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跨国研究小组，对日本、朝鲜、中国和越南在20世纪之交的历史进行了比较研究，在3年内举办了7次研讨会和1次公开研讨会。在讨论中，我们得到了一些关于在非西方国家实现自由民主的观点。一个是，我们不能引进一套完整的自由民主，因为那里几乎没有自由主义的传统。因此，我们最好不要用“民主”或“人权”之类的字眼。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，并在政治生活中将它们战术地结合在一起。我们发现，“公开讨论”的习惯形成和支持它的媒体比引入政治意识形态或制度更重要。我们考察了其过程中的以下几个方面：政府决策的习惯，私营部门的决策习惯，政府与私营部门沟通的变化，允许私人批评政府的“公共空间”的出现，大众媒体在其过程中的作用，言论凌驾于暴力之上的过程，以及使失败者重返政治生活的过程。我们希望渴望在非西方世界建立民主的人们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.