Prospects for Civil Society in China: A Case Study of Xiaoshan City

'Civil society', 'the market' and 'democracy' are the conceptual 'good guys' that dominate current Western thinking about China's present and future in the social, economic and political realms respectively. Though these ideas are often used in imprecise and tendentious ways, they have considerable analytical and practical power; they reflect real processes and point toward real solutions. This paper sets out to examine how useful the notion of 'civil society' is in describing and explaining social change in contemporary Chinese society. I shall proceed, flrst, by clarifying the specific way in which I intend to use the term 'civil society' and, second, by investigating the empirical utility of the idea through a case-study of one Chinese city.