【University of Tokyo Forum 2002】

Ji Weidong

Kobe University

Twelve young researchers from Beijing University’s Rural China Study Group surveyed Ancun, a remote Northeastern village, on basic issues of self-governance and village elections during the period of 29 September - 03 October 2002. They later presented their field research and preliminary analysis in a comprehensive report. This report vividly depicts the tensions and conflicts arising between the peasants, who seek the right and access to knowledge and democratic participation, and the local authorities as the fringes of administrative powers, reflecting the process of democratization at the village level, as promoted by the Organic Law of Village Committee and the related regulations. Furthermore, this report describes the people’s efforts, using the various laws and decrees concerning village self-autonomy as ammunition, to independently conduct a democratic election, despite their prior defeats of three times. The legal struggle or popular resistance included methods as the above-noted self-organized election, as well as appealing to higher authorities for righting wrongs (shang-fang), etc.

According to this report, the villagers of Ancun demanded the disclosure of information regarding village affairs since 1999. This demand arose from the villagers’ indignation towards the “village officials,” especially the Village Party Secretary and Head of Village Committee, who wantonly trampled on government policy as well as village contracts regarding distribution of contracted land and its production responsibilities, and used public power for private gain. However, the villagers’ rational and legal demands remained ignored. Thus the villagers made multiple attempts to remove the "village officials", starting with the election of village committee members in 2000. However, with the aid of township leaders, the Ancun village committee members nullified the first three elections by distorting elector rosters registered in the town administrative office's computer, obstructing issuance and delivery of voter registration cards, and stealing ballot papers. Thus, the villagers decided to organize the fourth election themselves. In line with village election procedures, the villagers carried out registration of voters at the beginning of January 2002, held primary election on 15 January, and final election on 20 January. Although mildly violent activities of seizing ballot boxes arose to a small extent, the self-organized and voluntary election succeeded, thanks to many villagers’ support. The election management committee reported the results to the local authorities on the final voting day. As expected, for the fourth time, the authorities nullified the election results.

After hearing the announcement over the local radio and television broadcast on Jan. 26, the Ancun villagers launched anew their battle and began repeatedly appealing to higher authorities against these malpractices by the "village officials" and township authorities. Especially following 12 March, when one of the village organizing leaders were taken into custody, some representatives of the village bypassed the immediate or intermediate institutions of authority, and went directly to Beijing for the third time to present their appeals to state organs and the mass media. To date, this problem is not yet resolved.

No matter how preliminary this short narrative is, we can still see the general trend of changes from peasant to civil society in rural areas-that is, developments in public knowledge regarding law and democracy, and tensions emerging between arbitrary decisions and public or mass discussions. In this scenario, we can observe how the peasants use the powers of popular and public opinion, through the noted self-motivated participations, direct elections, democratic management, mass supervision, and joint decision-making processes. These elements indicate, implicitly, the potential for the construction of a new kind of peasant public sphere. On one hand, the peasants’ side begins to make conscious use of laws and public opinion for the protection of personal rights and interests and rural grassroots self-governance. On the other hand, the Chinese government strengthens its supervision over administrative personnel at the lowest level, aided by rural democratization and these popular resistances. It may also be said that, through the interaction of three institutional factors-(1) the village pacts (cun-gui-min-yue), (2) the village committee elections, and (3) the feedback system of appealing to the higher authorities-and through popular or public opinion connected therewith, the top and the base of the power structure are linked up. As a result, a particular kind of public knowledge concerning a type of “legal community” or justice appears obscurely in its embryonic form from the dynamics of discursive venues.

To understand the essence and trends of social transformation, it is obviously necessary to compare, analyze, and explain theoretically the similarities and differences between the above-mentioned legal discursive field in contemporary China and the critical and popular discussions in traditional rural communities (xiang-ping-qing-yi). Thus we should consider and address the following two sets of issues. The first set of issues addresses the following: what are the mechanisms of generating local knowledge that may be used in modern state-building as well as in denationalizing political reforms; what kind of changes have taken place in the legal discursive field, especially concerning its structure and function; what kind of features should dialogue, popular opinion and public knowledge possess to suit the needs of this new age, etc. The second set of issues includes: how has the "web of meaning" has been rearranged in the course of this structural transformation of the public sphere from peasant to civil society; how much have the speech rules of Confucian politics of public opinion been revised and replaced (including both the formal discussions with a sovereign at court (chaoyi) and the informal discussions among the local elites or at magistrate's informal advisory council (qingyi), e.g., no free discussing among commoners (shu-ren-bu-yi) but in the Imperial College, academies of classical learning and recluse scholars; how can the interpretative turn in the traditional system of social values be actualized, and so on.

Prof. Philip C. C. Huang historically analyzed and presented insight into these issues, using the category of "the third realm between state and society" to address the questions of negotiations, mediation in civil litigations, as well as the dual structure of representation and practice in the Qing dynasty. His work deserves commendation for revealing the correlative interactions of the traditional legal process between the bureaucratic state and local society. Nevertheless, a few points still remain unanswered, such as the degree of free speech in the old-style tribunal that merged as an integral whole with the state organs. In fact, the typical phenomenon of "the third realm between state and society" can be located in the overlapping parts of kinship and the King's law in local society, especially in the domain of "mass contracting of the community articles (ji-zhong-li-yue)" or village pacts, i.e., in the process of shaping public knowledge and norms based on discussion and consensus. It is also worth noting that the practice of rural grassroots self-governance and elections from the 1980s inherit, to a certain extent, this traditional society’s “contract order,” and may provide some clues to understand the structural transformation of public sphere from peasant to civil society.

As for the second set of issues, it is necessary to analyze the changes in the power of speech and symbolic patterns, examine the formation and developments of popular or public opinions concerning social revolution, and explain the relationship between institutional ideology and social discourse from the angle of semantics. Generally speaking, the basic features of public knowledge formation in 20th century China may be summarized as the following. Because the vanguard party, as leading nucleus of social revolution and mass movements, had already removed the obstacle of Confucian speech rules that had been hindering free discussions among the common people, as a result, a kind of discourse space, somewhat similar to the so-called "plebian public sphere," opened up to a certain extent in both non-governmental and governmental sectors. Two aspects of the correlative interaction of state and society can be seen here. On one hand, we notice that individuals become increasingly self-assertive and self-dependent, the common people began to concern themselves with state affairs and join political discussion at small-scale forums of "letting everyone have his/her say" mass meetings. However, we also notice that the government side has been working toward political mobilization, by methods of educational dialogues to "overcome selfishness and foster public spirit (po-si-li-gong)", study classes for self-realization or self-remolding, performing arts propaganda teams, theatrical festivals and other kind of consent cultures based on mass organization of leisure.

What emerged from these "plebian public sphere"-like discursive venues are "people's public opinion (ren-min-gong-lun)" and "people's public pledge (ren-min-gong-yue)". Correspondingly, the “feedback-based” decision-making process "to pool the wisdom and efforts of everyone" and "from the people, to the people," the reflective discussion of "criticism and self-criticism", and the diverse strategies of discourse for the transformation of social conflicts also arose. Given the scenario above (despite the physical and linguistic violence of politics based on belligerent philosophy as well as the method for class classification), a new type of social order of contracts emerges from the public discussions of cooperative and non-cooperative dialogue as well as repeated adjustments for harmonization. Now I will provide a detailed exposition on these two sets of issues.

From a Habermasian standpoint, views on public sphere may basically be understood as re-exploring and reusing the resources of direct democracy, which has been weakened greatly since entering the era of the representative system and bureaucracy. The objective was to combine the face-to-face discussions at the grassroots level with organized society and mass democracy that already changed into the oversimplified voting behaviors overall. Therefore, it may be said that the public sphere prototype can also be found in forms of tribal assembly, folkmote, town meeting, moot and so forth. And the essence of public knowledge arising from it lies in the conception of social contract. Consequently, when the social contractual order in China is discussed, the question of whether any consciousness of social contract exists should be first posed and answered.

Generally, traditional politics and law has been viewed as lacking the concept of social contract. For example, Qian Mu, a great scholar on Chinese national culture, put forward the dichotomous schema of contract-type regime and trust-type regime, as to explain the essential distinction between Western Europe and China in the ruling typology. In addition, Prof. Yuzo Mizoguchi, a famous Japanese Sinologist, also pointed out that because China placed individuals as "the private” in an inferior position of value system (in a derogatory sense of selfishness), "it has not developed a theory of state or society that takes personal contract relationship as a fundamental principle of 'the public' ". However, Prof. Mizoguchi continued, saying that, because of the reason noted above, "on the contrary, there has also been a dynamic tendency out of anarchism and toward the society based on free contract relationship or free alliance of the common people". This proviso appears to be very significant.

In fact, desiring to impose restrictions on the selfishness of "the private," the traditional "private contract (siyue)" relations in Chinese everyday life have been interwoven with many kinds of parameters, such as a third-party approach, "the public" factors and social interference. In other words, the Chinese "private contract" relations always contained elements that may lead to a "public pledge". Prof. Hiroaki Terada, a scholar of Chinese legal history, went a step further to determine its characteristic as the mobility and continuity between the contractual and legal order, and sought the medium for peasants and bureaucratic state in the village-made agreements including prohibitory appointment, village pact, oath of alliance for refusing to pay rent or taxes and so on. According to his analysis, the social order based on village-made agreements may be viewed from two aspects-gathering together to discuss regulations and gathering together to take sanctions against violation.

What bore out Prof. Mizoguchi's proviso concerning the paradox of social contract conception much more clearly is the practice of "people's public pledge" in contemporary China. Indeed we have watched the "dynamic tendency out of anarchism and toward the society based on free contract relationship or free alliance of the common people" again and again in the ordering based on the "people's public pledge", "patriotic public pledge", village pact and other contractual relationship. Thus it may be said that some conceptions of social contract or public contract exist in China as well.

In China today, where the modern legal state is the ultimate goal, the three-in-one combination of contractual rules including (1) the Charter of Self-government as "mini-constitutional conventions (xiao xianfa)", (2) the Village Pacts as behavioral norms of villagers and (3) Specific Regulations, such as administrative norms of village committees, are being perfected and emphasized as never before, in the wake of village democratization. This is a very significant phenomenon. These contractual rules of grassroots self-governance are adjusted in light of public will and for way of equal participation, repeated discussions and voluntary recognition of the people. On the other hand, however, these contractual rules must be in line with state law and are inclined to formalization. Actually, while assimilating to the local conditions and customs, most of the charters, pacts and specific regulations are formulated in accordance with the Constitution, laws, and administrative regulations as well as governmental policies. The structure of the village pacts and articles is modeled on substantive law, and its executions are guaranteed by both the autonomous organizations of self-government and the administrative organizations. It is also surprising that the village contractual rules cover a very wide range of subjects including: the basic rights and duties of villagers; administrative institutions for the village public affairs; finance; taxes; mountainous land and forest; collective-owned enterprises; private businesses; contracts; productive services; power supply; responsibility system of contracted land; labor disputes; public welfare; public security; marriage and family; birth control; neighborhood relationship, etc. Therefore, this formation of order through “people's public pledges” may be considered a type of legalization.

In the public pledge making process, adequate discussions are normally carried out. The charters of self-government must be discussed and approved at village meetings or assemblies, and one or several officials of the town house also frequently take part in the discussion. In principle, all village pacts and specific regulations must be adopted at the village meeting. The village representative meeting may also create specific regulations, but in such cases, it is necessary to supply greater opportunities for expression of views or criticism by the public. Especially after the 1998 issuance of the notice to make countryside management more transparent and democratic, the institutional and face-to-face public sphere in the peasant society broadened.

As for implementation of these contracts, spontaneous discussions on justice or fairness, and the emerging public opinion, play an important role. For example, the village pact prescribing the contractual relations concerning production responsibility of collective-owned land may change if objected to, if the specific changes are accepted after thorough discussion among the villagers. In fact, as provided in all charters of village self-governance, one of the duties of the village representatives and village committee members is just to listen to these kinds of objections and other views or suggestions. Of course, the negotiating position of an individual may be very limited, and minority opinions may be ignored. But when many villagers begin to consider the status quo of contracted land distribution unfair, the pressure of popular or public opinion will increase and strengthen, thus the village committee has to respond and to adjust the contractual relations. Like the example of Ancun, it is imbalances in economic distribution and burden that are the catalytic agents in promoting the development from individual claims to public will.

III. The Interplay Between Mass Sentiment, Popular Indignation,

For contractual ordering, the most important problem is how to keep the spontaneous norms effective. This is also related to the Durkheimian problem regarding the non-contractual basis for contractual relations. In the Chinese practice, we can find 1) a kind of mechanism running by the principles of law-abiding psychology based on the participatory democracy annexed obedience, 2) the idea of preventive law based on sanction of public opinion and public indignation, 3) informal executive bodies, and 4) negotiated ordering in the shadow of governmental compulsory means. Obviously, public discussions are able to play an important role for this mechanism and some very complicated relationship of mutual promotion can be found there among the factors of mass sentiment, popular indignation, public opinion, sense of reflective equilibrium and social justice.

There are two significant aspects for considering the interrelations and interaction between state and mass discussions. One is the mobilization device of social and political resource, which is composed of psychology based on feelings of the masses. The other is the standard for judging legitimacy and effect of state law that stems from popular and public opinion concerning social justice. Here let us analyze the first aspect, which is public opinion as device for mobilization.

In contemporary China, it is the aspect of mobilization device that has been emphasized strongly for a long period of time. In particular, the public opinion concerning adjudication repeatedly made use of the emotional discourse about victim-centered justice and the public indignation against a public enemy, to play the role of social mobilization. Therefore, the adjudications of political or social significance took the form of public accusation meeting or public trial assembly more often than not. In other words, during a long period of time, the judicial proceedings in China worked to form a sympathetic order through educational communication, mass sentiment and popular opinion, besides dispute resolving and trial hearing. This feature of adjudication was manifested the most clearly and extremely during the period of "Cultural Revolution" (1966-76) when it was known as “popular justice.” According to the deliberation records, judgments, rulings, notices and publications from that period, basic features of the public opinion as a mobilization device may be summarized up as follows.

1. Regardless of it being a civil or criminal case, the judicial organ would always print and deliver a report on details of the case, after collecting evidence and ascertaining the facts, to the grass-root masses within a certain area (e.g. local community of the work place or dwelling place of a suspect or defendant, or the place where an important legal act took place), and organize specific "mass forums (qunzhong zuotanhui)" there to discuss preliminary plans of dispute resolution or judgment and offer suggestions. This kind of “moot-styled” popular justice put forward judicial slogans such as "putting all cards of the case on the table for the people," " enlarging the results of a trial to depict justice," "putting an end, once and for all, to disputes by changing our world outlook," "resolution should be a product of repeated discussions and persuasions," and so on.

2. The politics of law had been emphasized, especially during the period of "cultural revolution." Similar to Carl Schmitt's conception of the political as the ability to distinguish between public friends and enemies, the criminal adjudication in China also devoted much attention to the friend/enemy distinction by labeling the offenders as the "public enemies of the people." In accordance with this logic, many criminal cases as "friend/enemy contradictions (di-wo maodun)" and related legal judgments were handed over to the people for the "insider discussions (neibu taolun)". However, it is these kinds of political and class-based judgments that made a large number of unjust verdicts.

3. Although the people who took part in the discussion on these law cases may put forward a proposal on the sanction (in the name of the great majority or unanimity), the judicial organs must still make the judgments based on laws and policies, and only take the mass opinions as reference. Nevertheless, the outward appearance of judicial proceedings was to present the legal decision as unanimous of the judicial organs and the popular opinions. Thus, each judgment made illuminated the linguistic circulatory system between legal decisions and the will of the people.

4. Popular justice was always carried out at public accusation meetings or public trial assemblies. Criminal adjudication was then justified by mass opinion and emotional rhetoric such as "having incurred the greatest popular indignation", "the feelings of the masses ran high and were filled with indignation" which are used in a written judgment or a proclamation. In fact, it is possible to say in a sense that the offenders or lawbreaking persons have been asked to play the role of a “negative teacher.”

5. The judgments that were pronounced or executed were compiled and circulated as material for discussion from which lessons were drawn. The slogan for its aim was "educating a crowd of people by adjudicating a piece of litigation" and "to turn negative factors into positive factors". Furthermore, the related authorities also heeded the opinions and reactions of the masses to deal with the any objection in advance or immediately, and to identify improper judgment.

6. In traditional China, mediation was a means to avoid the formal verdict according to bureaucratic law through popular informality. The people's mediation in contemporary China, however, has been turned into a part of state power, and plays a dual role of both social mobilization and social control. In other words, the people's mediation has been considered an appendage to a newly emerging order that promotes political participation on the basis of internalization of laws, policies and socialist morality through energetic persuasion, education and propaganda, and fosters a spirit of discipline at the same time.

Of course, the popular justice that prevailed during the "Cultural Revolution" has been refuted in China today, and the modernization of law has become mainstream. However, we can see that the above-mentioned phenomena are still left over to a greater or lesser extent in grass-roots judicial proceedings as well as executive activities of the village pacts. For example, many executive teams that enforce village pacts have been organized and the common people have been using their discretion through public discussion since the 1980s. Even a form of public accusation meetings or public trial assemblies still continues in some regions. Moreover, it was pointed out that the problem of adjudication being influenced by popular indignation was not resolved until the end of 1999. Recently, although emotional factors have disappeared indeed from judgments and proclamations, the discourse of public indignation and popular justice can still find expression more or less in the court-watching measures such as the spectator system of the people's deputy and supervision by the public opinion.

Public opinion as a mobilization device is far from the "ideal speech situation" in Habermas' words. The "inside discussions" within a local community may promote unsymmetrical information transmission, and reject rational dialogue under conditions of public agora or arena and procedural due process at the same time. In addition, the public accusation meeting or public trial assembly easily becomes a forum not for free discussions but only a ceremony for declaring the government’s decision in the name of general will or public opinion. There the tyranny of the majority that worried Alexis de Tocqueville emerged more often than not. Of course, when we speak of this kind of problems, we do not mean that there was no opportunity of expressing disagreement with the general will or pseudo public opinion in name of public interests. For instance, some institutional remedies such as the system of paying return visit to the parties of past cases, appealing against a final decision for specific retrial according to the adjudication supervision procedure, and seeking audience with the higher authorities for righting wrongs, etc., had been supplied in China. However, the dialogues had been isolated from public discussions, and there were not enough guarantees for free participation and equal rights to speech.

For most occasions, the legitimacy of a legal order was established when the decision of the parties involved and the opinion of the local community were in agreement. Recently, "contentment of the people", that is, the extent to which the people are content with the judges and courts of justice, has been emphasized. It is the slogan of satisfying the people that have promoted supervision of popular opinion and mass media including live telecast of trial hearings, investigative questionnaire of court observers’ views, etc. Among legal scholars, however, there is growing anxiety about the possibility that because of the tension between discursive power and judicial independence, procedural integrity and reasoned discussions may be sacrificed for the “performance” of direct democracy, and free evaluation of evidence and public opinion may be distorted by journalistically edited reports of a litigation. In reality, strengthening the supervision of popular opinion without the real rights of free speech easily leads to pseudo public opinion that can be manipulated by state power.

Here, society’s value choices warrant attention. Namely, it is question of the collective behavioral pattern: in seeking justice, will the people resort to the law and adjudication system, or appeal to mass media or public opinion? According to statistics of a questionnaire of social opinions recently conducted by the State Planning Committee, the preferred mechanism for resolving problems that may affect social order was, in descending order, government departments, mass media and legal means. In particular, the preference of urban residents in 2000 was 89.2% for government departments, 79.0% for mass media, and 73.5% for legal means, and 77.7%, 73.9%, 72.5%, respectively, in 2001. As for rural residents, the questionnaire took place in the countryside starting from 2001, and the figures showed the same order as that of urban residents: 74.6%, 57.4% and 56.7%, respectively. The example of Ancun given above also made clear that the villagers have been appealing to government departments and the mass media for support and help. It is interesting that a tendency of Chinese people to have more faith in the forum of public opinion than in the legal system manifested itself in these simple data. Here we may find a hypothesis that social consensus or universal truth can emerge from not only the rational dialogue according to procedural requirements but also the chaos of ideological fighting for discourse hegemony.

Surely the mass media in China has yet to enjoy full freedom of speech, and the dynamics of communication are still organized and oriented by political power to a great extent. Thus the press circles are also serve to strengthen the effectiveness of governmental social control. Nevertheless, speech through mass media is not a completely one-way traffic. It is possible even for the common people to make their views and behavior public through journalists or letters to the editor or newspaper contributions. They may even strategically take advantage of the publicity of public figures and their social resonance in order to gain a negotiation position equal with the state power. Especially because the mass media always stresses social passion and the recognition of the people, it is not difficult to find an opportunity for political participation or resisting the structural pressure of the state. In view of China's cultural tradition that has been seeking legitimacy of legal system in consensus and recognition of the common people, rather than an external transcendental power, the role of popular and public opinion in providing social order will become increasingly important from now on, along with the commercialization of mass media and the development of free speech.

IV. The Institutions, Mediums, and Symbolic Circuit

As indicated above, ordering social through public pledges and the discourse of public indignation have been particular phenomena of modern state building in China. This fact was based on the "cultural nexus of power" in Prasenjit Duara's words and the needs of social control over that kind of grass-roots communities with changeable power relations. Without this mechanism, the state may lose its control at the grass-root. In fact, the political successes of Chinese Communist Party depended to a great extent on skillful mass mobilization through popular opinion and public opinion. Therefore it is necessary to investigate from the perspectives of both face-to-face and anonymity about the reality of institutions, mediums and symbolic circuit for public discussion.

Village pacts in a broad sense provide not only the behavioral norms of rural everyday life, but also a system of discourse that decides the meaning of particular community relations. It is the communication of interpreting the related norms and values that make the continuous growth of autogenous order possible. In traditional China, the center of discussion had been customary rules passed on from generation to generation and enjoying orthodoxy. But in contemporary China, legality, teleological rationalization, political mobilization, and democratic participation have been attached importance. Especially since the 1980s, the basic purpose of public opinion in the rural area has been to promote free communication among the people and to resume face-to-face situation in decision- making processes. It may even be considered that this kind of discourse field is pregnant with a new political paradigm of a democratic system based on cooperative groups instead of pressure groups. Here the people are fond of not antagonistic discussion but harmonious discussion, and not zero-sum game but plus-sum game.

According to Organic Law of Village Committee, the village assembly is drawn from all villagers 18 years old and over, and consists of a majority of all adult villagers or representatives of more than two-thirds of households (Article 17). It is the supreme decision-making body at the village level, voting on all major public affairs of the village. The village committee generally convenes the village assembly, but a petition signed by more than one-tenth of the villages’ households can also call a village assembly (Article 18). The following topics must be put to a public discussion by the village assembly, namely: (1) deliberation on the annual report of the village committee and appraisal of the village committee members (Article 18); (2) subjects related to personal interests of villagers and public interests of the community, e.g., the acquisition of supplies, subsidy for work losses, utilization of collective gains, contracted management of land, distribution of residential land, birth control, disaster relief, and so on (Article 19, Article 22); (3) making and revising the charter of self-government, village pacts, and regulations (Article 20), and so on. Therefore, public discussion at the village assembly must be opened at least once every year. In addition, by the principle of making village affairs known to the public, villagers may interrogate the village committee whenever necessary (Article 22).

In the institutionalized public sphere at the village level, many different and original means of communication have been created in different local communities. For example, a township in Henan Province has established the feedback system of "The Echo Wall: Your Voice and its Repercussions" bulletin board in all its villages on which any villager may put up signed or anonymous opinions on the board to express his or her demands, suggestions, and criticism. The village committee must make a public reply within five days. In other words, the proclamation board as one-way channel for transmitting orders has thus been changed into the board of public opinion as a two-way channel for free dialogue.

Most villages in China have already set up a "Board of Open Village Affairs (cunwu gongkai lan)" and a "Box of Supervisory Suggestion (jiandu jianyi xiang)". It was reported that this "One Board, One Box" system could play an important role in making public affairs truly known to the public and forming an atmosphere in which "all villagers participate in discussion, determination and management of village affairs."

Furthermore, "the institution of debate at village representative assemblies" was introduced in some localities. The representatives are normally elected by all the villagers or by the traditional method of choosing one from every ten families. The village representative assemblies are called, in principle, once every two months or quarterly, and have the right to decide important village affairs and participate in their management through democratic dialogue with the village heads in face-to-face situations. In some villages, even the right of refusing to execute the decision made by the village committee without public discussion at a representative assembly or a villagers' assembly has been recognized. While the ideal is wonderful, as shown by the example of Ancun, there is still a great gap between the ideal and the reality, and practice clearly varies from place to place.

Although the practice of self-government at village level was started by the state, we can also find more and more intense spontaneity. Thus the problem of discursive field in rural area is the fact that public discussions are contained within a local community and that the balance between university and plurality of values required by the public sphere of a civil society is not realized in the Chinese public sphere of peasantry society. Actually most village pacts have strictly limited the membership of the community, and the rights/duties of members are also decided by fixed status relations. The "outsiders" who live in a village without permanent residence registration are not able to enjoy villager treatments such as the distribution of interests, the right to vote, and the right of debate, and must undertake only the burdens and duties.

Therefore, what has been built up in the peasant society is a discursive field that is composed different local problems and local knowledge, that is, a realm of popular opinion that overlaps with the private sphere and its particularities and irrationality. To suit the needs of modern state building and keeping abreast of the times, it is necessary to make the speech situation open to a universal audience and structurally compounded. In China today, seeking an audience with higher authority in government departments and legal resistance are basic arrangements for peasants to express their voices in the universal institutional framework. From the viewpoints of making laws and guaranteeing rights, however, they are not enough.

On the other hand, a new tendency toward public sphere building by digital information technology has become stronger in urban area recently. Certainly the Internet also began to permeate the rural world. It was even reported that at least one "digitized villages" appeared in Henan Province. But because the digital divide among different regions, especially between the urban area and the rural area is still large and cannot be changed soon, we should pay attention here to the situation in cities. According to incomplete statistics, the registered population of Internet users in China was more than fifty million in the autumn of 2002. Considering the e-People who willfully enter in and out of Cyberspace to communicate, the population of “Netizens” may be much larger. At the present, the public sphere based on digital networking has opened up in two directions.

One is the development of mass "electronic commons" that is composed of a large number of net-cafes (wangba), manifold websites, academic net-forum as well as BBS on which opinions on public topics are exchanged speedily and extensively. Despite the fact that the Chinese government has promulgated several regulations for controlling Internet access, and communicative activities in cyberspace are thus not thoroughly free at the present, we may still say that the electronic commons is a marketplace for exchange of information and opinions.

The other is the development of the so-called "network state" that has already manifested itself in the experiments of "China electronic governance" in Shenzhen City

of Guangdong Province, Qingdao City of Shandong Province and Mianyang City of

Sichuan Province, the introduction of "national internet tax system", the reform program of the People's Supreme Court to "digitize the administration of justice" and so on. Discussions in the digital public sphere are not face-to-face but through the medium of computers and the Internet. Nevertheless, this discursive field is open to anyone at any time, and there the communicative actions are characterized by anonymous authors and audience and is thus a kind of a liberated area. Given the shortage of institutional guarantee for free speech, this anonymity of speakers promotes free discussions and political criticism to a certain extent. At the same time, however, it may also lead to negative consequences where the sense moral responsibility will get blunted, the communication will become irrational, and the quality of discourse will come down.

The net-forum and BBS based on IT are different from any other kind of existing mass media, and they help promote the multiplicity and complications of public spheres. As a result, the uncertainty of communication and decision-making may be enhanced, the social order of public pledge based on consensus by traditional and substantive values may be shaken, and the discourse of public indignation as a device of social mobilization may lose its direct influence to a great extent. In other words, the complex public sphere in the information age will have to face a dichotomous choice of whether to put the social division of labor and compulsory supply of public goods (considered as the non-contractual basis for contractual relations to the decentralized relational network), or allow the programming of the technocrat group as the center of decision-making in the form of absolute teleological rationality. Therefore, the Chinese public sphere, characterized as emphasizing cooperation and consensus, must now seek the basis for its consensus in the venues of spontaneous and free communication to maintain its mechanism. In this course, the concepts of social theory such as the ideal speech situation, ethical rules for reasoning dialogue, procedural due process, repeated games, irrational decisionism, etc. may become helpful clues and route signs.

In short, there are two different public spheres of knowledge-that is, the closed rural discursive field and the opened urban discursive field, existing side by side in China today, consisting of multiple grass-root "microcosms," in Max Weber's words, and connected by the governmental feedback systems and law. A never-ending struggle for discursive hegemony continues among these multiplicities of incomparable or incommensurable “public pledge” social orders and value systems, and unavoidably made the communication of the people more and more plural and complicated in pace with the social differentiation. However, the result is paradoxical. Viewed from another angle, we can find the possibility that the power of sovereign may be strengthened once again, in order to avoid the societal fragmentation as well as the mutual ignorance among the people. This kind of total public sphere, based on the administrative feedback arrangement and the information superiority of technocrat group, may be demanded in the future.

This paper aims to explain the dynamics of creating a social ordering through discursive fields, by analyzing the public sphere of peasant society in contemporary China at different stages and from aspects of personal contractual relations, mass negotiation in accordance with public opinion, state-oriented public pledge making as well as rural discourse field of grass-root self-government that may be considered one form of legalization. The empirical materials as basis of the argumentation here are mainly discourses and phenomena concerning village pacts. In addition to these, the communicative activities at public trial assembly as well as “electronic public domains” have also been brought into field of vision to show the complementary, or different aspects or possibilities of public discussion.