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

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.

Farmland Capitalization an Urgen issue in Institutional Reform

Developing modern agriculture is an important aspect of urban and rural integration. Chintz has adopted a new, highly compatible, multipronged approach. Judgingfrom current agricultural and rural policies, factors like capital, labor and land will continue to interact and revolve. The transformation of China＇s rural land tenure system is at a critical posifion in the overall strategy of developing tile rural economy. However, rural institutional reform will inevitably be constrained by the path and pattern China＇s industrialization, urbanization and agricultural modernization take. Creating a new pattern of urban and rural socioeconomic integration requires reform and improvement of rural grassroots governance structure. The interaction and reconsolidation of the factors have again become intertwined with the superstructure of rural society and will inevitably affect the direction and pace of rural grassroots governance structural reJbrm. Protecting the economic interests of farmers while respecting their democratic rights will always be at the heart of agricultural modernization.

Adaptive Social Mobilization in Grassroots Policy Implementation:Administrative Control and Multiple Participation

Grassroots policy implementation is an important link in China’s governance practice.Previous studies have analyzed the causes of divergence from policy goals or distorted implementation from the perspective of administrative control,or explored the impact of informal institutions on policy processes from the perspective of policy mobilization.However,both perspectives incline to static or fragmentary analysis and tend to be confined within the bureaucracy,ignoring the government’s mobilization of society.Our case study analysis of County T in Province Z shows that people engaged in implementing grassroots policy can develop varying mobilization strategies on the basis of different combinations of administrative control and social mobilization capacity.In the course of policy implementation,the boundaries and relationships between hierarchical control and social mobilization and between government departments and grassroots society can evolve according to the requirements of policy performance.This implementation process is generally expressed as“adaptive social mobilization.”Our findings could lead to a rethinking of the nature of social governance in contemporary China and explain the paradox of the simultaneous strengthening of administrative control and social participation.