From Subjects To Citizens

On experience level, the evolution from subjects to citizens is the constant process that the personal space is expanding, the rights is growing and the social status is rising, but the deeper reason is that the way of human existence have achieved radical changes, thus it has obtained more excellent political life. The foundation, which has facilitated the evolution process, is the human nature of freedom. It is the nature that makes human gain the intrinsic dynamic mechanism, which can help the individual get rid of alien bound through the creative activities, expand not only the natural living space, but also the social independent space, and ultimately complete the evolution from subjects to citizens. However, Freedom has to be demonstrated on every individual eventually, and as well as the individuals always live with others, which gives birth to the social order. As a result, the contradictory symbiotic relationship between individual freedom and social order happen. The traditional society is a natural economic times with low productivity and narrow communication methods, so the human had to be at the disposal of the double inevitability of nature and society, individuals had to accept the specific social status, undertake the role of the social ordering them, and obey the ethical requirements. At this age, individual freedom and rights hadn't yet had independent form, and the social order had been to be power-oriented, showing a dependent, hierarchical and closed characteristics. However, individual freedom is the historical scale of social progress after all, the human nature of freedom must to be tend to realize the material living conditions of their own effectively. In discarding of individual freedom and social order, individuals have been moving toward freedom and self-manipulation, and the social orders also accommodate the freedom and autonomy. In modern social market economy, a social integration pattern linking to individuals need has created individual freedom and rights. Social order, which has experienced from the power-oriented age to the right-oriented age, shows such features as independence, equality and openness. But this materialized social relations only mediated by individual interests after all, is just an external social relations for individuals, therefore, Marx has made a critical theory of civil society and the idea of Communism society. On the individual point of view, the course from the subjects to the citizens is the process of the subject of rights from specialization to generalization, of the resource from monopolization to sharing, of the life from personal attachment to act independently; on the social point of view, it is the process of social order from the integration of power to the appeal of right, from the hierarchical to the equal, from a closed to an open.But the contradiction is that there must be a social mechanism to protect the growth of individual freedom, it can eventually break through the old social order. If there is no such internal mechanism, the old social order will become a stifling prison of individual freedom. The different paths of the East and the West of evolution from subjects to citizens are created by these different social system and cultural gene. The western tradition of "rights", "Contract" and "rule of law" formed the social security system of the growth of individual freedom and rights, from this public classes obtained an opportunity to nurture and grow, so that the separation of civil society and state became the historical inevitability, which path was almost the way "inevitability" coming from the "inheritance". In Chinese tradition, the social mechanism and cultural gene of "right", "contract" and "rule of law" is absent completely, and the long tradition of entrenched despotism stifles the growth and reproduction of individual freedom seriously. Since there is no such tradition to rely in China, the choice of its path only can be "Building" from scratch, which the relative independence and autonomy of civil society grow from their own interior, so that society could get rid of the domination of state, and individuals could have their autonomous lives, in order to achieve a fundamental transformation from subjects to citizens. Since modern times, the Chinese society has been trying to find out the path from subjects to citizens hard for almost one hundred years. Despite several Constitutions established the legal status of citizens repeatedly in order to give citizens their proper rights and obligations by the clear provisions, the personal life property rights that can't be deprived of and the modern right subject have always been difficult to generate in reality. The establishment of market economy and the rise of civil society undoubtedly provide realistic and profitable opportunities. Through the structural decomposition of the ownership, the state withdraws from the economic field actively in order to create the spaces and conditions for market exchange system growing independently, to release personal interests which is conducive to form the subject of interests and rights, and the development of a large number of civil society organizations has become the symbol of the rise of civil society. However, the Chinese civil society depends on the state greatly, which shows it is still at the early stages of development and far from the degree of maturity, thus only the social structure should be transformed from the vertical "Centralized" to the horizontal "decentralized" in which market, civil society, the state the three forces communicate horizontally, check and balance mutually, and then civil society could achieve independent characteristics and free spaces. The self-government areas of the state alienation has become a society school where people can study and practice democracy, therefore the modern Chinese citizens who have the consciousness of freedom and rights and the concept of democracy and the rule of law can be generated eventually.