Making the Social Work: toward a Functionalist View of Social Governance

This paper is situated in the normative discourse on the society building in China, seeks to go beyond the various ideological discourses, such as the liberal, the socialist, and neo-Confucian approaches, and develops a functionalist view of social governance. The functionalist approach maintains that the political vision is to build a Chinese-style “active society” that rises above the “under-organized society” of traditional China and the “over-organized society” of contemporary China simultaneously. An active society has three principal sociopolitical functions: inhibiting “state fetishism,” and defending the public sphere to promote the legitimation of state power; resisting “market society,” creating a market (re-)embedded in society and ensuring nonmarket supply of public goods; and rising above “the differential mode of association” (chaxu geju), accumulating social capital and nurturing civil virtues.