Page 33 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 2. Literature review

the system’ (meaning here the Chinese political system), depending on the context in

which it is used (Zhou, 2006, p.202).
Civil society in the Chinese context traces back to the age before the founding of
People’s Republic of China. It rooted from one of the traditional Chinese traits – the
‘relationship culture’. In contrast to Anglophone who assume the autonomy of individ-
uals, Chinese people tend to recognise themselves as members of a group. For example,

before one person is an individual, he/she is a member of a unit in the first place. The
initial unit is one’s family, then the person advances as a member of many other units
or networks in which responsibilities of the groups are prescribed as overriding duties

over oneself. This idea was also reinforced in traditional Chinese education: the norms
and benefits of a unit override individual interest (De Burgh, 2020).
After the overturn of Qing Dynasty, in the early period of Republic of China,
administration of most regions was under military command which were in the hands
of local elite families and chamber of commerce. In urban areas, in addition to local

elite families and commerce communities, study societies (xuehui), student unions
and labour federations burgeoned with strikingly modern and foreign ideas. They were
the initial localised forms of civil society in China. Due to the minimal administrative

presence of provincial and central government, at the level of county and municipali-
ty, these local elites concerned mostly with constructing their local area and providing
public services, such as water conservancy, education, road building, electrification,
small-scale industry and charity (Dikötter, 2014). Study societies and student unions
published translated foreign news, educational articles and criticising commentaries to

evoke people’s awareness of revolution and reform and to promote intellectual renewal.
They started from informal gatherings and grew into more formally organised groups
and societies, social spaces such as temple grounds, restaurants, teahouse, parks and

theatres were used for political debates and events planning (ibid). Activities ranging
from delivering political messages through chalk scrawl on city walls and handing leaf-
lets on the street to confrontational demonstrations were all the early forms of public
participation promoted by civil society in China (Strand, 1995). Therefore, pre-1949,
there existed ‘a traditional civil society’ which was ‘very localised and detached from

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