An open access publication of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Summer 2017

Authoritarian Deliberation in China

Authors
Baogang He and Mark E. Warren
View PDF
Abstract

Authoritarian rule in China increasingly involves a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian command with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation and democracy are usually found together, they are distinct phenomena. Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments like votes and rights. Deliberation is the kind of communication that involves persuasion-based influence. Combinations of command-based power and deliberative influence – like authoritarian deliberation – are now pervading Chinese politics, likely a consequence of the failures of command authoritarianism under the conditions of complexity and pluralism produced by market-oriented development. The concept of authoritarian deliberation frames two possible trajectories of political development in China. One possibility is that the increasing use of deliberative practices stabilizes and strengthens authoritarian rule. An alternative possibility is that deliberative practices serve as a leading edge of democratization.

BAOGANG HE is the Alfred Deakin Professor and Chair in International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of In Search of a People-Centric Order in Asia (2016), Contested Ideas of Regionalism in Asia (2016), and Governing Taiwan and Tibet: Democratic Approaches (2015).

MARK E. WARREN is the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair in the Study of Democracy at The University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Democracy and Association (2001) and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (forthcoming) and Designing Deliberative Democracy (with Hilary Pearse, 2008).