The Public Sphere in China

Hanjiang Road, Hankou (Thanks, wikicommons)

Rowe, William T. "The Public Sphere in Modern China." Modern China, 16:3 (July 1990): 309-329

What makes modern society so different from ancient societies? Is it just that we have new ways of working in groups on larger, more complex projects than before? Does having ways of working in groups make us any better at communicating with each other, or at fighting for the rights of the weak and injured in the world?

Writing just after the translation into English of Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, historian William Rowe reviews 1970s and 1980s work to analyze Chinese social structures in terms of the growth and decline of a “public sphere.” Most scholars answer the first question above with an affirmative to the second question: modernity is about the growth of long-distance trade, which necessitates new social structures such as newspapers, coffee houses, popular literature, trade guilds, neighborhood elites, and street repair teams. Habermas’ work specifically laments the transformation of the public sphere of the European bourgeoisie into a place where mass opinion is manipulated by large corporations, mass media, advertising, the ideology of social rights, an enormous bureaucracy, mass political parties, and highly-organized interest-group politics.



The work of China scholars, however, does not always lament. Research on 18th- and 19th-century Chinese social structures often celebrates attention to the “public” (gong) as a class of citizens, in contradistinction to “private” (si) concerns that were negatively encoded in the tradition for their exclusion of anyone outside the family; gong was also most often distinguished from “official” guan, which according to ancient ideals was a support to the larger community, but which was notorious for serving its own needs as a larger, more malevolent version of “private” actors. “Public” social structures included gongjian, special offices “authorized for use on local community projects such as road and irrigation work repairs.” These kinds of local elite structures continued to evolve through the early 20th century, when they began to realize that they were more effective at management than the imperial system.

Rowe admits frankly that the accounts available by 1990 had not developed the history of how this locally-based “public sphere” was “foreclosed” by the expansion of the “official” (guan) sphere under the late Qing, then Yuan Shikai, and then the KMT. The question, “Did an autonomous public sphere disappear in twentieth-century China, and, if so, at what moment?” remains intriguing and incompletely answered. Now that the Chinese government has scaled back from the peak of its intrusion into the intimate sphere, the question of both the intimate sphere and the non-governmental public sphere have become active topics for discussion again.

Rowe suggests that Habermas has “much to say” for students who would write the histories of “domesticity, friendship, and intimacy in China,” but leaves this aspect of history mostly outside the scope of his article. I take away a number of points, however, which I believe are applicable to my work so far (against my better judgment, I first put these down as a list, because they are still so fragmented in my mind):

“Why” attempt to find an analogue to “the public sphere” in Chinese history? Because we are looking for the opportunities that life offers for criticism. In doing this we follow the tradition of the Frankfurt School. between “public” and “gong” in Chinese history?

We are interested in the historical changes to people, and their values. Where Habermas studies the creation of the bourgeois (burgerlich) class which at first imposed its will on what was to become the notion of the “public sphere,” in China we must follow along the local elites who so often took responsibility for mass communication, education, and even repairing the roads.

For Yang Yinhang, a crucial component to popular sovereignty was the rule of law and an independent judiciary. I wonder how contemporary readers, intellectual or otherwise, understand Yang’s values, and his disappoinments?


My own focus on a woman who seeks only to remember her most personal and intimate relationships at first seems to put the economic origins of the local elite class out of my scope. But this is not quite the case; Yang Jiang remembers the centers of wealth in her own clan, in the Qian clan, and in the people she knew as a child in Shanghai. Uncomfortable feelings about one extremely wealthy family in Shanghai helps us to understand how Yang Yinhang and his family distinguished its own modesty and concern for social justice. The contrast of Yang’s more open and progressive home from the Qians also highlights the diversity of approaches to the tradition and such matters of public taste as “elegance” (ya).

Wuxi, with its dialect, its customs of teasing, it’s strong local community, makes it an ideal place for Yang Jiang. The influence of Qian’s Bofu, and the Wuxi teahouse culture, on him is directly connected to his production of a novel in Yang Jiang’s formulation.

Yang Jiang’s own practice is characterized as an appeal to public opinion. There is a basic faith that public opinion has not degenerated wholly into mass opinion. Yang Yinhang’s older and undeveloped view that an informed reading public could help in the creation of an informed and influential public opinion lives on in Yang Jiang.

There is a centuries-old war of the word “gong” in China -- does the responsibility of the public interest lie in the central government, or in the hands of its private citizenry? If self-interest (si) could be understood as crucial components of public interest (gong), then gong and si need not be opposed. This tradition is what Yang Jiang is trying to describe in her own family.

We can see this idea at work in Yang Yinhang’s dedication of his home to an elite activist from the late Ming. Yang Yinhang at the time had hope that an elite-led local public sphere might still be a force for political good using tools like the newspaper and the legal office.

The form of the essay lends itself to combining social comment with the deeply personal and subjective, with making symbolic the details of everyday living. In doing so, it shows itself a proper form to inherit the old tradition that would make gong out of si. No wonder it remains the major form for so many Chinese readers.