Civility Without Democracy. Norms and Politics of Altruism in an Authoritarian Regime

Since the 1980s, urban interactions in China have been scrutinized as a means of assessing the state of Chinese society – firstly by the government, which seeks to shape and “civilize” people’s conduct in public spaces (Flock 2020); but also by researchers, journalists and citizens, for whom these interactions supposedly offer a window into moral life in contemporary China (Yan 2009). Recent ethnographies of urban China invite us to rethink the notion of “publicness,” and to explore how collective identities and forms of ‘togetherness’ emerge in authoritarian public settings (Richaud 2025; Thireau 2020; Amar 2022). Thus, highlighting the need for approaches aiming to grapple with the fragmentation of urban public space in China, recovering spaces of internal critique, and rethinking the conceptual tools needed to assess the conditions of togetherness in authoritarian contexts. While the concept of civility is understood as an activity through which political principles and social norms become embodied and negotiated in everyday life (Gayet-Viaud 2015; Schaap, Tønder 2025), it is also rooted in historical forms of public accountability and political organization that foreground “democracy as a way of life” (Gayet-Viaud 2015). More specifically, the literature tends to centre on practices related to anti-discrimination and anti-harassment (Dekker 2019; Gardner 1995), the politics of free speech (Whitten 2022), the accommodation of normative plurality and role of civility in politics of dissent (Zamalin 2021). My paper, by contrast, will take China as a case study for the experience of citizenship and civil interaction under authoritarian regimes. This paper stems from a study examining how failure to rescue among citizens in a public space became a public issue in China during the 2000s and 2010s, prompting general debates on social cohesion, public morality, and modernity. Based on fieldwork conducted in China—including interviews, press analysis, and case studies— my research examined how citizens and institutions articulate the sources of a civic duty to rescue and negotiate the moral and legal contours of responsibility among citizens. The definition of what people owe one another in terms of assistance requires attention to the interplay between the conditions of acknowledgement in a public space, institutional arrangements, as well as the situated notions of unaquaintance (mosheng 陌生, bu renshi不认识). Therefore, this paper argues for shifting the focus from questions of morality or order-imposition to the diverse situations in which forms of commitment are concealed or made visible, and to the conditions that enable acknowledgment, acquaintance, and basic trust, thereby inviting a more nuanced understanding of publicness.