ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 elaborates the background representations (socio-cultural context) and the scripts (political-legal context) employed in activist performances, which are two essential components of the mechanism of cultural resonance. The socio-cultural context articulates the complex cultural, social, and political environment that the actors and audiences inhabit. This chapter presents the short-, medium-, and long-term landscapes of Chinese civil society, which together compose the genealogy of Chinese culture. To be specific, it discusses Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, nationalism, communism, and capitalism, as well as the symbolic binary codes come with these genealogical traditions (harmony versus disorder, Chinese versus foreign, public versus private, responsibility versus rights, and development versus underdevelopment). It is argued that this meaning system or genealogy of Chinese culture influences the political-legal context reflected in political and legal discourse, which acts as an immediate reference for actor performances. The socio-cultural and political-legal contexts play vital roles in deciding whether an actor's social performance can achieve resonance with the audience; thus, the chapter lays the foundation for the case studies in the following two chapters.
