The middle class in the theoretical perspective 02

作者：admin  点击次数：26  发布时间：2025-03-07

Institutionally, these two different deliberative spheres also differ significantly. Habermas describes the press as the social and cultural foundation of civil society, but in China—where an independent aristocracy, power capital, or church independent of political rule had developed for less than a hundred years—the press could not have been supported by a well-developed civil society. Apart from the press itself, there were few organizations in early twentieth-century China that could be described as institutions that were supposed to exist in civil society—“areas of social life that [could not/would not] be confused or submerged by the state.” None of these institutions were rooted in the legal or economic infrastructure that characterizes the public sphere and civil society. Because China did not have such a spontaneous structure and foundational rights, at best, late Qing society was a civil society in the making. The capitalist market, the prerequisite for the emergence and generation of the public sphere that Habermas describes, was also very weak in late Qing China, as were financial institutions such as the central bank, which were an integrated development process in a public-led country like Great Britain. However, what is crucial to this comparison is not the absence of Western civil society elements in early 20th century China, but the existence of this political publishing industry and the public intellectuals who support this institution in the context of a profoundly different social, legal and economic situation in China. This is actually a manifestation of the important differences between Chinese and Western history. The development of the public sphere in Europe is based on the hypothesis of the existence of civil society (Habermas: The Public Sphere in Civil Society), while in China it is a public organization and the driving force of the basic institutional creation for the construction of civil society. Since late Qing newspapermen were reformers without political affiliation and founders of the emerging print media, their new political strategies were spontaneous and disorganized, and only gradually began to move towards the institutional level.