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Social Activism in East Asia: Civil Society in China and Taiwan

In recent decades, civil society as a platform for civic activism is presented as an answer for democratization, development, good governance, social service production, and social justice. In China, research commonly sees the development of civil society as a key for democratization, while in Taiwan it is mostly counted among the explanations for recent democratization. Modernization theory thus dominates the theoretical field.

Taru Salmenkari, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University, recently published a book, Civil society in China and Taiwan: Agency, class, and boundaries, that takes an issue of the civil society approach based on modernization theory. The book builds on anthropological work with nongovernmental organizations, community movements and dissident spaces. It covers NGOs in environmental, feminist, disability and other movements, but also underground art circles and community-based anti-eviction movements. The book investigates the social production of civil society space and its boundaries. It establishes with anthropological evidence that field evidence about the interrelations between various factors that modernization theory links together are random and thus non-causal. It also investigates contradictory expectations of this theory, such as the expectations that NGOs should have no connections with the state but should still be politically effective or that the middle class should have cravings for social justice against the political system that promoted this class.

You are welcome to join us for the next sessions

22.02 Carlo Cubero, Tallinn University, Caribbean Transinsularisms: A Reading

29.03 Igor Mikeshin, St. Petersburg Center for the History of Ideas, "If you marry, you do not sin": The Construction of Sex and Family in Russian Evangelical Christianity

12.04 – Kirsti Jõesalu, University of Tartu, Studying the Meaning of ‘Late Socialism’ (1960s-80s) in Estonian Memory Culture at the Beginning of 21st Century

26.04 – Hadas Weiss, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Financial Education in Germany: The Social Logic of Financial Agency

30.04 - Frank Heidemann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Identity and Social Proprioception

3.05 – Rein Raud, Tallinn University, tba