n still has value for analysis of China's situation. The structural differences between civil society in Europe and the embryonic civil society of China do not render the concept inapplicable. They merely require a careful consideration of what civil society means in China.
Pro-democracy movements of the late 1980s and increasingly active labor unions have provided the basis for Chinese civil society even if these forces are far from unified in what they wish to accomplish. The economic reforms of 1978 have also tended to favor the formation of such a sphere of activity. Where the Soviet Bloc leaders' will to resist was seriously weakened by the desperate state of their economies, China's economy had actually improved in some respects and this, ironically, had a similar dispiriting effect on China's leaders. Overall, by 1989, inflation was rising and the economy was going through a downturn. But the 1978 reforms that allowed increased private enterprise had produced large numbers of individual successes and were fostering extensive changes in the control of production. The reforms significantly "reduced the State's pervasive influence, and institutions have been arising apart from the State apparatus" as a result (Ostergaard 40).
The "blossoming of autonomous associations" (getihu) among entrepreneurs meant that by the time of the 1989 demonstrations there were independent groups of business people who were willing to lend support to the students if the students were willing to accept it (Perry and Fuller 675). But, as Perry and Fuller note, intellectuals usually rejected support from this sector (669). In the same manner the students were unwilling to accept too much support from labor unions on the basis of the students' "elitist view of themselves as morally and politically superior to the uneducated masses" (Perry and Fuller 669). Overall, inter-class cooperation has not been a feature of most of the associational ac...