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Introduction

Debate about the existence and nature of the public sphere in China is one that captures the attention of historians of China, political scientists and anthropologists and sociologists of China. The term is largely wedded to European history and European notions of modernity. Despite the potential for ethnocentrism when applying the concept to China, it is useful as a lens to examine continuities and changes in Chinese state-society relations.

Defining “Public Sphere”

Most discussion of the public sphere in the west follows from its conceptualisation by Habermas, 1962 (Habermas, 1992, in translation). The terms public sphere and civil society are used mostly interchangeably when discussing China (e.g., Rankin, 1993). Discussions about public sphere and civil society in China broadly follow this conceptualisation, though with limitations that follow from the specific observations that guided Habermas and concerns about the usefulness of applying western concepts to understanding Chinese history (e.g., Rowe, 1993). For the sake of parsimony, some of these limitations will have to be set aside, and consideration limited to the dominant strand of thinking in the European tradition.

For Habermas, the public sphere is a uniquely European phenomenon that captures the way that the bourgeois managed to ensure that the state legitimised its activity in terms of (bourgeois) public opinion. To understand this we need to make two sets of distinctions. First, the life-world can be divided into three distinct spheres, the official, public and private. The public sphere constitutes that space between the family and household (where the state has no rights) and the state (where the private individual has no nights). Second, the public sphere was bourgeois and not plebeian; it was constituted by the liberal, reading middle classes and not the working class (see Rowe, 1990).

The public sphere emerged in the coffee houses, salons, newspapers and pamphlets of the European industrial revolution wherein the bourgeois sought to develop both universal concepts for the management of society that were more representative (i.e., to ensure that state action reflected their interests) and sought to organise themselves for their betterment independently of the state. The power of the public sphere was re-presented through the media, industrial associations, benevolent and charitable organisations and so on. As the state became increasingly separate from the royal court, through the creation of an impartial bureaucracy, independent judiciary and parliaments, the distinction between voluntary collective action in the public interest and the government public sector becomes blurred (Rowe, 1990, also identifies the overlapping use of the term public sphere to mean the depersonalised state and/or civil (non-state) society). The apogee of the public sphere lasted until public life began to be overtaken by commercial interests. The commercialisation of the public sphere has echoes with the earlier move to management of the public sphere by the impartial government bureaucracy. Now, in Britain and the United States and increasingly on continental Europe, the public sphere is a commercial activity, run by commercial enterprises as an adjunct or substitute for the impartial bureaucracy (such as for the subcontracted delivery public services) and as the key force for marshalling public opinion and public action (through the commercial media).

So, on the conceptualisation of the public sphere that dominates western thought, there would seem to be no case to argue that there is a public sphere in China, post-1911 or otherwise. The (bourgeois) public sphere in the work of Habermas is something that is historically European. However, we might look to the work of Habermas for some more general indicia of a social and political interaction that is independent of the court/state and see if there is evidence of them in Chinese history, before and after 1911. This broadly follows the logic of Rankin, 1993, and Huang, 1993, who see Habermas’ work as a specific example of a broader concept of the public sphere and Rowe, 1993 (following Rankin, 1986, Strand, 1989; Rowe, 1989) who sees something related, but not identical, to European conceptualisations of the public sphere.

Following this line of reasoning, important general indicia of a public sphere might then include, debate about the relationship between state and society, places of free association (whether guaranteed or not), some equality of access to the debate, property rights and literacy to enable participation. As we shall see, through various mechanisms and institutions (formal and informal), many but not all of these conditions existed in China in the lead up to 1911 and afterward.