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Citizenship Studies
ISSN: 1362-1025 (Print) 1469-3593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20
Deliberative citizenship and deliberative
governance: a case study of one deliberative
experimental in China
Baogang He
To cite this article: Baogang He (2018): Deliberative citizenship and deliberative
governance: a case study of one deliberative experimental in China, Citizenship Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13621025.2018.1424800
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1424800
Published online: 17 Jan 2018.
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CITIZENSHIP STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1424800
Deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance: a case
study of one deliberative experimental in China
BaogangHe‡
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT
Deliberative democracy requires a new type of deliberative
citizenship and deliberative governance. However, there has been
little examination of the connection between deliberative citizenship
and deliberative governance. Moreover, despite a growing literature
that has examined a diversity of concepts of Chinese citizenship,
the newly emerging deliberative citizenship has not been studied.
This paper attempts to ll these two gaps by studying the role of
deliberative citizenship in deliberative governance practice. Drawing
on an experiment this author organized in 2010, this article examines
the question of whether deliberative citizenship can be harnessed
to solve a particular social problem and how deliberative forums
can become a new form of deliberative governance mechanism. It
examines what kind of conditions help or hinder the development of
deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance, and identies
the limitations of local deliberative democracy in China.
Introduction
A democratic theory of deliberative democracy requires ‘a distinctive form of deliberative
citizenship’ (Stokes 2006, 56). Diering from an ocial, legal and administrative category
of citizenship, this notion of deliberative citizenship sees citizenship as a normative ideal in
that citizens can empower themselves through their deliberative capacity to achieve self-gov-
erning practice with regard to the issues and policies that impact their lives. Moreover, the
realization of deliberative democracy relies on the presence and activism of deliberative
citizens. erefore, for citizens to deliver eective deliberative governance, deliberative
citizenship must be cultivated. However, there is a lack of the discussion of the connection
between deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance. is paper attempts to ll
this intellectual gap by examining the connection between deliberative citizenship and
deliberative governance through a case study.
is paper also contributes to the growing literature on Chinese citizenship studies.
Scholars have applied a diversity of citizenship perspectives, ranging from a statist con-
cept of citizenship as welfare entitlement (Liu 2007; Zhang and Wang 2010) to an activist
KEYWORDS
Deliberative citizenship;
deliberative democracy;
deliberative governance;
differentiated citizenship;
women’s rights; civil society;
the petition and visitors
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 4 May 2017
Accepted21 December 2017
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Baogang He baogang.he@deakin.edu.au
‡Adjunct professor at Tianjin Normal University, China.
2 B. HE
concept of citizenship as struggle and resistance (Solinger 1999; O’Brien and Li 2006).
Keane (2001) points out that citizenship in the ocial discourse is merely understood as
social-economic entitlement rather than entailing political rights and claims against the
state. Baogang He (2005) examines the micro site of village citizenship and its implication
for the development of village democratic institutions. Innovatively, Sun (2015) applies the
concept of biocitizenship to investigate how biological citizenship has become an integral
dimension of China’s citizenship project. Qi and Chen (2016) draw on Chinese traditional
thought to develop a concept of world citizenship.
Notwithstanding, the emergence of deliberative citizenship has been overlooked in the
study of Chinese citizenship. Such an omission is quite understandable as the development
of deliberative citizenship is only in its infancy stage. However, deliberative citizenship and
capacity are critical for Chinese local democratization, NGO’s citizenship education eorts,
and homeowner associations’ activism. e paper aims to ll this intellectual gap.
Drawing on an experiment which this author organized in 2010, this paper examines the
emergence of deliberative citizenship and its features through discussing the research ques-
tion of whether deliberative citizens can solve one particular social problem, which has been
leading to excessive petitioning in China. It further investigates both the intellectual and
practical connections between deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance through
a case study on that deliberative experiment. e deliberative democracy experiment took
place at Guangming Village, Dayawan District, Huizhou City, Guangdong Province on 6
May 2010, lasting about 10h.
It should be acknowledged at the beginning that local governance in China is charac-
terized by the domination of party control, the wide use of administrative orders and the
excessive deployment of political control (He 2003; Benney 2016). Nevertheless, in some
areas, administrative orders and political control are no longer eective and some local
ocials have been forced to search for alternative local governance models; one of which
is a deliberative governance model. While the deliberative governance model is still rare in
China, it is likely to become increasingly prominent in more and more localities.
e paper consists of six sections. Section ‘Introduction’ carries out a literature survey on
the ideas of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance to set up a theoretical frame-
work and normative criteria to examine the local experiment in China. Section ‘Deliberative
citizenship and deliberative governance’ describes the background to explain why the local
ocials adopted the deliberative experiment. Section ‘Background: benets-sharing and
persistent petitioning’ discusses the design and process of the experiment therein. Section
‘Deliberative democratic experiment’ examines the debates and outcome of the experi-
ment. Section ‘Debating competing arguments by deliberative citizens’ summarizes the
lessons learnt from the experiment, focusing on the questions of how to cultivate delibera-
tive citizenship and how to improve deliberative governance. Section ‘e mechanisms of
cultivating deliberative citizenship and improving deliberative governance’ concludes on
the emergence of deliberative citizenship and its implications for the development of local
deliberative democracy in China.
Deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance
e idea of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance can be traced back to John
Stuart Mill’s ideas of ‘government by discussion’. For Mill, ‘it is from political discussion,
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 3
and collective political action, that one whose daily occupations concentrate his interests
in a small circle round himself, learns to feel for and with his fellow-citizens, and becomes
consciously a member of a great community’ (emphasis added) (Mill 1975, 277). Habermas
continues Mill’s tradition by emphasizing the role of the public sphere. For him, ‘democratic
legitimacy is generated through two practices: informal processes of opinion-formation and
formal institutionalised deliberative and aggregative decision-making procedures’ (cited in
Erman 2013, 13).
Dryzek (2011), a leading scholar in developing a radical theory of deliberative democracy,
has examined the key issues of deliberative citizenship and governance. Firstly, he argues
that one must explain what ‘deliberation’ is and how to assess it. Here, Dryzek develops
a normative notion of citizens’ deliberative capacity, which can be assessed according to
the criteria of authenticity, inclusiveness, and whether it is consequential for collective
matters. Secondly, deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance need to pay atten-
tion to the concept of ‘discursive representation’ – whereby political systems have ways of
representing discourses and not just people or preferences (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008).
One implication of this notion is that to address any practical issue, a deliberative citizen
must consider all ideas and proposals, rather than merely expressing and articulating their
individual preference. e experiment discussed in this paper was designed to achieve this
normative and epistemological requirement (see Section ‘Deliberative democratic experi-
ment’). irdly, deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance should not be limited
to the liberal democratic state. It has an application in authoritarian regimes, global politics,
and networked governance. is paper aims to address the question of whether and how
the quality of democratic deliberation can be established and improved in the context of
an authoritarian state.
Other scholars have also examined various aspects of deliberative citizenship and delib-
erative governance. Hajer and Wagenaar (2003), for example, explore a new deliberative
policy-making process and new possibilities for conict resolution through deliberation and
collective learning in the complexity of a socio-technical system. Mark Warren (1996, 242)
argues that deliberative citizenship can overcome the old problem that in a liberal society
‘democracy works poorly when individuals hold preferences and make judgements in iso-
lation from one another’. Graham Smith (2000, 32) further points out that ‘citizen forums
embody an active conception of citizenship, one in which the experiences and judgements
of citizens are brought into the public domain’, and that through public deliberation, citi-
zens are likely to ‘develop a disposition of mutual respect and understanding towards other
citizens’. A concrete example takes places at Hampton, New Jersey, in the US. e Hampton
government adopted a citizen-focused approach to governance, created forums for citizens’
participation, and fostered democratic and deliberative citizenship through participatory
processes. As a result, ‘residents – both youths and adults – become citizens fully exercising
their role in a democratic society’ (Potapchuk, Carlson, and Kennedy 2005, 259).
Georey Stokes (2006, 62–66) has provided a long list of the qualities and features of
deliberative citizenship. For him, deliberative citizenship is about the capacity of, and oppor-
tunity for, citizens to engage in enlightened debate. It includes the abilities of citizens to
engage in dialogue, to embrace the values of reciprocity, to be acutely aware of the limits
of their knowledge, to listen carefully to others, to respect dierent viewpoints, to revise
earlier positions, to be self-critical, to be able to exercise self-restraint in refraining from
4 B. HE
the immediate instrumental pursuit of their own self-interests, and to make a public stand
on a particular issue.
Baogang He examines three ‘ladders’ for the development of the deliberative capacities
of citizens. e rst ladder relates to their ability to express and reect respective views crit-
ically. e second ladder requires citizens to go beyond their own perspectives. In placing
oneself in the position of another, it is important to consider whether the views of others
are convincing and whether one should modify his/her own views as a result. e third
ladder involves the systematic synthesis and balancing of competing views. roughout
the deliberative process, the citizens engage factual truths about certain historical events,
they ask normative questions about fairness and responsibility, and they express their views
sincerely (He 2015, 196). is paper assesses whether Chinese villagers have developed
deliberative capacities through the deliberative experiment.
While a theory of deliberative democracy presents an ideal model of deliberative citizen-
ship, the question of how deliberative citizens can solve social problems and deliver good
governance in practice has not been well discussed. We need to explore the connection
between deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance through studying how citizens
can state their reasons and deliberate on those reasons, how citizens can be empowered in
the decision-making process, and how they can promote mutual reliance and cooperation.
e key question of deliberative citizenship concerns the impact of citizen’s deliberation
on decision and governance. Scholars have dierent views on deliberative democracy’s
eectiveness in resolving social conicts. Some think that deliberative democracy cannot
resolve identity problems in pluralistic societies and cannot deliver stronger safeguards for
weak groups in social conicts (Young 2001; Sunstein 2003). In contrast, Dryzek (2005,
2006, 154–157) argues that deliberative democracy can contribute to the resolution of
social conicts. Fishkin (2009) demonstrated that deliberative democracy helps promote
mutual trust and increase consensus, thereby contributing to the resolution and control
of social conicts.
My notes taken on 5 May 2010, the day before the village deliberation day, instead
recorded local leaders expressing extreme anxiety: ‘Will the villagers come to the village
deliberation day? Will some of them quit the meeting as they did before? Will the mar-
ried-out women speak calmly (as in the past, they oen spoke as if quarrelling)? Will the
village deliberation avoid or reduce the polarization of two positions? Will villagers nd
an acceptable solution?’ For the local leaders, this was truly a test of the eectiveness of
deliberative forums.
Background: benets-sharing and persistent petitioning
The dilemma of continuous petitioning
China has faced an explosion in the number of social conicts since the rapid economic
growth and the privatization of state enterprises in the 1990s (O’Brien and Li 2006). For
instance, the number of mass incidents grew sixfold between 1993–2003 and had doubled
again by 2008 (Perry and Selden 2003; Wang 2014). Moreover, collective resistance has
gone beyond the traditional channels of letters-and-visits (Xinfang, petitions), in which
people complain through ocial bureaus. It now takes more disruptive forms, such as
demonstrations, strikes, protests, sit-ins, trac blocking and riots, and yields larger impacts.
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 5
In particular, petitioning by women is a common method of resistance. Its prevalence
highlights the widespread social conicts arising from Chinese economic reforms. Aer
more than 30 years of reforms, Huizhou City has achieved material prosperity and villages’
collective economic power has expanded. However, at the same time, social conict has
intensied. One such source of conict concerns the rights of, and benets available to,
‘married-out women’.
In the 1990s, following household registration reforms, it became no longer necessary for
a married woman to take on her husband’s registered place of residence and their children
could choose to be registered at either their father’s or mother’s hometown residency. is
resulted in many married-out women and their children retaining their previous village of
residency aer marriage, with some even choosing to stay in their original village in order
to receive a share of the collective benets there, or maintain family connections, friends
and jobs, etc.
Married-out women oen use petitioning methods to make appeals when they do not
receive shared economic benets, which they argue they are entitled to according to the
constitution. For example, on 20 September 2007, more than 40 villagers petitioned the
local government in Dayawan District, presenting a signed document ‘on the requirement
of enjoying the allocation of villagers’ collective economic benets.’ e married-out women
then continuously petitioned higher levels, including twice to Guangzhou and even to
Beijing. e allocation of economic benets to married-out women became a sensitive
social issue and a challenge to local economic development and social stability.
The limits of existing governing methods
Several methods were used to try to solve the problem (‘the benet-sharing problem’) raised
by the petitioning of married-out women.
Administrative measures
In November and December 2007, the Dayawan Stability Maintenance Centre held grass-
roots village meetings, but the mediation was ineective. Village elections were being held
in an increasingly tense political atmosphere. e local government’s ability to control vil-
lage cadres had become weak as it was unable to recall the cadres to force them to comply
with directions. Village cadres also rejected holding an all-villagers meeting to deal with
the problems raised by married-out women on the grounds that villagers do not attend
such meetings.
Village democracy
Although the local government mandates the entitlements of married-out women, indi-
vidual villages can invoke their autonomy and hold votes to deny the allocation of benets
(He 2007). is author went through the original records and found that nearly all villages
had at some time in the past used democratic processes to reject the allocation of rights to
married-out women. For example, a village of 79 members voted to reject the requirement
with an overwhelming majority of 64 against, 11 in favour, and 2 abstentions. e decision
was recorded as ‘the village decides not to distribute to married-out women (passed)’ on
6 December 2007.
6 B. HE
Legal measures
Judicial rulings have also struggled to solve the problems. Courts oen refuse to hear cases
because the lawsuits fall into the realm of village autonomy. Some courts, despite accepting
the cases, acted on the basis of other civil legal relations, which do not have broad guiding
relevance for solving disputes relating to married-out women. In addition, the law does
not allow people’s governments at the county level and above to use forceful administrative
measures to deal with issues that fall into the realm of village autonomy. e absence or
incompetence of the rule of law at the village level, as one local ocial informed this author,
oers a social space in which local public deliberation takes place and spreads.
Traditional negotiation
Villages in Huizhou carried out a great deal of negotiation work and raised many sug-
gestions, but the benet-sharing problem could not be fundamentally resolved. As early
as September 2007, the Dayawan Stability Maintenance Centre held mediations for 30
married-out women, issued relevant legal regulations for the village and encouraged the
village to hold a village conference to discuss the problem. However, there was no resolution
as most villagers continued to oppose married-out women being able to access collective
economic benets.
The search for deliberative citizenship and governance
e local government was thus forced to initiate this deliberative experiment. In the words
of a local ocial, it is a ‘product of urgent circumstances.’ Married-out women had been
petitioning for around two years and had already travelled once to Beijing. is author
was called in 2010 by the local ocial to hold an urgent meeting with the married-out
women to explain the plan of the deliberative experiment so that they would be persuaded
to not go to Beijing. e local government deployed deliberative democratic methods to
build a platform for villagers and married-out women to deliberate and seek a solution to
the problem.
It is not dicult to see that the crux of the problem lay in the fact that the majority of
villagers did not agree that married-out women should benet from the collective wealth of
the village. If the rights and benets of married-out women were to be realized, they needed
to be passed through discussion in the village representative meeting, irrespective of what
other steps were taken. erefore, conducting public deliberations between villagers and
married-out women was the focus.
Genuine local deliberative democracy contributes to the reduction in numbers and fre-
quency of petitioning. Let us compare the methods of petitioning and deliberative forums.
Petitioning is oen a response to injustice, and petitioners go through administrative pro-
cedures at higher levels to resolve their problems. Local governments do not want people
to travel to Beijing to petition, and so will even provide material benets to petitioners
to discourage them from doing so. is creates an unusual political culture: some people
continually petition so as to obtain the maximum benets possible.
In comparison, a deliberative forum does not rely on higher level administrative means
to solve problems, but instead relies on the capacity of public reasoning. e deliberative
method is an open, democratic, rigorous, rational, and scientic decision-making process.
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 7
For resolving social conicts, it is a high-level political art. Firstly, it guides petitioners to a
communication platform. Rather than allowing petitioners to ‘cause trouble’ on the streets,
it leads them to channels through which they can engage in discussions and express their
grievances and desires. Secondly, through public communication, the intensity of dispute
can be alleviated by reframing it as a negotiation over rights and benets. irdly, a deliber-
ative forum can resolve issues of public rights and benets by turning them into quantied
problems that can be the subject of bargaining. Each side can express their own opinions
and use their best reasoning to argue for their interests.
Currently, a signicant number of local governments use political techniques to minimize
petitioning, such as by mobilizing family members to persuade petitioners to stop their
petition actions, or by dividing petitioners into dierent categories with dierent measures
so as to reduce their force. In the case studied here, the local government also adopted a
deliberative mechanism to solve the benet-sharing problem. e mechanism – known as
‘democratic heart-to-heart talks’ – is a local democratic innovation for the local ocials to
apply deliberative democratic methods to resolve the thorniest problems. e innovation
lies in cultivating deliberative citizens. If the villagers become deliberative citizens through
democratic heart-to-heart talks, their opinions can change; equally married-out women
are not as ‘stubborn’ as the villagers told this author, they can become deliberative citizens
and accept rational arguments. Further, through attending deliberations ordinary villag-
ers can renew the contents of village regulations, fully reconsider the majority’s opinion,
and look aer minority groups’ valid interests. Democratic heart-to-heart talks encourage
villagers to actively participate in solving the benet-sharing problem through free, fair,
and rational dialogue.
In addition, the local government sets up a platform for public deliberation and takes a
neutral position in order to ensure fairness. Local deliberative democracy is not only political
communication between the government and the people, but is also deliberation between
dierent groups in society with dierent interests. e case discussed below involves groups
that hold the traditional view that the village no longer looks aer these married-out women
as their husbands should look aer their welfare, and the married-out women’s group that
demands an equal share of village wealth. Although the deliberative experimental forum is
held under an authoritarian system, the government’s public policy-making is not simply a
contest between the ocials and people, but is the result of the contestation of many interest
groups. is is an important reason why local deliberative democracy can develop in China.
Deliberative democratic experiment
e local government established a platform for the villagers to use democratic heart-
to-heart talks to solve for themselves the benet-sharing problem. is author was
involved in conducting a deliberative democratic experiment at the request of the local
government, visiting four times before 2010 and returning in 2014 and 2016 to assess
implementation.
e deliberative experiment, or democratic heart-to-heart talks, used a modied method
of deliberative polling. Deliberative polling is an investigation of public opinion based on
information sharing and full deliberation, and can overcome the limitations of traditional
polling (see Fishkin 1992, 200–201; 2009). Deliberative polling uses random selection tech-
niques, along with the provision of brieng materials, large and small group discussions,
8 B. HE
and two surveys to measure the change in people’s opinions. For this experiment, Professor
James Fishkin at Stanford, who developed the deliberative polling idea, provided concrete
advice from its conception, while Alice Siu, also at Stanford, trained students from Shenzhen
University to be facilitators.
e experiment adopted basic elements of deliberative polling including the provision
of brieng materials, the completion of surveys before and aer the public consultation,
the alternation between small group and large group discussion, and the dialogue between
citizens, ocials and experts. However, it is a modied version of deliberative polling in
the sense that random selection is no longer deployed. Originally this author proposed the
random selection method for the whole district under the local government’s jurisdiction
as petitioning by married-out women is widespread. e local ocials, however, expressed
their uneasiness about random selection and its statistical representation because randomly
selected participants do not have the political legitimacy to make a decision. Moreover, ran-
domly selected participants generally don’t know each other, but in contrast, most villagers
are acquainted and understand local conditions. ese are the political and epistemological
reasons that the local ocials abandoned the random selection method. Hence, the local
government selected Guangming village and required all adult villagers to attend the heart-
to-heart talks. ese villagers could then make a decision through an all-villagers meeting.
In addition, in designing questions in the questionnaire, the local ocials did not adopt
one specic aspect of James Fishkin’s design, namely the identication of a question that
could serve as explanatory variables for the opinion changes. e Party Secretary Huang
Zhijuan expressed his idea clearly that ‘the purpose of the experiment is not to conduct
academic research, but to reduce polarization and move public opinion towards the middle
position so that a compromise can be found’.
Guangming Village was selected to pilot the democratic heart-to-heart talks to resolve
the benet-sharing problem. e village comprises 45 households containing a total of
230 people. In 2003, the village’s collective economic income was around 5000 Yuan, and
in 2008 it was 200,000 Yuan – a 40-fold increase over a 5-year period. According to statis-
tics of 20 April 2010, the village registered a total of 23 married-out women, comprising
7 who had village residency and had lived in the village for a long time, and 16 who had
residency but did not live in the village. eir requests for the division of collective benets
mainly related to the compensation given to the village small group when the government
requisitioned land.
e democratic heart-to-heart talks involved the following steps:
• Firstly, from the 230 total residents, all those over the age of 18 (143 people) were cho-
sen to participate. is ensured that every citizen with voting rights had an opportunity
to express their views and exercise their rights.
• Secondly, before deliberation, brieng materials were provided to participants, to allow
them to fully understand the dierences of opinion and the reasoning behind the issues
that would be deliberated.
• irdly, using the method of small and large group discussions, participants were
divided into 10 groups. Small group discussions rst allowed everyone to express their
opinion then discussion took place in the large group.
• Fourthly, to preserve the fairness of the democratic deliberative talks, graduate students
from Shenzhen University were trained to facilitate the small group discussions. e
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 9
facilitators did not take sides and had no direct interests that coincided with those of
the villagers.
• Fihly, participants lled out a survey before and aer deliberation, so that the com-
parison between the two could demonstrate the inuence of the deliberation on the
participants’ thinking.
e experiment consisted of three stages. e rst was the preparatory stage. Between
2009 and 2010, there were discussions and an initial work meeting to clarify the basic situ-
ation and the aims and tasks. e second stage took place between February and May 2010,
and included publicizing to, and mobilizing, villagers and married-out women, inviting
experts, selecting and training sta, etc. e third stage was the holding of the democratic
heart-to-heart talks, on 6 May 2010, allowing both sides an open channel for discussion.
Experts and local ocials (including Professor Yu Jianrong, the chairperson of the local
women’s association, director of the local institute of petition and letter, director of local
social aairs, and street government ocial) responded to questions and provided expla-
nations on the reasons and methods for solving the benet-sharing problem.
e experiment can be assessed according to the three criteria set up by Dryzek: authen-
ticity, inclusiveness and consequence(for an assessment of democratic deliberation, see
Fishkin et al. 2010). e experiment was authentic in that the local government selected
the village where the practice of married-out women petitioning was most prevalent, and
the site of deliberation was in village homes and village public spaces. It was inclusive as it
invited all stakeholders to participate. It was consequential as citizens came up with decisions
about public aairs through social deliberation and the results were implemented. Moreover,
while local party organizations usually won’t give up their decision-making power, as we
have seen in this case, they did in this case listen to the voice of people and change policy
aer deliberation.
Debating competing arguments by deliberative citizens
Following the theoretical idea of deliberative citizenship discussed in Section ‘Introduction’,
here I discuss how the villagers considered competing arguments, changed their previous
opinion and developed deliberative capacities. Almost no study has addressed to what
extent the participants’ deliberative capacity impacts on the quality of deliberation and
decision-making in China. is study examines how marginalized women were involved
in the deliberation process, to what extent they were successful in convincing their fellow
villagers to change their position and to what extend they themselves were persuaded to
change their position through reasoning. Let us look in turn at the deliberation day’s three
major debates on the question of whether married-out women should receive a share of
collective benets.
Village autonomy law vs. national laws
Villagers held the view that within the system of village autonomy, the democratic process
fully justies and legitimizes the villages’ decisions that married-out women should not
have the right to share the economic benets. Section 2 of the Village Committee Law of
the PRC states that ‘village committees are self-governed, self-educated, and self-serviced
10 B. HE
by the villagers, and are base-level mass autonomous organizations, implementing dem-
ocratic elections, democratic decision-making, democratic management and democratic
monitoring.’ Section 29 also stipulates the principle that when village committees decide
on problems, the minority must defer to the majority.
However, the married-out women argued strongly for their claims by citing national
laws. Section 33 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) states that ‘PRC
citizens are equal under the law.’ Section 32 of the PRC Law on the Protection of Women’s
Rights states: ‘women in rural areas have equal rights as men to the distribution of collective
funds, compensation payments and all the uses of collective income.’ Section 27 of the PRC
Rural Committee Organisation Law states: ‘Village autonomy rules and regulations and the
actions of village assemblies or the directives of village representatives must not oppose the
Constitution, laws, regulations or national policies, and must not violate villagers’ personal
rights, democratic rights, or legitimate economic rights.’ Many married-out women used
these legal documents to support their claims for rights and equal entitlement.
Traditional concepts and customs vs. modern concept of fairness
Most villagers followed the Chinese traditional practice that only males have the right to
inherit. Regardless of whether the person is in line for the imperial throne or just a common
labourer, it is the same: boys inherit but girls do not. In traditional thought, it was widely
believed that women who married into other villages became part of another family life
and became outsiders who could no longer enjoy distributive rights.
In contrast, the married-put women held a modern concept of gender equality. Many
married-out women stated in the small group discussion that
male children who grew up in the village like me, aer they married their wives, their wives
had the right to benets, and these men increase their share of collective benets from an
individual to multiple shares [referring to the wife and children], but married-out women do
not have the right to enjoy a share of the collective economic benets. is is unfair!
‘Why is it that men always leave for city but they can still have the right to a share?’
Practical considerations of one-o compensation solution
e majority of married-out women were responsible for farms when the government
requisitioned land, had met their obligations to the state and the village collective, and paid
all taxes in a timely manner. erefore, they argued, they should be entitled to a share of
collective benets. ‘I had the right to a share before I was married, the land contract in the
village still has my name, why when I marry I do not have the right to a share?’ ‘Why do
other places implement rights for married-out women? Why can’t we implement them here?’
Many villagers agreed that resident married-out women who full their collective obli-
gations and responsibilities should receive a portion of the distributive rights to the collective,
but they also believe that if someone spends a long time living or residing away from the
village and does not full their obligations and responsibilities then they should not have an
equal share in the collective economic wealth. Some men even believed that women’s equal
distribution appears to be fair but in fact is not fair because the married-out women have
or will also receive distributive benets in the village they are married into.
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 11
Fundamentally, the disputes were a conict over interests. In the village context, collec-
tive economic earnings are limited and so dividing up limited rights and benets between
even more married-out women will mean that each slice of the ‘cake’ that rural villagers
now enjoy will become thinner. e vast majority of villagers (including the parents and
siblings of married-out women) believed that their limited resources could not withstand
the pressures of an increasing population. As a result, the majority of both the villagers and
married-out women reached a conciliatory solution of one-o compensation.
The outcome of the deliberative forum
e villagers had discussed many dierent proposals for solving the benets-sharing prob-
lem: one-o compensation, in the form of a one-time payment given to married-out women;
equal distribution, following the national constitution’s rules on gender equality and the law
on women’s rights; proportional division, where the appropriate proportion was determined
according to the farming responsibility at the time of land requisition, or according to the
population, or according to the contribution.
Aer a day of discussions, the villagers’ thinking had clearly changed. Before the discus-
sions, the villagers’ approval of equal distribution was very low, and they believed the issue
to be unimportant. However, aer discussion, the mean level of importance attributed to
this issue increased from 0.7 before the discussions, to 4.0 aerwards (using a scale of 0–10,
with 0 meaning the least important and 10 the most important).
Regarding proportional distribution, on a scale of 0–100, with 0 representing no share,
100 representing a complete share, and 50 representing a half share, the average response
by participants to ‘how much of a share would you give to married-out women?’ was 14.6%
before the discussion, and increased to 27.3%. e change in opinion before and aer public
deliberation is summarized in Table 1.
From Table 1, we can see that the villagers’ attitude towards the importance of equal
distribution greatly increased, but the average remained below the mid-point of 5. e
one-o payment proposal received substantial support, both before and aer deliberation,
with an average of above 5. Guangming Village eventually chose a one-o provision of a
100-square metreapartment (worth approximately 500,000 Yuan). is solution clearly
reects public opinion.
In December 2007, the villagers had voted overwhelmingly to oppose distributive rights
for married-out women, but more than two years later, their thinking had undergone a major
change. In 2012, 80% of original residents agreed and signed their name to the compensa-
tion proposal. Sixteen of the 23 married-out women agreed, 4 pursued the matter through
the courts, and 3 refused to sign as they continued to demand equal distributive rights. By
Table 1.Opinion change through deliberation.
Note: There was a clear difference in averages before and after deliberation: **represents the significance level at 0.05; ***rep-
resents the significance level at 0.00.
Proposal Mean value pre-deliberation Mean value post-deliberation
One-off payment (0–10) 5.0 5.1
Equal distribution*** (0–10) 0.7 4.0
Proportional distribution** (%) 14.9 27.3
Share-based system** (0–10) 0.7 2.4
12 B. HE
the time this author revisited the village in 2016, all married-out women had accepted the
one-o payment solution.
In 2010–2011, a further 10 villages in Huizhou City used the deliberative democratic
method to hold discussions with villagers and married-out women and eventually also
adopted a one-o payment solution whereby the amount of money provided varied accord-
ing to the wealth degree of each village. e result is that married-out women have not
been to Beijing or Guangzhou to petition, and social conicts have been reduced. e
process split the collective power of married-out women: while most people agreed with
the proposal of a one-o payment, a very small minority of married-out women still peti-
tion the government. However, their legitimate reason for petitioning is now questionable,
and they have lost some moral ground, because the local ocials can refer to the result of
the democratic deliberation. e village deliberative experiment did provide a viable and
acceptable alternative to petitioning, solving local problems and reducing social conict.
The mechanisms of cultivating deliberative citizenship and improving
deliberative governance
The value and limits of deliberative polling
Deliberative meetings have contributed to villagers understanding of equality, rights, and
obligations, as evidenced by the agreed outcomes. e deliberative polling method enabled
village cadres to rely on deliberations to solve the problem. It was so eective that the dis-
trict leaders used this deliberative method to teach neighbouring villages: ‘If you do what
Guangming Village has done, you should be able to resolve the problem quickly.’
e results of deliberative polling demonstrate that the experiment cultivated deliberative
citizenship and changed the original position of the villagers’ and married-out women. Aer
listening to the dierent opinions put forward by male villagers, the majority of married-out
women realized that male villagers also held some partially legitimate reasons such that
these women were willing to make compromises by withdrawing the radical equal share
position. At the same time, the male villagers took into account the three arguments made
by the married-out women, and agreed with the one-o pay solution. Both sides made
compromises and moved their positions towards the middle. Questionnaires and explan-
atory material also helped lead both the villagers and the married-out women towards a
compromise.
Another value of village deliberation is that it is able to overcome the cognitive closeness
problem. Although the villagers and married-out women were acquainted with each other,
they had tended to collect and process only the information they needed, and thereby
considered contested issues in a closed or narrow manner. Moreover, although they did
know the opinions of others, they did not understand suciently the complicated reasons
and deep emotions attached to the issue by the other group. rough the one-day debate,
which even included verbal quarrels, both sides were able to move beyond their narrow
cognitive framework, process the new information, and, nally, reach a compromise. Open
discussion, transparency, and no behind-the-scenes activity helped create a strong sense
of fairness. In particular, the platform the government set up created public trust, and the
great deal of energy it applied showed that it took the problem seriously.
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 13
However, this experiment shows that to cultivate deliberative citizenship, a one-o large-
scale democratic deliberative polling is not enough. Democratic deliberations must be
repeated regularly and informally. In this case, the village cadres held informal discussions
more than 10 times. e importance of this should not be underestimated. Moreover, the
village cadres gave more time for each individual to reect the root of the problem and
urged each individual to engage in internal dialogue so as to achieve a better understanding
of the perspectives of another; this is what Robert Goodin (2003, 169–93) calls the ‘inter-
nal-reective’ aspect of deliberation.
Quarrel is the opposite of rational discussion, but it is a component of cultivating delib-
erative citizenship: allowing each side to express completely opposing positions and express
their underlying feelings allows each side to understand the other’s ‘baseline’, which assists
problem-solving. Indeed, on the deliberative day of 6 May 2010, heated arguments even
cut short a plenary session. However, following the quarrel, villagers surprisingly put for-
ward new approaches by treating households as work units to resolve the benets-sharing
problem, which received support from 48.1% of attendees.
Combining Western democratic deliberative method with Chinese local methods
From the actual experience of resolving the benets-sharing problem, we can see that formal,
large-scale democratic deliberations and informal, local, interpersonal, daily deliberations
are intimately connected. is seems to support Habermas’ view on dual processes cited
earlier.
One the one hand, standardized large-scale democratic deliberations can improve all
kinds of deliberative meetings. e openness and fairness of a deliberative forum can avoid
suspicion and gain popular trust. Taking pre- and post-deliberation surveys can help us
to understand the changes and trends in villagers’ thinking. e intersection of large and
small group meetings can increase the quality of deliberations.
On the other hand, we need to recognize the value of local methods in cultivating delib-
erative citizenship, including Chinese traditional philosophy and cultural practice. Back in
2007, the local government had already developed what it called ‘four people procedures,’
namely, people put forward a motion; people make a decision; people manage public aairs;
and people monitor the process. e Guangming village party secretary also adopted a
traditional ‘severance method.’ At the beginning he did not allow married-out women and
villagers to have direct discussions, due to the sharp divide between the two groups. If the
two groups were brought together for discussion, they would simply ght. erefore, the
village secretary rst independently discussed with the villagers, then once this was nished
talked to the married-out women. Public openness only referred to ‘the public’ in a limited
sense. e severance method allows village cadres to act as go-betweens so as to avoid direct
conict between villagers and married-out women in the early stage. However, on the public
deliberation day, both sides meet directly and engage in serious debates.
In addition, equal rights were interpreted as ‘equal but not equalitarian distribution’
(‘pindeng bu juefeng’), an Aristotlean proportional fairness. To operationalize this pro-
portional fairness, the village cadres used a points-deduction system. For example, not
contributing to village responsibilities would lose some points, so that equal entitlement is
subject to dierently legitimate considerations, resulting in a sort of dierentiating village
citizenship. Moreover, the village cadres convinced sisters and daughters to take the lead in
14 B. HE
compromising, bringing multiple households under one agreement, so that other house-
holds followed their lead. Of course, some local experiences did not embody democratic
principles and cannot be elevated to a kind of widespread political technique or used in
other villages.
Building a negotiation mechanism
is experiment demonstrates that the ability of deliberative citizens to solve a practical
problem depends on the presence of an eective and fair negotiation system. e local gov-
ernment constructed a democratic deliberation platform to allow each side to fully express
their rights claims and perspectives, and explain their reasoning. Once each side obtained all
the information, especially in relation to understanding the rational aspirations of the other
group, their prejudices underwent a change. In this case, more villagers began to partially
support the distributive rights for married-out women, while the majority of married-out
women began to empathize with the legitimate elements of the villagers’ opposition and
abandoned their original position of radical distributive equality. Finally, the majority of
villagers and married-out women chose the one-o payment proposal. is kind of nego-
tiation, compromise and balance is the key to resolving the problem.
Relationship between public administration and deliberative citizenship
is experiment shows that government ocials and public administrators have played a
diversity of roles in cultivating or inhibiting deliberative citizenship; and these conicting
roles demonstrate deep tensions of Chinese authoritarian deliberation (He and Warren
2011). How the relationship between public administration and deliberative citizenship is
managed holds a key to successful deliberative governance. To study deliberative citizenship
and deliberative governance, one must take power relations seriously(also see He 2011).
e results of the experiment show that although this democratic deliberation was suc-
cessful, still four married-out women refused to sign the agreement (until some years later).
Hence, the Huizhou city government still relied on the strategy of administrative guidance,
issuing a requirement for all villages to follow the constitutional principles of gender equality
when addressing the benet-sharing problem. Originally due to the lack of legal power,
administrative intervention was comparatively weaker than the democratic deliberation
method. Now there is a return to the path of administrative guidance. Local governments
use administrative power to force local cadres to resolve the benet-sharing problem: the
village development plan is bound up with solving the problem. If the village is unable
to do so, the local government does not give the village permission to carry out certain
development plans or it does not award a bonus to the village leaders at the end of the year.
is persistent use of an administrative order is very striking and a permanent feature of
Chinese authoritarian deliberation (He and Warren 2011); and deliberative democratic
theorists and deliberatively-oriented policy processes (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003) must
take this seriously. Perhaps, public administration’s active role in developing deliberative
governance is not unique to China, as many local councils in liberal democracies have also
become involved in a variety of way.
e method of administrative order may have benets for the resolution of the ben-
ets-sharing problem, but it may also lead to a new round of petitioning incidents. One
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 15
village cadre rmly stated ‘the government wants [us] to control our village but doesn’t give
us the means to do it, this is illegal so we want to petition’, and even said, ‘if the government
doesn’t allow the village to make changes, we won’t do it; we’ll just divide up the land equally
among everyone’, ‘the government’s order spoils the married-out women, making them
greedier and unwilling to compromise.’ Once administrative guidance leads to the drawing
up of unsuitable policies they are resisted on a large scale, producing petitioning incidents,
which will again entice local ocials to try the democratic deliberation method. is is the
hope and tragedy of the development of local deliberative democratic government among
contemporary local governments (see He and øgersen 2010; Truex 2014).
In the end, the local government considered the results of deliberative methods to be
plural, and not the same for every village, since the power relations in each village are
dierent and so the same solution cannot be used everywhere. If a city chooses a uniform
set of policies to solve the benet-sharing or other problem, they may not necessarily be
suitable or helpful for the whole city or other areas. Deliberative forums can avoid recourse
to xed and predetermined administrative directions. Citizens can reach a satisfactory
result through deliberation and achieve a resolution. is is the bottom line for deliberative
democracy. Without this condition it cannot be called deliberative democracy, regardless
of whether or not there is deliberation.
Administrative management should be bought into a framework of democratic rights
– democracy should be allowed to tame administrative management, to regulate it and
to bring in appropriate limits to authority. A legitimate political society should maintain
appropriate fairness in the high levels of the administrative management power system and
in high-level citizen participation. Without the latter, the political system will lose balance
and lack order, high-level administrative management will eventually atrophy and become
corrupt, and lack the power to deal with any social crisis.
Conclusion
e experimental study shows that deliberation has cultivated a new type of deliberative
citizenship in that it changed villagers’ views with regard to the idea of equal distribution,
which is crucial for resolving the problem. About one or two years beforehand, the major-
ity of villagers completely rejected the allocation of resources to women who had married
outside the village, but in 2010, the majority approved a compensation plan. Deliberative
discussions contributed to villagers’ understanding of equality, rights and obligations.
e experiment shows that deliberative citizens have also reduced or resolved the
over-petitioning in this situation. When citizens learn to make compromise, engage in
rational dialogue, and exercise self-governing management, they develop and improve the
skill, capacity and quality of deliberative citizenship, and help to reduce and manage social
conicts.
e experiment also reveals several unique features of the Chinese deliberative citizenship
and deliberative governance. One such feature is the domination of local party organiza-
tion and ocials who are not interested in the voices of NGOs. In this instance, the local
government attempted to use the deliberative forum to prevent the informal and loose
network of married-out women petitioners from developing into a formal and strong NGO.
e experiment also demonstrates the conditions for successful deliberative citizen-
ship for eective deliberative governance. ey include a bonded community, genuine
16 B. HE
deliberation, the existence of negotiation mechanisms, a power institution that oversees
the whole process and guarantees the implementation of the decision derived from public
deliberation, a focus on concrete issues, and a sequence of small, informal deliberations
prior to a big, formal plenary session.
rough the involvement in this experiment, this author has also realized the limitations
of scholarship and democratic theory. No matter how well scholars master sophisticated
theory, their practical knowledge is still oen limited when applied to a concrete problem.
No matter how beautifully written, logically coherent, and morally persuasive a theory of
deliberative democracy is, it becomes ‘grey’ when facing real complex issues. To achieve
deliberative governance, deliberative citizens must take account of all other relevant factors
rather than just an ideal version of deliberative democracy. In the end, the development of
deliberative citizenship and governance is rooted in concrete political, social and economic
systems; and how such systems impact on the development of deliberative citizenship and
governance deserves a separate paper.
It should be acknowledged that the emergence of deliberative citizenship in this exper-
iment is a relatively isolated case and does not represent all villages in China. However,
aer the 2010 experiment, 10 additional villages in the region held this kind of democratic
deliberation to address issues raised by women’s petitions; and villagers have slowly become
accustomed to using this method to resolve this kind of social conict. On 23 August 2016,
the author was surprised to see the experimental site, where the village deliberation was
held, being replaced by several new tall buildings. Despite the disappearance of the site,
the spirit of public deliberation survives and villagers’ continue to deliberate their issues.
Authoritarian deliberation with its internal conicting logics points to two possibili-
ties: deliberation-led democratization or deliberative authoritarianism (He and Warren
2011). Perhaps, one may hold an opportunist vision of Chinese local democratization in
that through developing deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance, China will
slowly build a rational, mature civil society in which citizens can manage their own aairs
and achieve what Mill calls ‘governance by discussion.’ At the same time, however, such
local experiments might contribute to authoritarian resilience (Nathan 2003), or delibera-
tive dictatorship (Leonard 2008), or deliberative authoritarianism (He and Warren 2011).
Others may even hold a pessimistic view of the prospect of local deliberative democracy
given that the Xi Jinping government has been stressing that there should be more political
study, in which a correct political line is set up, and that people are supposed to learn and
follow this correct party line. How this revival of Mao’s political study tradition will impact
on local deliberation needs to be investigated empirically. All of these issues deserve the
future research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
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