Market Economy and Civil Society — China and Russia

Author: Yu Keping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-17
Features: In the history of China, civil society has always been subsumed by the political state, and the emergence of a relatively independent civil society is a product of modern China. Although autonomous guild organizations existed early in the fields of commerce and transportation, these organizations were not modern civil organizations in the 20th century but rather traditional secret societies. After the 20th century, influenced by Western civilization, relatively independent civil organizations began to become active. However, how many civil organizations there were at that time and their level of activity were not well-studied, and estimates varied widely. For example, some literature records that there were approximately 1,000 civil organizations in China in the first half of the 20th century, while another study estimated there were over 80,000. After the Communist Party of China came to power in 1949, it implemented socialist public ownership and planned (command) economy in the economy and a highly centralized system with the core of the Party's unified leadership in politics, leading to the near-total disappearance of all civil organizations that existed before 1949. In the early 1950s, there were only 44 national associations, and by 1965, there were fewer than 100. Local associations were also around 6,000. These associations were also quite monotonous, mainly consisting of nine types of mass organizations such as trade unions, the Communist Youth League, the Women's Federation, the China Association for Science and Technology, and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. These conditions did not change substantially until the reform and opening-up in the 1970s. After 1978, under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, China implemented reform and opening-up, which brought fundamental and massive changes to Chinese society. One of the important consequences of reform and opening-up was that the economic, political, legal, and cultural environment in which civil society exists and develops underwent fundamental transformation, leading to the first large-scale emergence of civil organizations in the history of China.