ABSTRACT
Two decades ago, democratizing countries all over the world witnessed groundswells of popular organizing against non-democratic incumbents. The global resurgence seen in grassroots activism was remarkable, as the participants seemed to speak the same language in justifying their struggles, despite the vast cultural differences between them. In the 1980s, the term “civil society” became a universal lingua franca that was freely used in the Polish Solidarity movement (Ost 1990: 21), and the Korean opposition movement (Koo 1993), among Chinese dissident intellectuals and by the Taiwanese opposition (Hsiao 1989: 127-33; He 1995). Whether civil society was expressed in Chinese (shimin shehui), Korean (minjung), or Taiwanese (minchian shehui), it denoted an autonomous and oppositional sphere of independent and voluntary associations that resisted state control and prefigured the state of affairs that was to come following the demise of authoritarianism.
