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The Western Concept of the Civil Society in the Context of Chinese History
The Western term "civil society" has become prominent in current Western and Chinese discussions regarding China's history and possible democratization. There is a complicated relation, however, between these discussions and the meanings of this term in its original Western context. By analyzing this confusing semantic situation, this article makes clear not only that China throughout its history has only exceptionally developed a civil society but also that current Chinese writing using this term has typically conflated it with indigenous assumptions out of accord with the Western civil society tradition. This article argues that, in this Western tradition, "civil society" refers to an un-utopian political order in which morally and intellectually fallible citizens organize themselves to monitor an incorrigible state, seeking either to minimize state intervention in their lives or to use some state intervention to check allegedly oppressive elites outside the state. In Chinese writing, however, this un-utopian, "bottom-up" definition of "civil society" has been filtered out and replaced by a tradition-rooted, utopian, "top-down" view according to which moral-intellectual virtuosi--whether a political party free of selfishness or "true intellectuals"--take charge of a corrigible state or at least are allowed by the latter to guide society. This divergence in political reasoning threatens to complicate international relations. Introductory Remarks
It is convenient to deal first with the epistemological question. Etically imposing a Western category on Chinese facts would be justified if one believed that global history follows laws that Westerners happened to discover, or that ideals like "civil society" are based on universal human rights, or that such categories at least are part of a universally homologous terminology which one can properly use to analyze the facts of human life even when this terminology is unknown to the people one is studying. In the Chinese intellectual world, therefore, where none of these three beliefs has been seriously challenged, there is no epistemic obstacle to using "civil society" as a category with which to analyze Chinese history. In much of the Western academic world, however, these three beliefs have been seriously challenged, whether by Karl Popper's denial that there are laws of history, Alasdair MacIntyre's catalogue of philosophical objections to the notion of objective, impersonal norms, or Richard J. Bernstein's discussion of objections to any kind of "objectivism" in the pursuit of knowledge.(2) Yet even in the West, many currently prominent trends refer to universal human nature (whether in medical, psychological, ethical, or epistemological contexts), to universal cognitive modes such as "rational choice," to universal sociological or economic functions, to global patterns of social evolution, and to the "convergence" of only partly "diverging" industrial societies.(3) Moreover, a purely emic understanding of historical activity is probably unattainable, not to mention undesirable, because explaining the past requires putting it into a frame of reference understandable to people in the present, whether foreigners or natives. Still more, as cultures change, natives frequently think it proper to analyze their own culture by borrowing foreign ideas, as illustrated by contemporary Chinese discussions of Chinese history using the Western idea of the civil society. If foreign ideas cannot be properly used to analyze a culture, a native using them would have to be regarded as having emigrated out of her own culture even as she felt she was just trying to interpret it. Thus the very scholars seeking to avoid etic frameworks would end up imposing one on her own understanding of her life. Such an absurdity can be avoided only by realizing that cultures are not clearly bounded systems. To the extent that they consist not of almost unexplainable customs (such as setting off firecrackers to celebrate a wedding) but of "because" statements, they entail a reflexive discourse or "argument" that is carried on by people often crossing social or ethnic boundaries, such as Chinese serving as professors in the United States and vice versa.(4) If one accepts Bernstein's "hermeneutic" solution to the problem of obtaining knowledge, any category of historical analysis may be used that can be defended by those who use it as in accord with the rules of successful thinking they regard as veridical.(5) In other words, people inevitably will use categories that way, there is no logical way of showing they should not, and, if there were, it would be useless. The idea of bypassing etic categories is a chimera. Refining them is the only feasible methodology. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | ESSAY | |
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