Study Of The Masses Of Urban Communities Civic Societies

There are various kinds of grassroots cultural and entertaining groups in China's city residential communities. Some are completely spontaneously founded and the others are subordinated to departments of residential government. Few researches are focused on this sort of grassroots groups yet. This thesis analyzes such groups in the frame of Performance Study, with Richard Schechner's concepts of"doing"and"showing doing"as the main analyzing tool. Because the core definition of performance is"showing doing", all the human behavior of"showing doing"could be framed as performance and became the object of Performance Study. The main standard I use to group those grassroots cultural and entertaining groups is"completely self-entertaining"or"entertaining through showing", which is parallel to"doing"and"showing doing".I select 4 typical groups as study cases. First I compare the acting purposes of these 4 groups and their different organizational structures and ways of actions. Then I discuss the main factors which influence the different purposes, structures and ways of actions. As a conclusion, I find the government plays an important role in the performance of nearly all grassroots groups, directly or indirectly. The government decides the acting purposes, structures and ways of acting of their subordinating groups. The measures the government takes include resources providing, such as places, tutors, chances of performance, etc. To those completely spontaneously founded groups, most of the potential places they can use are controlled by the government and priority hierarchy is decided by the government. Besides, the government can use the mass medias to influence the groups fame thus changes their living spaces and resource-getting abilities.On the basis of comparing and analyzing, I put the relationship between the government and the grassroots cultural and entertaining groups in city residential communities in the context of the relationship of the nation and the society. By retrospection of the relevant histories, I make the following conclusions:First, nation came into existence in need of ruling the society, thus nation has strong motivations to control the society. In ancient China, nation ruled the society through the media of local squire class and organizations due to the limitation of the productive force and techniques. But with the transformation of China into a modern country, the controlling power of nation on the society keeps growing. Second, the political philosophy of traditional China is that nation is nothing but a big family. Therefore the relationship between nation and the non-government organizations of the society is more interrelated than resistant. Basically, the non-government organizations rely on nation. Last, one of the most important reason that Communist Party of China(CPC) turned itself from an opposition party to the ruling party is to make use of cultural and entertaining activities. It provided shelters to political activities, united the mass, spread the ideas and theories of Communism and waged campaigns. As a result, CPC continued the strategies of using the cultural and entertaining activities and relevant groups to fulfill political and social aims. During the period of"Society of Unit", nation reorganized the society is every aspect, including personal entertainment and leisure activities after work. The society became more political and organizational. After the reforming and opening of the country, nation made a big recession from many areas and encouraged the development of the non-government groups and originations. However, as soon as it realized the huge risks of losing control of the society due to some events, nation adjusted its policies to the non-government groups and originations which is called classifying control system, that is to adopt different policies towards different groups according to their potential political challenging abilities and public products providing abilities,the same to the cultural and entertaining groups of the city residential communities.Of course, the grassroots groups and non-government organizations are active performers although in the background of"Strong Nation vs. Weak Society". Various groups and organizations take different coping measures according to their purposes, from subordination to cooperation. To those marginal groups, by keeping the ultimate rules of the government, they create their own spaces and standards by cutting off from the mainstream values.At the end of the thesis, I prospect the future development of the relationship between the government and the cultural and entertaining groups of the city residential communities and make some suggestion to the government to adopt more flexible and indirect controlling measures.