The so-called East European revolution symbolized by the collapse of “the Berlin Wall” in November 1989 was apparently the trigger of the world history which facilitated the restoration of “the theory of civil society” during the past 30 years at the global level. The trade unions, Catholic society, as well as citizen forums had created the various types of citizen’s power “from the bottom,” and a series of movements represented a strong unified resistance to the state power as a party dictatorial organization of socialism under the framework of “civil revolution.” However, Tiananmen Square incident which took place just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall (June 1989) had a completely opposite implication in the contemporary history of the world in the respect that the civil movement in seek of democracy and freedom was brutally cracked down by its military power. In addition, the authoritarian political system which suppressed such “civil movements” has remained unchanged in China where the nature of such suppressive regime seems to have been further intensified since 2013 under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of Chinese Communist Party. In 2013, he promulgated the strict policy of “seven unmentionable topics,” and these taboo areas include universal values, press freedom, civil society, citizens’ rights, the party’s historical aberrations, the “privileged capitalistic class,” and the independence of the judiciary. It is evident that all of these “taboos” should be interpreted as against the idea of “civil society.”
Under such leadership, however, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong were not always obedient to the Chinese government. In Taiwan, the Sunflower Student Movement was associated with a protest movement driven by a coalition of students and civic groups that came to a head in March and April 2014 where the activists protested the passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) by the ruling party Kuomintang (KMT). In Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement was upheld as a political movement that emerged during the Hong Kong democracy protests of 2014 which widely extended passive resistance to the Hong Kong Police during a 79-day occupation of the city demanding freer elections of Hong Kong’s chief executive. Against these backgrounds, the paper mainly attempts to describe the fundamental changes in academic society in China which took place since 1990s after introducing the theory of western-standardized “civil society,” and continues to discuss the implication of new social policies which have been adopted under the above-mentioned difficult conditions of “civil society” in contemporary China.
