ABSTRACT
This conclusion gives concluding thoughts on key ideas discussed in the previous chapters of this book. The book focuses on three ideas that all challenge the standard civil society approach in China studies, an approach combining neo-Tocquevillean definition with modernization theory. The first idea is that there are various conceptions of civil society. In scholarly discourse, many famous statements about civil society do not refer to what China studies makes it mean. For example, the following two famous ideas about modern European developments make little sense if the term 'civil society' in them is read in the neo-Tocquevillian sense in vogue in China studies: Every dispute between the state elite and elements of civil society, and every dispute among the latter which is routinely regulated through the state institutions, tends to focus the relations and the struggles of civil society onto the territorial plane of the state, consolidating social interaction over that terrain.
