ABSTRACT
From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, a series of debates over civil society in China took place among Chinese scholars and China scholars in the West. The earliest attempts to understand Chinese institutions and practices in terms of Western notions such as “civil society” or the “public sphere” appeared in the mid-1980s in histories of the late Qing Dynasty (1890s to 1911) and early Republic (1911-37) (Rowe 1984, 1989; Rankin 1986).1
