Formation of Public Sphere in East Asia

这个项目的目的是在东亚寻找民主的可能性。我们组织了一个由日本人、韩国人、中国人和美国人组成的多国研究小组，对20世纪之交的日本、韩国、中国和越南的历史进行了比较研究。我们在三年内举办了七次讲习班和一次公开研讨会。在我们的讨论中，我们得到了一些非西方国家实现自由民主的观点。其一，我们不能在几乎没有自由主义传统的地方引进一整套自由民主制度。因此，我们最好不要使用“民主”或“人权”之类的术语。相反，我们最好分析民主的各个方面，寻找在每个社会中促成“公开和公开讨论”的传统，并在政治生活的过程中有策略地将它们相互结合起来。我们发现，“公共讨论”的习惯形成和支持它的媒体比政治意识形态或制度的引入更重要。我们调查方面的过程如下:定制的政府决策,决策的习俗在私营部门,改变政府和私营部门之间的沟通,“公共空间”的出现,使政府的私人的批评,大众媒体的作用在其过程中,在暴力的话获得霸权的过程,这个过程,使政治生活的失败者回来。我们希望那些渴望在非西方世界建立民主的人们能够真诚地关注我们的见解并进一步发展它们。

The aim of this project was to search for the possibility of democracy in East Asia. We organized a multi-national research group, consisted of the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese and the Americans, to carry out comparative study of the histories of Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam at the turn of the 20th century.We held seven workshops and one open symposium in three years. During our discussions, we got some view points for achieving liberal democracy in non-Western countries. One is that we cannot import a complete set of liberal democracy where little tradition of liberalism had existed. Thus, we had better not to use the terms like 'democracy' or 'human rights.' Instead, we had better analyze the aspects of democracy , search for the traditions that had enabled 'open and public discussion' in each society, and tactically combine them with each other in the course of political life.We found that the custom formation of 'public discussion' and the media that supported it were more important than the introduction of political ideologies or institutions. We investigated the aspects of its process as follows : the custom of decision making in the government, the custom of decision making in private sector, the change of communication between the government and the private sector, the emergence of 'public space' that enables the criticism of the government by the private , the role of mass media in its process, the process that words gain supremacy over violence, and the process that enables the losers to come back in political life.We hope that people who are eager to establish democracy in non-Western world will pay sincere attention to our insights and further develop them.