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The Death and Life of China's Civil Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2003

Ian Johnson
Ian Johnson
Affiliation:
(Ian.Johnson@wsj.com) works in Berlin for The Wall Street Journal. He was a reporter in China from 1994 to 2001 and won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series of articles on Falun Gong. His book Wild Grass: Stories of Change in China will be published in January 2004. Johnson thanks two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier draft of this essay
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Extract

Afew years ago, I interviewed two retired men who had helped organize a huge class-action lawsuit against the Chinese government's efforts to demolish most of Beijing's old town. The men had been elected in a secret ballot by all 10,000 members of the lawsuit; they were the group's representatives in court and to the media. At the end of our talk, I asked one of the men why he was so confident that they would win the suit, which to me seemed doomed to failure.

Type
Perspectives
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , September 2003 , pp. 551 - 554
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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