Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events.

Situated far from coastal cities and foreign concessions, Chengdu yields insights into the role of the local press and its specific publics in the political evolution of the late Qing and early Republic. Despite its remote location, Chengdu developed its own modern press in the late Qing, relying on print entrepreneurs and modern journalists recruited from the ranks of the local literati and traditional sociability, in particular teahouses. They all played a role in forming a modern reading public which came to understand itself as a distinct local political community in dynamic interaction with national politics and transnational networks. The local press evinced three successive but intertwined ideals of publicness: as a link between the state and the people and a vector of enlightenment, as a professional forum for public opinion and as a tool for political mobilization. In solidifying public opinion around the local community, the press served as a forum and catalyst for political activism in the 1911 Railroad Protection movement and the 1919 May Fourth movement, events which were shaped as much by local dynamics as they were by national developments.

While it was traditionally accepted that Hongkongers shared a form of pan-Chinese cultural identification that did not contradict their local distinctiveness, over the last decade Hong Kong has seen the rise of new types of local identity discourses. Most recently, “localists” have been a vocal presence. Hong Kong has – quite unexpectedly – developed a strong claim for self-determination. But how new is “localism” with respect to the more traditional “Hong Kong identity” that appeared in the 1970s? The present study takes a two-dimensional approach to study these discourses, examining not only their framework of identification (local versus pan-Chinese) but also their mode of identification (ethno-cultural versus civic). Using three case studies, the June Fourth vigil, the 2012 anti-National Education protest and the 2014 Umbrella movement, it distinguishes between groups advocating civic identification with the local community (Scholarism, HKFS) and others highlighting ethnic identification (Chin Wan). It argues that while local and national identification were traditionally not incompatible, the civic-based identification with a local democratic community, as advocated by most participants in recent movements, is becoming increasingly incompatible with the ethnic and cultural definition of the Chinese nation that is now being promoted by the Beijing government.

Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kong's political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong's younger generation.

The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui's 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang's book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang's work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.

Le mouvement du 4 mai 1919 est généralement associé aux appels en faveur de « Monsieur Science et Monsieur Démocratie » d’activistes comme Chen Duxiu, dont les théories restent souvent prisonnières d’une vision à la fois scientiste et instrumentale, conduisant directement du darwinisme social au marxisme. L’appel à la littérature comme vecteur de diffusion des idées nouvelles a cependant donné naissance à un autre courant de réflexion dont Lu Xun est le représentant central. Cet article cherche à montrer comment Lu Xun, dans ses nouvelles, a rejeté l’instrumentalisation aussi bien de la littérature que du savoir sur l’homme que celle-ci véhicule. Se détournant de la morale comme du culturalisme biologique, il traite les difficultés rencontrées par la démocratie en Chine à travers une analyse des mécanismes sociaux qui entravent une plus grande autonomie individuelle. Par ce tournant épistémologique, et par sa volonté de thématiser de façon réflexive la position de l’écrivain comme observateur du social, Lu Xun peut être considéré comme un pionnier dans l’émergence du discours des sciences sociales modernes en Chine.