Reconciling deliberation and representation: Chinese challenges to deliberative democracy

Deliberative democratic theorists addressed the practical issue of combining representation and deliberation, leading to a number of institutional inventions and theoretical debates. James Fishkin, for example, invented and advocated deliberative polling (DP) technique to reconcile deliberation and representation. Adolf Gundersen, John Parkinson, and Crisitna Lafont, however, have criticised DP in the light of the democratic ideas of representation and legitimacy. This paper aims at joining in this debate on DP by examining how Chinese local practitioners have employed and modified DP techniques to address the practical questions on representation and deliberation in their decision-making process, and how they make contribution to the debates in the politics of public deliberation. China's local experiments reveal and confirm the law of political empowerment, that is, citizens are empowered to make their own decision on the condition that their deliberation must be based on elected representation.