Chinese 'democracy': 'Dualism' of state and society

This thesis argues that there has been a significant qualitative change in the intellectual conception of “democracy” in China. While democracy is still a social as well as political construct, it now turns on a self-conscious “dualism” which distinguishes state and society.; The traditional unity of state and society has been theoretically challenged in the reality of a multi-dimensional process of ideological, socio-organizational and cultural change. The conceptual formation of “democracy” now relates to the explicitly recognized contraction of the state and the expansion of autonomous social and economic life as indicated, for example, in the increasing reform focus on “small government and big society.” The developing, but unofficial theory on “civil society” is focusing attention on the organization of society into autonomous and horizontal social groupings. Actual organizational change has become manifest in the complex evolution of mass associations and the development of “village self-government.”; Intellectual understanding of “democracy” is vigorously exploring new dimensions of “political” and “social pluralism.” “Economic freedom” characterizes individuals as players in the free market, and the equality of different social interests is receiving attention in the formal differentiation of social interests which accompanies the processes of economic decentralization and marketization. Such differentiation meanwhile facilitates a focus on “political pluralism.” New theory on the “dualism” of state and society is contemporaneous with new cognitive and cultural appreciation of people's independence from state authority.; In 1989, some believed that China's political reform process had been violently short-circuited, but few would dispute that China is now in a very important transition, which has been described in qualified terms as “soft” or “consultative authoritarianism.” Seminal to this transition has been an extraordinary change in the formal intellectual conception of “democracy,” which has not yet been fully described and analyzed. Increasingly, “democracy” is understood in terms of the control of a limited state by an independent society and the accommodation and coordination of diverse social interests in a political process predicated in the “dualism” of state and society. This evolving “pluralism” constitutes a significant departure from both traditional political culture and the Leninist concept of “democracy.”...