Alternate Civilities

An anthropologists answer to the argument that Chinas cultural tradition renders it incapable of achieving an open political system, drawing on the example of the role of business organizations, religious groups and womens networks in the democratization of Taiwan.. Alternate Civilities is an anthropologists answer to the argument that Chinas cultural tradition renders it incapable of achieving an open political system. Robert P. Weller draws on his knowledge of both China and Taiwan to show how such sweeping claims fail to take account of potential democratic stimuli among local-level associations such as business organizations, religious groups, environmental movements, and womens networks. These groups were pivotal in Taiwans democratic transition, and they are thriving in the new free space that has opened up in China. They do not promise a clone of Western civil society, but they do show the possibility of an alternate civility }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 Taiwans 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 womens 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. }