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Item Details
| Title:
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IN SEARCH OF CIVIL SOCIETY
MARKET REFORM AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA |
| By: |
Gordon White, Jude A. Howell, Shang Xiaoyuan |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
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£170.00 |
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| ISBN 10: |
0198289561 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780198289562 |
| Publisher: |
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
15 August, 1996 |
| Pages: |
252 |
| Description: |
This empirical study of China's economic and social transition focuses on the social effects of the emergence of the developed market economy in post-Mao China. The study is based on extensive fieldwork on the changes in the eonomic reality of three major social groups - manual workers, women, and managers/entrepreneurs. The primary emphasis is on transformations in urban China, though, for contrast, one chapter is devoted to a detailed case study of a rural countyin Guangdong. The authors describe the state corporatism in social and political life that has resulted from the transition from centralization of power in the Leninist state to a new form of associationism relatively independent from the state but jeopardized by the lack of general democratization ofthe political institutions. Their anlaysis turns on the concept of `civil society' - the means whereby members of society can limit the power of the state and transform it in the direction of liberal democracy. |
| Synopsis: |
Since 1978, China has pursued sweeping economic changes in an officially sponsored transition from a Stalinist centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy. China's reformers have highlighted the need to curb the awesome power of the Leninist state and change the balance of power between state and economy, state and society. In practice, the economic reforms have set in train a process of potentially fundamental social and institutional change in China which is creating new socio-economic forces, shifting power in their direction, and raising the possibility of political transformation. This book explores the extent to which this experience can be described and understood in terms of the idea of 'civil society', defined in sociological terms as the emergence of an autonomous sphere of voluntary associations capable of organizing the interests of emergent socio-economic groups and counterbalancing the hitherto unchallenged dominance of the Marxist-Leninist state. the authors lay out a clear operational definition of the concept of civil society to make it useful as a tool for empirical inquiry and avoid the cultural relativism of its origins in Western historical experience.Guided by this theoretical framework, the book brings together a vast amount of empirical data on emergent social organization and institutions in contemporary China, drawing on the authors' extensive fieldwork experience in East Asia. It is based on interviews, survey questionnaires, and copious documentary sources, buttressed by in-depth case studies of specific localities over a two-year period from 1991 to 1993. the research focused on the changes in the socio-economic realities of three major social groups - urban manual workers, women, and managers/entrepreneurs. The primary emphasis is on transformations in urban China, though detailed rural case studies of Xiaoshan and Nanhai are included to provide comparative context. The authors describe the new forms of state-society relations, as reflected in the complex links between the state and new associations. They show how the expansion of these associations is jeopardized by the lack of general democratization of China's political institutions. |
| Illustrations: |
tables |
| Publication: |
UK |
| Imprint: |
Clarendon Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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