The politics of authoritarian empowerment: Participatory pricing in China

Abstract

Partial and perceived empowerment in the practice of public hearings, widely spreading across China since the late 1990s and still operating today, is puzzling. Citizens enjoy the right to participation, information, and formal equality but their political empowerment is constrained without the right to elect and dismiss officials there. This article examines the politics of ‘authoritarian empowerment,’ which combines partial empowerment and sophisticated control, and separates psychological empowerment from political empowerment. Through such a delicate combination and separation, citizens are partially empowered, paradoxically, to prevent their full empowerment. Our study is a supplement to the previous study of authoritarian deliberation (consultation) and phantom democracy, discloses the deficiency of the literature on local deliberative democracy in China, and enriches the literature on sophisticated authoritarian innovation in Southeast Asia. The article is based on documented research, interviews with 469 non-participants and 72 participants, and an in-depth case study in Shanghai.

Investigating the potential of civil disagreement to decrease issue polarization in China

“…Last but not least, we suggest that the freedom to discuss nonsensitive issues (e.g., livelihood) would eventually strengthen CCP dominance, reflecting the concepts of "authoritarian resilience" (Nathan, 2003), "deliberative authoritarianism" (He & Warren, 2011), as well as "authoritarian empowerment" (X. Qin & He, 2021). Since all political leaders, including those in authoritarian regimes, need to empower citizens (to a certain extent) to maintain their rule, open legal avenues for citizens' political expressions on certain issues may well keep political risks in check for the state authorities.…”

Women's Participation in Politics and Government: The Experience of the United Arab Emirates and of China

“…Chinese researchers Qing and Hee point out that such an approach to the exercise of power in society is an attempt by the authoritarian government to implement "democratic" innovations in the form of "phantom democracy" or an analogue of Rodan's idea of participation in governance without democracy (Qin & He, 2021). Some Chinese researchers call the blatant demonstration of Chinese women's equality a "digital carnival" because it hides tight control over feminist organizations, suppresses attempts to spread the anti-harassment movement in the university environment, and opposes domestic violence (Tan, 2017;Zhang & Xu, 2018).…”