A Discourse On Discourse

The adaptability issues of Western democracy in the context of China have always been an important academic concern. This research was intended to study the adaptability of deliberative democracy in the Chinese context in terms of a normative perspective. At the beginning, this research focused on Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, because it is one of the most discussed normative deliberative democratic theories in China today. Taking into consideration the normativity and ideality of Habermas’s theory, Foucault’s discourse theory of power relations is then introduced to illustrate the tensions between different Western discourse theories. In order to investigate the adaptabilities of these two discourse theories in the Chinese context, and to balance the tension between them, another normative concept, namely the Confucian Rationality, is then drawn upon from traditional Chinese cultural sources. Accordingly, these three dimensions of discourse theory, as well as the relations between them, are presented. The employment of some empirical descriptions of certain Chinese historical-political facts is also necessary to explain, to supplement, or to question this theoretic framework. Two tension perspectives are critical throughout the research:the tension between universality and particularity, and the tension between normative theories and social-political facts.Through the approaches of textual studies, aided by conceptual and empirical studies as complements, the research is conducted as following:Chapter 1 discusses the tension between Habermas’s normative discourse theory of law and democracy and social facts; Chapter 2 analyzes the tension between Habermas’s discourse theory and Foucault’s discourse theory of power relations, and proposes to rethink the tension problems. Chapter 3 tries to search for the resources in traditional Chinese political cultures, and to put forward another normative discourse theory-the discourse theory of Confucian rationality-to balance the tension between the foregoing two normative discourse theories. It is argued that an ideal type of Confucian rationality (a kind of normative value rationality) can be used as a bridge between the two opposite discourse theories. Chapter 4 further explains the normative theory that was proposed in Chapter 3, and tries to re-examine and redefine the concepts of "Public Sphere" and "Deliberative Politics" in the context of traditional China through empirical descriptions on the "Public Sphere" and political/legal discussions in traditional Chinese society. Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on the descriptions of the political and legal discussions in China’s new media public sphere today. It is an empirical response to all the normative studies mentioned above, and at the same time an investigation on the tensions between the normative theories and the social experiences.We argue that, because of the different cognitive structures and diverse modes of thinking in specific cultures, there should be different normative paradigms of discourse democracy in corresponding cultural contexts. Normativity and reality are the two sides of the same coin. Normative discourse theories serve as the guidance for the practices of deliberative democracy, which can, in its turn, verify, supplement, improve and challenge the normative discourse theories.Apart from demonstrating of the multiple dimensions of discourse theories, another practical intent of this thesis is to promote an approach leading to discourse democracy that would combine elements of both Chinese and modern, consistent with both the fundamental predilections of Chinese civilization, and the practical needs of a modern China.