The middle class in the theoretical perspective 01

作者：admin  点击次数：117  发布时间：2025-02-22

The political media was the most important institution among the middle class in the late Qing Dynasty. It promoted changes in social, cultural and political fields. Its role in Chinese society in the early 20th century can be compared with the Western "civil society" and "public sphere". "Civil society" is an important concept that has existed for a long time in European history and social sciences. Simply put, it is "self-governing social organizations independent of state control". "Public sphere" is a theoretical framework recently proposed by German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, meaning "a field that reconciles between society and the state, in which public organizations themselves become the carriers of public opinion". Habermas sorted out the media consultation (printmediation), publicity, public opinion and their impact on political change in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Scholars studying Chinese history, modernization, and contemporary issues have recently begun to explore the above two concepts theoretically, but few have yet to link them to the publishing industry. Introducing late Qing political journals into the discussion of "civil society" and "public sphere" means that a series of Western theories and frameworks can be applied to the study of Chinese history. This not only shows the value of using a common discourse system to analyze and compare cross-cultural and cross-border social forms, but also warns us that we may fall into superficial comparisons or impose theories applied to a certain period of history on a historical experience.
Rather than viewing the existence of the publishing industry as evidence of structural similarities between early twentieth-century Chinese society and “modern intellectual” Europe, it seems more fruitful to use these theories as a starting point to explain the differences between different social formations and to reveal the unique tensions that shaped the middle sphere in the late Qing. Although political publishing plays the role of mediator between what Western scholars call “state and society”, between the intellectual public sphere and the middle sphere, the Chinese sense of “mediation” is conceptually and institutionally distinct from that in Europe. First and foremost, the transferability of this analytical approach cannot be taken for granted. “State” and “society” are products of specific cultures, and some complex concepts can only be understood in their specific contexts. For example, in late Qing China, the concepts of “dynasty” and “state” are clearly distinguished, and there is no unified concept of “state”, which is of paramount importance for understanding the development of the middle sphere. Furthermore, in China, state and society cannot be so clearly binary opposed as in Europe. Although there is no direct government base, influence or control in the middle sphere formed by the media, its members, such as reformist publishers, are not opposed to achieving their reform goals through official entities such as provincial councils. The political tension of the middle class in the late Qing Dynasty is such that it is small when opposing the rulers, and becomes strong when it needs to be vigilant to the imperial power and collude with the state structure. As a concrete and comparable entity, the long-term consideration of society is that since ancient times in the social context of China, the word "man" has been a privileged social construction, which both presents and is endowed with a way of consciousness that is profoundly different from the "le peuple" of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.