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2 It is important to clarify that we, like Alexander, focus on this symbolic, cultural sense of “we-ness” rather than the mechanisms that may be associated with building such a sense. While social ties and civic engagement are often considered as possible (though not inevitable) mechanisms for engendering and strengthening this symbolic sense of a civic community, the two should not be conflated. Thus civil society scholarship centred on discourse takes up a different object of study from studies of civic ties.

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7 Ngok Ma, “Changing political cleavages in post-1997 Hong Kong: a study of the changes through the electoral arena,” in ibid. pp. 111–38; Suzanne Pepper, “Hong Kong and the reconstruction of China's political order,” in ibid. pp. 20–66.

8 Ku, Agnes, “The ‘public’ up against the state: narrative cracks and credibility crisis in postcolonial Hong Kong,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 18 (2001), pp. 121–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ma, “Changing political cleavages in post-1997 Hong Kong.”

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10 For Locke, what held human beings together in the form of a civil society was their shared fear of the Christian God. For most of the Scottish Enlightenment scholars, civil society was held together by an awareness of the interdependence of need. Hegel found both answers insufficient. He claimed to have produced a political equivalent of the Christian community, “united not by fear of God but by belief in the divinity of the political community itself.” Khilnani, Sunil, “The development of civil society,” in Kaviraj, Sudipta and Khilnani, Sunil (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 11–32Google Scholar; Seligman, A., The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For Habermas, a vibrant pluralistic public sphere is united by the universally-revered value of rational communicative action, thus “any individual or group may argue for continued incorporation into the decision-making process simply by demonstrating their ability to reason and to express it.” Rabinovitch, Eyal, “Gender and the public sphere: alternative forms of integration in 19th-century America,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 19 (2001), p. 347CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For him, only rational communicative action can achieve social integration necessary for a democratic public sphere without suppressing social and cultural differences. Gellner shares a similar view, with less of a focus on the normative value of rational debate than on the social function of rational individualism. Gellner, Ernest, “The importance of being modular,” in Hall, John A. (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 41–52.)Google Scholar In Democracy in America, Tocqueville praises civic associations in the United States not just for their ability to create social ties but especially their orientation towards the common good, or the propensity to orient their arguments towards public engagement. Alexander, Jeffrey, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Alexander, The Civil Sphere; Alexander, “Citizen and enemy as symbolic classification.”

13 See Rabinovitch, “Gender and the public sphere”; Ku, , “The ‘public’ up against the state”; Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “The civilizing force of social movements: corporate and liberal codes in Brazil's public sphere,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2006), pp. 285–311Google Scholar.

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17 Jacobs, “Civil society and crisis.”

18 Jacobs, “Race, media and civil society.”

19 See Alexander, The Civil Sphere, particularly chs. 10 and 11.

20 See ibid., particularly ch. 8, for a detailed discussion of civil repairs.

21 Ma, “Changing political cleavages in post-1997 Hong Kong,” p. 120.

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29 Gamson and Stuart, “Media discourse as a symbol contest.”

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32 Ming-Cheng M. Lo and Yun Fan. “Gender and civic imagination: political culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” paper presented at the 2006 Annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (Minneapolis, Minnesota).

33 Ku, “The ‘public’ up against the state.”

34 Lo, Bettinger and Fan, “Deploying weapons of the weak.”

35 Binary code was operationalized in two ways: using the three major discourses of liberty, caring and bureaucracy; and using the discourses of caring and bureaucracy and the five subcodes of liberty. These two methods had no effect on the substantive findings. We have presented the second method here for its greater detail.

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42 Ku, “The ‘public’ up against the state;” Lo and Fan, “Gender and civic imagination.”

43 Rabinovitch, “Gender and the public sphere.”

44 For example Kuan and Lau, “Traditional orientations and political participation in three Chinese societies”; Nai-Te Wu, “Identity conflict and political trust.”

45 Ku, “Immigration policies, discourses, and the politics of local belonging in Hong Kong.”

46 Wong and Sun, “Dissolution and reconstruction of national identity.”

47 Brewer, “Multiple identities and identity transition.”

48 See also Ma, “Changing political cleavages in post-1997 Hong Kong.”

49 Wu, “Identity, sovereignty, and economic penetration.”