terminology of poverty with its implication of Christian piety. In a more secular vein, this same class refers to the “poor” simply as el pueblo, in dim awareness that “the people” are indeed a majority or near-majority in their country. By the time I arrived in Chile in 1965, the conservative governing coalition had just been replaced by left-of-center Christian Democrats, and the more common expression substituting for the somewhat dismissive el pueblo was now the “popular sector” – el sector popular. In the development discourse of the time, the use of this term suggested that special programs would be launched to address some of the problems of poverty, such as affordable housing. A more activist language, championed by the Jesuits who advised the Christian Democrats on social policy, avoided the word poverty altogether, giving it a more sociological slant by speaking of marginalidad and los marginados, that is, of those who had been “marginalized” (though it was never established who or what might ultimately be responsible for their marginalization) with the implication that the challenge was how to “reintegrate” or “reincorporate” the victims of marginalization with the mainstream of Chilean society.

During the 1970s, however, the discourse on poverty gradually took a more radical turn, especially in Brazil from where it spread throughout Hispanic America. Seemingly out of nowhere, political activists started to speak of “citizens” (ciudadanos/as), “citizen rights,” and sociedad civil. Two influences converged to produce this new language: Marxism and Liberation Theology, ideologies that were gaining prominence at the time. But whatever its inspiration, the meaning was clear. The “poor” had entitlements by virtue of their citizenship, and it was the responsibility of the government to honor these entitlements in practice.

The frequent invocation of civil society occurred more or less simultaneously with a social movement called basismo, i.e., a movement that concerned itself with the conditions of life of, say, the lower one-third of the social pyramid. Its name derived from the idea of comunidades de base (base communities) or more accurately, ecclesiastical or Christian (base) communities, whose theological underpinnings were found in the writings of radicalized priests and theologians (Gutierrez 1973). Base communities, it was said, were modeled on early Christian gatherings in the Roman empire. Usually convened by a local priest who ministered to the “poor,” they were ostensibly occasions for reading and interpreting the scriptures with a slant towards the social gospel. With diplomatic ambiguity, the Vatican referred to ecclesiastical communities as the “popular church.” According to its advocates, the intention was to raise people’s awareness of the “objective” reasons for their abject condition of life and to instill in them a sense of their political rights as citizens. Incidentally, in a time of authoritarian military regimes, base communities were also widely interpreted as a call for greater democracy.

Before long, the advocacy of liberation theology along with its real-world counterparts in the “base communities” was squashed by a Vatican that feared the rise of the “popular church” as a dissident movement and by the authoritarian governments that were flourishing with American support from the sixties through the eighties, most notably in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The basismo movement had also to contend with competition from the Pentecostal and evangelical churches that were making headway throughout Latin America. What made Pentecostal Christianity so attractive to the political class was its non-political character. Among the popular sectors, its appeal was especially powerful among women, because it demanded abstinence from alcohol and promiscuity, provided for an emotional outlet in singing and fierce sermons, and told believers that to get ahead in the world, one had to lead a disciplined, virtuous life in Christ and work hard, a Protestant version of the medieval monkish saying, ora et labora. Then as now, the Pentecostal/evangelical survival strategy was strictly an individual one; it accepted the existing system of political and social relations as a given.

The popular appeal of Pentecostalism was one, if not the most important, reason why basismo ultimately declined (Burdick 1992). The missionary work of evangelical churches was well financed through mother congregations in the United States, while progressive Catholics struggled to keep their “popular church” filled. Not only was there an overall shortage of Catholic clergy in Latin America, but of those who were already ordained, only a small minority was prepared to share the life of the poor. And those who elected to do so were regarded with suspicion not only by the hierarchy (the Vatican had reacted quickly by replacing “red” Bishops with conservative stalwarts), but by the political class as well. The “popular church” fostered feelings of (class) solidarity, and its strategy was ultimately a political one. But it offered no concrete practices through which its noble ends might be accomplished. Its structural account of misery was an abstraction that failed precisely where the “moral rearmament” preached by the Pentecostals succeeded with their basic message: stop drinking, stop whoring, work hard. Properly motivated, anyone might be able to accomplish these mandates.

A secular version of basismo sprang up more or less simultaneously among some neo-Marxist intellectuals and others who came together as advocates of an alternative development. This intellectual movement had grown out of the dependency theory of underdevelopment (with its ostensible solution of an endogenous development). Among its leaders were economists, such as André Gunder Frank, Ignacy Sachs, and Osvaldo Sunkel, all with long experience in Chile and Brazil, but the international headquarters of the movement was in a small town on Lake Geneva, headed by an idealistic Swiss national, Mark Nerfin. My own orientation followed this movement to the point of publishing a small book, Empowerment, subtitled The Politics of Alternative Development (Friedmann 1993). By then, however, the Swiss office had already closed its doors, and many of the arguments for an alternative development were being mainstreamed into World Bank policy, including a focus on poverty, the natural environment, and the role of women.

In general, advocates of an alternative development had followed the basismo belief in community-based action that would leave the larger system of economic relations untouched. It was widely understood to be an approach to solving some everyday problems of poverty within a system that, left to itself, continued to generate poverty. During the past fifteen years, or more, its banner has been taken up by so-called non-governmental organizations (some that are faith-based, others funded by international donor agencies, but increasingly also NGOs working under government contracts) that view themselves as its principal agents (Edwards and Hulme 1996). Not surprisingly, NGOs and related community-based organizations are now generally identified as the “third sector,” that is, as “civil society,” and are working hand-in-hand with the governments of the day. Their work is characterized by attention to popular participation and self-help efforts by local communities of the poor, while the bulk of development aid goes towards infrastructure that meets the requirements of global capital. Although broadly speaking, their focus is on social projects, an overall anti-poverty strategy has not emerged, and NGOs don’t, as a rule, succeed even in coordinating their efforts within local communities where several NGO-sponsored projects might compete for the attention of local residents. On the contrary, many of them act like business enterprises that see each other as competitive rather than complementary. And like the Pentecostals, most NGOs avoid taking a political stance and are prepared to work with the powers that be. Their so-called poverty alleviation strategy gives the political class free reign to pursue their own agenda.

It would be wrong, however, to say that nothing significant has happened in Latin America since the mid-sixties. Civil society has not been brought to heel. A powerful sense of citizenship and citizen rights has taken hold of disempowered groups and continues to be asserted. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party, which is arguably an outgrowth of Paulo Freire’s consciousness-raising work among rural workers in the 1960s (Freire 1972) and of the basismo movement in the 70s and 80s, has consolidated its mandate not only in key cities, such as Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, but reached the pinnacle of power in 2002 when it captured the country’s Presidency under the leadership of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Brazil’s political class now has to share power with a party that enjoys a strong popular base. According to Wright and Wolford (2003), “there has been a kind of explosion of citizen initiatives since the dying days of the dictatorship [in Brazil] (326). Among the vigorous social movements they mention are a black consciousness movement with strong roots in local (urban) communities; the feminist and gay rights movements; a movement for indigenous rights; and an environmental movement. But the movement with the highest public profile is the militant Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) that emerged in 1984 with the support of the left wing of the Catholic Church and the newly founded Brazilian Workers Party. Today, with one million members and claiming to speak for five million dispossessed rural workers, it has adopted a strategy of land occupations (notably of large estates that are not being worked) and of establishing rural settlements called agrovilas, some of which have adopted cooperative (collective) forms of farming. These settlements offer a sense of community and, like the Pentecostals, enforce an ethic of virtuous living (no alcohol, equal rights for women, hard work). They provide education and health services, and are run along democratic lines (Rocha 2003; Wright and Wolford, op. cit).

Poverty in Brazil, as indeed elsewhere in Latin America, has of course not disappeared, and in some countries, it has probably deepened. But the disempowered masses are at least gaining a political voice and, conscious of their rights as citizens, are beginning to exert significant pressure on their governments for relief of their condition. Counter to early revolutionary dreams, they are fighting for inclusion in the system, not for its overthrow.

II
In Latin America, civil society was a moment in a political struggle to reclaim citizen rights and a contested rhetoric about poverty and its conditions. But different actors, at different times, assigned different meanings to the term. Activists on the Left used civil society as a fighting word to advocate democratization while claiming citizen rights for the poor. With the mainstreaming of an alternative development and the emergence of non-governmental organizations as the tool of a macro-strategy of poverty alleviation, civil society was re-named the “third sector” and harnessed to hegemonic rule. The concept itself was never theorized.

A brief theoretical reflection on civil society will therefore be necessary before we continue our journey to the People’s Republic of China. Without it, we cannot hope to make sense of how the concept is deployed by various scholars who, each in their own way, all hope for a democratization of Communist rule.

Over the past decade, a good many philosophical reflections on civil society have appeared in English (Cohen and Arato 1994; Keane 1998; Chambers and Kymlicka 2002). My intention here is not to review this literature; instead, I will propose four ways of “reading” civil society. The conceptual setting for such a reading is taken from political economy, where civil society appears as a sphere of action along with separate but overlapping spheres for the state and for (corporate) capital. To the extent that these spheres overlap, a public realm common to all macro-actors is created, a realm that, at least in principle, should be open to all citizens. In liberal democracies, this realm is identical with the polity as a whole. By implication, each of the three overlapping spheres of action is partly autonomous of the others, though in the nature of the case, this autonomy can never be absolute. The actions of our macro-actors will always be constrained by the existing strands of interdependency that link the three spheres to each other.

Given these broad theoretical considerations, the four models of civil society currently in use include the Toquevillean model of associative democracy, the Habermasian model of the public sphere, the Castellsian model of social movements, and the Gramscian model of hegemony. It is to a brief sketch of each of these that I now turn.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his political analysis of Democracy in America in 1835 (Tocqueville 1988). Among the many things that impressed this aristocratic traveler from France about the freshly minted democracy he visited were the numerous community-based organizations throughout the small towns and cities of America, forming a dense pattern of associational life. From this emerged the model of an associative democracy which posits “intermediate” organizations between the state and the individual. The model enjoys special favor today among neo-conservatives in Anglo-America suspicious of the powers vested in the state. In their view, the best state is one that governs least and empowers local communities to deal with public issues as they arise through organizations such as local churches, benevolent associations, athletic clubs, neighborhood houses, and the like in which participation is voluntary. From time to time, these associations may become politicized around an issue of special interest to them, but for the most part, intermediate organizations of the Tocquevillean kind are active for themselves alone rather than active in the public sphere.

The German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas formulated the second model of civil society in the course of his doctoral dissertation on the rise and decline of the public sphere in Western Europe in the years following the French Revolution (Habermas 1989; orig. 1962). In his view, consistent with our conceptual setting above, the public sphere encompasses all matters that emerge as the common concerns of a democratic polity. Its original model is the civic space of the Athenian agora where democratic (if not always rational) talk debated the issues of the day. In the late 18th century in France and England, a nascent bourgeoisie gradually became politically vocal finding its voice with the spread of newspapers, coffee houses, salons, and a “free-floating” intelligentsia. Drawing on this historical process, Habermasian civil society refers to people who in one way or another participate in democratic talk. We should remember, however, that democratic talk already assumes the existence of considerable freedom of speech and assembly, that is, of a certain form of political life. Where these conditions do not prevail, the Habermasian model cannot be said to apply.

Habermas himself talks about the rise and decline of the public sphere in western Europe. In particular, he deplores its displacement in his own time by the manipulation of public opinion by both the political class and the state. There are numerous other problems with his concept of civil society, all of which, in one way or another, are a result of the vast imbalances in the distribution of effective power in society. It is thus an overly idealized, discursive model, though one that is perhaps, and for just that reason, useful as a template or norm against which to measure actual performance. In another, more radical interpretation, one could argue that rather than a model based on open dialogue, the Habermasian public sphere is an oppositional or conflict model in which a politicized demos brings pressure to bear on the political class for structural reforms to limit the accumulation of power in the hands of the few and to allow for greater and more effective participation by ordinary citizens in political discourse, in other words, for a public sphere inclusive of all citizens.

The third model can be ascribed to the work of Manuel Castells and centers on the role of social movements. In this perspective, social movements represent a mobilization of civil society for political ends (Castells 1983; 1997). Castells himself was born in Spain and educated in France; the major part of his academic career, however, was spent in the United States where he retired recently from the University of California at Berkeley.

It has become a commonplace to speak of the so-called “new” social movements that became active in the decades following the end of World War II, among them the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-globalization movement, the environmental and women’s movements, the civil rights movement in the United States, and any number of what Castells refers to as “urban” movements for housing, gay rights, public transit, and so forth. Some of these social movements are essentially about resistance (anti-war, anti-nukes, anti-globalization); others are more pro-active and a source of socially progressive policy changes (indigenous rights, civil rights, women’s rights). Social movements are characteristically self-organized and self-financed. They are non-violent in their actions (the violent Islamic jihad is therefore not a social movement of a mobilized civil society), and most of them espouse strong moral convictions. Their organization is around small face-to-face groups that are networked into larger structures as needed, though formal organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, sometimes carry on the more routine work of the movement. Leadership is therefore diffused, and movements often have the capacity to act on a global scale, commensurate with the ability of global corporations.

Our fourth model of civil society, the Gramscian, is based on the concept of hegemony. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist theorist who languished for many years in a Fascist jail in Italy and died in 1935, asks an analytical question in his famous Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971): how do bourgeois regimes of power successfully maintain themselves with only minimal resort to overt coercion and violence? His answer is that this is accomplished through their ability to impose the hegemony of their ideology and culture by building a vast social consensus in support of the legitimacy of the existing system of power. This feat is accomplished through the public media, the educational apparatus, the entertainment industry, advertising, and other means, all of which fall more or less into line in support of the dominant system of relations. Dissenting voices, even when they are permitted rather than quelled, are either marginalized or co-opted.

Given this definition, the strategic question for Gramsci was how to disrupt societal consensus and establish a counter-hegemony in the midst of a consolidated hegemonic bourgeois system. The Italian Communist Party seized upon this notion and adopted what in effect was a cultural strategy, by creating a complete society of the like-minded within the larger society of which it was a part, but which it sought to win over to its side. To guide this struggle, Gramsci formulated his famous doctrine of the “war of position” (war in the trenches) and the “war of movement.” In this context, civil society referred to members of the working class and lower bourgeoisie whose consensus needed to be disrupted by holding out to them the possibility of an ethically superior way of life (and its underlying ideology) to the one that they still considered to be the “natural order” of things. To the extent that the Italian Communist Party was successful in this endeavor, Gramsci thought, it would gradually delegitimize the regime in power, and at some point, the war of position would transform itself into a war of movement in the course of which, deprived of its ideological support, the old regime would collapse and the Party would establish the new hegemony of a socialist society. In essence, the Gramscian model of civil society is a conflict model with a potential revolutionary outcome.

We are now ready to apply these four models, first, to the Latin American case. In the first phase, guided by Liberation Theology and various interpretations of Marxist thought and, not least, informed by an idealistic reading of the Cuban revolution, activists on the Left toyed with what could be called a modified Gramscian version of civil society. Both Christian base communities (for the Catholic Left) and the communitarianism implicit in much of the writing on alternative development (including my own) set their hopes on the possibility of a counter-hegemony that would eventually challenge the status quo, ushering in not only a genuine democracy but a new “social” economy that would embrace the least empowered sectors of civil society (Friedmann 1988). These hopes were dashed. Put simply, an effective political agency to usher in the “good society” was missing. More to the point, perhaps, communitarianism lacked broad public appeal even among the poor, though it still has a tenuous hold in the Brazilian landless movement whose cooperative settlements prefigure the socialist society of which its activists dream.

In the second phase, when base communities were already history and many aspects of alternative development were being mainstreamed into foreign aid policy (e.g., by the World Bank), and with the rise of non-governmental organizations, the Tocquevillean model of civil society could be said to have prevailed. NGOs were re-baptized the “third sector” and harnessed to a hegemonic policy of “capitalism with a human face,” the so-called poverty alleviation programs. Being for the most part non-political, and with their ambit of concern limited to local practice, the political threat NGOs might have posed to the state was deftly removed, and civil society was rendered harmless. It was now being touted as “social capital” and thus assimilated to economics (Fine 2001). As regards the Habermasian communicative model in its original version, it had no purchase anywhere, even though after the 1980s, more or less liberal democracies reappeared throughout the Luso-Hispanic world.

In the second version of a Habermasian civil society, in which the demos pressures the state for structural reforms, one could argue that to the extent that this was happening – as indeed it did happen in Brazil with the election of a Workers’ Party government in 2002 and, with the recent success of popular protests spearheaded by militant labor unions and indigenous associations, in bringing down a traditional authoritarian regime in Bolivia – the conflict version of the Habermasian model may be applied. Today, however, the operative model is chiefly the Castellsian model centered on social movements. The basismo movement of the 1960s was such, but its day has come and gone. Latin America now has other social mobilizations, among them movements for the rights of indigenous people, for women’s rights, for saving the environment.

III
We are now ready to shift our attention to China and the prospects there of a civil society. The tragic events on Tiananmen Square in 1989 set off a small cottage industry on the question of the prospective role of civil society in the democratization of the one-party state (Gold, 1990; Wakeman 1993; Huang 1993; Gu 1993/4; Ding 1994; White, Howell, and Shang 1996; Brook and Frolic 1997; Chamberlain 1998; Pei 1998; Cheek 1998). The recent collapse of the communist states in eastern Europe, especially in Poland (with the role played by the Solidarity movement) and Czechoslovakia (thanks to the influence of writers like Vaclav Havel), had given rise to what can only be called a mythological account of the role of organized civil society in the regime changes that followed (Cohen and Arato 1994). A number of western scholars whose work focused on China had taken this account on board, or were at least inspired by it. But the new discourse that resulted stood in stark contrast with Latin America, where (as we saw) the invocation of civil society occurred in the course of a long struggle for democratization and social justice. It was endogenous to that struggle, whereas the discourse on China was largely the handiwork of western – chiefly Anglo-American – authors. Except for a small number of dissidents who had escaped to the West, Chinese intellectuals were not drawn into the debate about civil society.

For the most part, proponents of the civil society thesis based their argument on Jürgen Habermas’ doctoral dissertation on the rise and decline of the public sphere in western Europe beginning in the late 18th century. The English translation of this careful historical study had just become available and offered an attractive foundation for what, in the event, was a speculative exercise (Habermas 1989). But now, fourteen years after Tiananmen Square, it is safe to say that a Habermasian public sphere did not then nor does it now exist in China. Since 1949 and right on through the reform era, questions of common concern have been the exclusive domain of the Chinese Communist Party and therefore the domain of the state. A civil society “beyond the reach of the state” and engaged in democratic talk about matters of common concern is simply unthinkable in today’s China where state repression of independent political thought is an everyday practice.

Not only is the public sphere pre-empted by the party-state, the basic institutional preconditions for its emergence still do not exist in China: freedom of speech and of assembly and what we, in the West, speak of as the “rule of law.” Nor are these basic institutional conditions, which for us define a liberal democracy, likely to make their appearance in China at any time soon. As Timothy Cheek has observed, “the discourse of positive rights, limited government, and antagonistic public contention remains alien to Chinese intellectuals in general” (Cheek 1998, 251).

Similarly, we have to reject the Castellsian and Gramscian models. It was again Timothy Cheek (op. cit.) who first introduced Gramsci’s concept of hegemony into the civil society discourse about China. But he failed to spell out the complete model, which, as I have suggested, incorporates the idea of a counter-hegemony as well as a strategy for transforming the latter into the new hegemony of a victorious “vanguard” party. It is hardly necessary to point out that a revolutionary model of this sort would be anathema to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which would bend all of its efforts to prevent a counter-hegemony from ever emerging. Equally unthinkable is the rise of a mobilized civil society in the form of social movements that are not tightly controlled by the center, as was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution instigated by Mao Zedong (a revolution within the Party against the Party). A repetition of that calamity is unlikely, but a genuine movement grounded in an autonomous civil society is similarly improbable.

This leaves us with the Tocquevillean model of “intermediate” organizations – intermediate, that is, between state and individual. The number of organizations that might be called that has sky-rocketed over the past 20 years, and their phenomenal growth has given rise to the thought that here, indeed, might be the beginnings of a “third sector.” Specifically, the suggestion was made by Philip Huang (1993) in an essay for Modern China, a journal of which he was the founding editor. Huang argued that even though these “civil” organizations were in many cases started by agencies of the state, and continued to be supervised by the state, they might nevertheless, and over time, claw back a substantial independence from the state, evolving into a genuine civil society along Tocquevillean lines. Huang urged his colleagues to enter this new field of research. After a full decade, the first results of such research are in, and we can now critically assess Huang’s claim.

In one of the best studies of Chinese “intermediate” organizations, Gordon White develops a typology that distinguishes among four strata: a “caged” stratum of mass organizations (such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions); an incorporated stratum of officially recognized social organizations (business, trade, professional, academic, sports, recreational, and cultural), of which by late 1993 there were already 1,460 at the national, 19,600 at the provincial, and 160,000 at the county level; an interstitial stratum of mostly local organizations that while officially registered, and despite some degree of state supervision, are more or less free to pursue their interests without direct interference from above; and finally, a suppressed stratum that includes a wide variety of political and social organizations as well as secret societies and other criminal organizations (White 1996, 196-222; see also the more thoroughly documented study by White, Howell, and Shang, 1996).

Leaving aside the captive and suppressed strata—the first, because it is part of the state and the second because it is both invisible and, when criminal, not civil—the question remains whether White’s incorporated and interstitial strata could evolve into a version of civil society “for itself” or even more hopefully, into a civil society capable of exercising the right to free speech and using this right to contest the state. The answer comes in part from an excellent study by Kenneth Foster (2002) of business associations in Yantai, a medium-sized city in Shandong province. He writes:

[T]his paper argues that China’s business associations (as well as many professional associations) can be more fruitfully studied as new elements of the state’s administrative system than as participants in a state-society dialogue. That is, if we are to understand the emergence and role of business associations in China, we must first analyse how they are connected to state and Party organizations and how these links affect their character and operation. My research in the city of Yantai shows that nearly all business associations there were created at the initiative of state and Party officials, and that they are in essence appendages of government or Party organizations. Over the past two decades, these associations have accordingly functioned more as new parts of the local administrative system than as new sites of state-society engagement. However, this does not mean that they should be regarded simply as newer versions of the classic Leninist transmission belts. Unlike instruments of top-down control, business associations in Yantai are used by government agencies and their officials in a localized and parochial fashion to assist the agencies in carrying out their mandated tasks. But sometimes they are not used at all and become mere hollow shells (op. cit., 42).

Foster’s picture of so-called intermediate organizations in Yantai does not bode well for a civil society, at least for now. Even local Chambers of Commerce, it turns out, are frequently created by and integrated with the Industry and Commerce Federation, a “tame organization under the Party’s United Front Department” (op. cit., 49). Funding for these organizations comes for the most part directly from the state or state-operated enterprises, although membership dues are sometimes collected, though not without difficulty.

There remains the possibility of the interstitial organizations mentioned by White. In a recent field report from Guanting Township in China’s northwestern and impoverished Qinghai Province, the authors examine the case of a single rural non-governmental organization, the Sanchuan Development Association (Zhang and Baum 2004). The SDA, they write, “is a relatively autonomous, indigenous NGO of a type that appears to be popping up with increasing frequency in rural China, but that to date has not been widely reported or taken account of in the civil society/corporatism literature” (op. cit., 99). SDA is entirely financed by foreign donors and is exclusively devoted to local poverty alleviation and community development projects, ranging from school construction, public sanitation and water conservation to horticulture and animal husbandry. The authors call it a “true minjian (people’s) NGO. In the development literature, it would probably be referred to as a CBO (community-based organization). They observe that an exploratory Google.com search, using the keywords “China+rural+poverty alleviation+international NGOs” generated almost 500 hits. As a foreign-financed CBO, the Sanchuan Development Association tries to keep the local state at arm’s length (though it is registered and ostensibly “supervised” by the state) and remains studiously non-political. It may count as an “intermediate” organization, but it has little to do with transforming an autocratic into a more democratic regime.

If none of our four models of civil society have any purchase in China, the prospects for democracy arising out of a civil society in that country are indeed dismal. The question is left why this should be the case. The disposition of the CCP to autocratic rule is not the full answer, and we may have to look further into China’s cultural heritage, most notably the Confucian tradition that is endogenous to the region. Confucianism is a powerful tradition that for over 2000 years has shaped local societies throughout northeast Asia, just as the Judeo-Christian tradition has(over a shorter period) done in the West (Nisbett 2003).

I am well aware of the contentious nature of the argument I am about to make. I want to use the terms “Confucian” and “Judeo-Christian” in this context as markers of cultural difference between north-east Asian and chiefly Anglo-American or western self-understandings of who we are. There are nuanced differences within these categories: so, for instance, Korean society is today largely Christianized, but this is an overlayer over a deeper cultural level that is “Confucian,” while Mediterranean countries in western Europe are more inclined to be familistic, i.e., “Confucian,” even though they are part of the “Judeo-Christian” cultural sphere. Furthermore, global capitalism operates entirely on the assumptions of Anglo-American (“Judeo-Christian”) individualism, thus creating contradictions and conflicts in all societies, which in any event never conform 100 percent to the pure, unmixed models of our self-understanding. This said, we can proceed.

Following the American and French revolutions, civil society in the West was forged as a concept in the Judeo-Christian tradition according to which Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said: “Render under Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto the Lord what is the Lord’s.” The Lord’s voice in this instance was directed straight at the mind and heart (soul?) of the single, stand-alone individual, naked and defenseless in body and soul. Saint Paul clearly understood the need for an intermediary between God’s omnipotent power and this individual who needed to be guided along the path of righteousness if he wanted to save his soul. And thus the Church together with its interlocutory priesthood was founded to connect us all with the Divine. Fifteen centuries later, however, the Reformation returned many of us to the original Man/God relationship: we were now supposed to speak again directly to God.

Meanwhile, the absolute power of Caesar confronted the individual in all of his or her ignorance and weakness, reducing humankind to the role of subservient subjects of the Sovereign. With the coming of democratic rule, however, subjects were suddenly transformed into citizens who asserted that they had entered into a contractual relationship with their Sovereign (Locke, Rousseau), and who now required countervailing institutions that took the form of an organized political community (Parliament) and a civil society capable of asserting collective rights and demanding a voice in democratic process. This new relationship also gave rise to a dichotomous distinction of what is public and private, a distinction that would create considerable difficulties in reconciling the distinctive concerns of the two realms. The new “classical” economics that swept in with the coming of the industrial revolution reinforced the latent individualism of the period that, along with having turned us all into citizens now also provided us with a new role as consumers.

If the foregoing is a roughly accurate account of the way those of us raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to understand ourselves in the world, the Confucian way offers another conception of public and private, ruler and ruled. Here, individuals are always already embedded in affective networks of social relation whose paradigmatic form is the family and the extended kinship network of the clan. Korean scholars Lew, Chang, and Kim (2003) provide a succinct statement of this tradition.

Zhu Xi [important neo-Confucian philosopher at the end of the 13th century whose writings led to the enthusiastic adoption of neo-Confucian practices in Korea] had made clear and elaborate provisions, both theoretical as well as institutional, for the reconstruction and strengthening of the institution of the family. The clan, or the family writ large, was the institution of choice for Zhu Xi just as it had been for Confucius, because it was where filial piety, loyalty, trust and other values essential for the affective society idealized by Confucius could flourish. As a sociopolitical institution, it provided the sense of continuity, permanence, and identity that the highly bureaucratized, impersonal, and commercialized society of imperial Song could not.

Home was therefore not merely the corner stone of the private sphere. It was, at the same time, a public sphere ‘in which one is taught one’s rights and duties, responsibility, and power. Confucians viewed public and private spheres to be in harmony rather than in conflict’ (214-215).

As northeast Asia’s most Confucian, if Christianized, society, South Korea provides us with insights into a culture which, like China’s, understands individuals first and foremost as beings whose very nature is defined by their affective social ties. This self-understanding who we are as human beings is not merely a thirteenth century conceit to be displaced by a more “modern” idea of the individual but continues right up to the present era. According to Lew, Chang, and Kim:

Affective networks in Korea are based upon three factors: blood ties, school ties, and regional ties. Korean businesses are (in-)famous for the way in which they are family based. Most of the largest chaebols (conglomerates), including those most internationally competitive…are still controlled by members of the founder’s family, usually brothers, sons, nephews, and grandsons. The importance of blood ties is even greater for smaller companies… (op. cit., 203-4).

And the authors continue:

Given the importance of affective networks, it is little wonder that Koreans invest significant amounts to time and energy attending innumerable social gatherings such as weddings, funerals, and alumni meetings, as well as more traditional social groups….This is in sharp contrast to the conspicuous lack of commitment to and involvement in the voluntary citizens’ groups or “civic organizations” deemed essential for a thriving democracy [i.e., the Tocquevillean model]. Although many Koreans would gladly pay U.S. $10 for a round of drinks for ‘old buddies,’ few are willing to pay even half that amount in fees and dues to citizen groups. Even in the smallest localities, town elite gatherings function as the focal points of affective networks linked by blood, school, and regional ties (op. cit., 205).

Perhaps we can now begin to understand why so-called intermediate organizations in Yantai and presumably elsewhere in China are more often hollow forms than the substance of a vital civil society, why their members are disinclined to contribute to their support, and why the state nevertheless continues to create them to carry out its mission. In China, as in South Korea, the private and public spheres have always been intertwined; they are not inherently in conflict. As the authors conclude,

What we have then, in Confucianism, is a philosophy of the public that does not follow or respect those dichotomies essential for the concept in the Western tradition, namely, ‘individual versus the group, ‘state versus civil society,’ and ’public versus private sectors.’ …[T]his does not mean that it lacks a sense of the public as opposed to the private. Confucians are able to make the distinction between ‘cronyism’ and a ‘just’ order. It is just that they are not neatly distinguished along the dichotomous lines so dear to Western [Anglo-American?] political discourse (op. cit., 215).

IV
The position I have tried to argue in this essay is that civil society is a concept embedded in liberal democracy where a term that would refer to the demos as a collective actor in the public sphere was a necessary complement to the more formal democratic institutions. Civil society was that actor, and it had to be sufficiently distinguished from the state (and later also from the corporate capital sector) to endow it with a substantial degree of autonomy. It was thus both a social and a political concept. As the former, it included those organizations outside state and capital that concerned themselves with civic life. This was the Tocquevillean idea of an associative democracy. As a political concept, formulated in very different ways by Habermas, Castells, and Gramsci, it was supposed to engage the state through political parties and social movements. This was the arena of democratic talk. Essential to the life of civil society were democratic freedoms, most importantly the freedom of speech and association and a legal system capable of safeguarding these freedoms against the state.

In actual use, civil society has more often than not been deployed as a rhetorical weapon in the struggle for democracy and social justice. The example from Latin America has demonstrated this use over the course of several decades in a struggle that eventually led to the consolidation of liberal democracy throughout the continent and the emergence of non-governmental joined to community-based organizations in the continuing fight against disempowerment and poverty. The alternative development discourse that grew up alongside this struggle has meanwhile been mainstreamed into development programs, notably by the World Bank.

Civil society discourse about China turns out to be an altogether different matter. It is not endogenous to China but a discourse among western scholars who speculate about the relevance of the concept and China’s prospects for democratization. These debates have raised new questions and produced new insights, but they are only tangentially related to whatever forces may lead to a democratic opening in China. Our review of the four most common models of civil society has, I believe, unambiguously demonstrated that these western models are inapplicable to the People’s Republic.

I have argued that the basis for this judgment can be found in the very different intellectual/religious heritage of China (and more generally northeast Asia) as compared to the West. Whereas the Confucian tradition sees a vertically integrated society intertwined with the institutions of the state, and the private is subsumed under the public and thus has no independent status, the Judeo-Christian way sees only free-standing individuals in need of mediating social institutions between themselves and the powerful structures of the state. We call these mediating institutions civil society, and they are found in varying measure only in countries that are heir to these traditions. China, with a very different take on what it means to be human has no need for a western-style civil society. What this implies for the prospects of democracy in China remains an open question. But whatever form it takes, it is unlikely to resemble, except in the most superficial sense, a liberal democracy in our common understanding.

Acknowledgements

I would like thank Jacqueline Chase for reading and commenting on the Latin American section of this paper, Kenneth Foster for commenting on the section dealing with China, and Timothy Cheek both for his suggestion that I take a comparative approach to the civil society debate about China and for his critical comments on an earlier version of this paper.