The brutally repressed 1989 student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square have been widely seen as one spark that helped ignite the uprisings in Eastern Europe in that same year. When it is asked why the same kind of uprising did not take place in China many scholars have blamed the supposed absence of "civil society" there. Though uses of this term vary considerably, those who subscribe to this explanation of China's problems generally conceive of civil society as "an arena of independent associational activity free from state domination" (Perry, Introduction 297). This is the type of activity -- ranging from the Catholic Church in Poland to dissident intellectual circles in Czechoslovakia -- that others have credited with providing the "institutional stage on which the revolutions of 1989 were played out" (Perry, Introduction 297). This explanation seems fitting despite the fact that the Tiananmen protests were staged by student groups who fit the civil society definition. In fact, in reviewing the literature on associations it becomes clear that there are numerous organizations in China which fit the definition. The problem for China has not, however, been the complete absence of civil society but the fledgling status of the associations, the state's efforts at coopting these organizations, the willingness of the government to resort to extremes of repression, and the inability of various groups to find common cause.
The specific European origins of the notion of civil society also seem problematic. To take the early manifestations of a civil society in China as "closely following patterns described by Rousseau or Habermas, which are rooted firmly in Western history and are reflective of Western utopian and dystopian fantasies" is very misleading (Wasserstrom and Xinyong 392). The patterns followed by Chinese groups differ in essential ways from those of European groups, but the overall thrust of the civil society notio...