When democratic deliberation encounters Confucian moral governance: Rethinking consultative politics in rural China

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed the flourishing of consultative democracy (xieshang minzhu, a concept similar to deliberative democracy) in China, with ambitions for implementing consultative politics and governance. In the West, mainstream deliberative democracy studies largely overlook the fact that deliberation is an elusive and polysemic notion, which develops into various practices in different social and cultural contexts. Therefore, a non-Western-centred approach needs to be adopted to further investigate deliberative experimentation in rural China. Based on the four months of fieldwork conducted in several villages in rural China, this paper argues that China’s rural villages have inherited a strong Confucianism-based idea of deliberation and consultation. With case studies from the sociological–political perspective, this paper also aims to shed some new light on the compatibilities between modern democratic governance approaches and the informal, hierarchical and highly moralised forms of public order in the rural Chinese acquaintance society. Incorporating these empirical observations could bridge the gap between Western and Chinese perspectives on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.