Alternate Civilities: Democracy And Culture In China And Taiwan [Paperback]

Robert Paul Weller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0813339316 | ISBN-13: 978-0813339313

Some Asian political leaders and Western academics have recently claimed that China is unlikely to produce an open political system. This claim rests on the idea that “Confucian culture” provides an alternative to Western civil values, and that China lacked the democratic traditions and even the horizontal institutions of trust that could build a civil society. An opposed school of thought is far more optimistic about democracy, because it sees market economies of the kind China has begun to foster as pushing inexorably against authoritarian political control and reproducing Western patterns of change.Alternate Civilities argues for a different set of political possibilities. By comparing China with Taiwan’s new and vibrant democracy, it shows how democracy can grow out of Chinese cultural roots and authoritarian institutions. The business organizations, religious groups, environmental movements, and women’s networks it examines do not simply reproduce Western values and institutions. These cases point to the possibility of an alternate civility, neither the stubborn remnant of an ancient authoritarian culture, nor a reflex of market economics. They are instead the active creation of new solutions to the problems of modern life.

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About the Author

Robert Weller has been doing research on local life in China and Taiwan for over two decades. His other books include Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and TiananmenUnities and Diversities in Chinese Religions, and several edited works. He is research associate at the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture and associate professor of anthropology at Boston University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press (April 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813339316
• ISBN-13: 978-0813339313
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #977,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oustanding comparative sociology of emerging "civil society", May 28, 2002

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Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Alternate Civilities: Democracy And Culture In China And Taiwan (Paperback)

By comparing civil society in contemporary China to that in Taiwan before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987, in Alternate Civilities Boston University professor Robert P. Weller shows that democracy can grow out of Chinese cultural roots and authoritarian institutions. Both the Chinese communist party leadership and the similarly geriatric authoritarianism of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew have justified their rule by some essential Chinese need for paternalist domination and claimed that human rights are a form of neocolonial and ethnocentric meddling from the West, and should not be allowed to disrupt the splendid Confucian subordination of individuals to collectivity. This view of necessary passivity -- an extreme version of cultural determinism -- is belied by the recent history of Taiwan. After half a century as a colony of Japan and half a century under brutally repressive Kuomintang martial law, democracy and civil society have blossomed in the last fifteen years. These days Taiwan is more democratic than its former tutor, the United States: there are election campaigns going on seemingly all the time in Taiwan, there is more real freedom of the press, and the candidate with the most votes in the 2000 election there became president.

Weller's comparison of civil society in Taiwan and in the PRC focused on business organizations, religious groups, environmental movements, and women's networks, synthesizing a wealth of detail about "horizontal associations" (i.e., associations between equals in contrast to vertical relationships to the state apparatus or the deference to and domination by elders within families).

Weller justly claims that "by comparing China with the vibrant democracy that has developed over the last decade in Taiwan, I show how civil society can grow out of Chinese cultural roots and authoritarian institutions. "He is not so rash as to argue that a vibrant civil society and democracy will necessarily blossom in China, only that the often invoked essential need for authoritarian rule has been disconfirmed. It seems to me that, like most American social scientists who look through Taiwan to see China (whether a past or future one), Weller underestimates the extent of non-Chinese influences on Taiwan, including not only 20th-century Japanese and then American ones, but that Taiwan was incorporated into production for export in the early 17th century by European footholds (on an island never completed controlled by any imperial Chinese dynasty).

South Korea provides another comparison of a society for which earlier authoritarian rulers claimed a Confucian duty to repress the "disorder" of public criticism. Like Taiwan, Korea was a Japanese colony (1910-45) and a flowering of civil society and democratization occurred during the 1990s.

Weller discusses material on voluntary associations from Taiwan and China interestingly, and his book is an important contribution to the comparative study of post-authoritarian sociopolitical transformation.