ABSTRACT
Western observers of China have debated the extent to which a social realm between state and family existed in the Chinese past, and the possibilities of its renewed development in contemporary China. Most of these analyses, born of the celebrated ‘public-sphere’ theory of Habermas (1989), look to the rise of a market economy for signs of an emerging ‘civil society’ in which contractual ties and horizontal integration between economic actors challenge primordial ties to the family and to the ruler. This market-spawned civil society in turn serves as the precondition for free, rational, informed discourse on the political ends of society-the public good debated in the ‘public sphere’. Implicit in this
discourse of civil society, born of the western historical experience, is the notion of a clear boundary between state and society. We argue that this notion of boundedness is problematic in the Chinese context, where the vectors of social interaction involve both horizontal and vertical linkages of exchange and expectation. If the idea of ‘civil society’ is to have salience in the Chinese countryside, it must be reworked to embrace the blurry interpenetration of state and society, and understood in terms of the cooptation, negotiation and historicity at the heart of this interaction.
