ABSTRACT

Truncating civil society to certain limited forms of organizations only runs the risk that civil society would not have the capacity to do everything that is understood to take place in a dense and pluralistic civil society. The gaps between the ideal and practice are only to be expected even in Western civil societies. This chapter looks into fragmented activities in civil society. No individual case makes a civil society, but there is no civil society without plentiful individual cases of social activity. The chapter shows that these individual cases do not help building civil society with all of its characteristics, but only with some. Therefore, it challenges attempts to detect some kind of general civil society development, such as civil society as a whole being underdeveloped or becoming stronger, based exclusively on the observation of certain types of civil society activity. In China studies this expectation is common.