ABSTRACT
The study of State-Society relations is an important component of political science and is particularly useful to characterize a political regime. Such an approach is especially fruitful in the study of communist regimes.* The rediscovery of the concept of civil society in the 1970s can be considered a landmark in the development of research on Central and Eastern European regimes. It is therefore quite surprising that most sinologists have been reluctant to use the notions which emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1970s to analyse China before 1989. Only a handful of European observers of the pro-democracy movement during the late 1970s and the early 1980s had regarded the concept of civil society as fruitful for the study of Chinese politics. Paradoxically, it became widespread among China specialists and pro-democracy scholars in exile only after the repression of the 1989 pro-democracy movement. In China itself, it became a “hot” topic when Social Sciences in China, the mainland journal published in Hong Kong, devoted its first issue to a discussion of this concept in 1992.
