This chapter aims to provide an overall context for the detailed case-studies of intermediate social organizations which take up the main body of this book. the first section provides some historical background to the study by briefly assessing the findings of historians about the prevalence and nature of 'civil society' in China before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. the second section analyses the system of socio-political controls which shaped the organization of Chinese society during the post-revolutionary period from 1949 to 1978. the third and fourth sections move into the reform era from 1978 onwards and draw with broad brush the key changes in both Chinese society and in the Chinese Party/state during this period which have provided the context for, and a 'dual impetus' towards, changes in state-- society relations and the emergence of new forms of intermediate social organization. the fifth section presents an overall map of what we call the 'civil society constellation', the various types or layers of intermediate social organizations, both old and new, which have emerged during the reform era, which operate in different ways and exist in a variety of different kinds of relationship with the Party/state.

Was There a 'Civil Society' in Pre-Revolutionary China?

As we saw earlier, there has been considerable debate among historians about whether a 'civil society' of any description existed in pre-revolutionary China, concentrating mainly on the phase of rapid social, economic, and political change during the last phase of the Qing dynasty and the Republican period from from the overthrow of Qing rule in 1911 to the revolutionary success of the ccp in 1949. This has been prompted partly by a desire to look for historical precursors of the social organizations which have emerged during the post-Mao reform era, but also for historical precedents for the kind of political mobilization mounted by urban social forces during the Democracy Movement of 1989. Our intentions here are similar and in this section we shall draw on the Chinese and foreign historical literature on this same period, first, to investigate the extent to which intermediate organizations of the type we have identified with civil society can be identified in the late Qing and . . .