Decoding Xieshang Minzhu in Chinese Politics: Chinese vs. Western Conceptions of Deliberative Democracy
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Decoding Xieshang Minzhu in Chinese Politics: Chinese vs. Western Conceptions of Deliberative Democracy Li-chia Lo 1 Accepted: 8 October 2020/ # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2020
Abstract This article explores the significance of xieshang minzhu, the Chinese term for deliberative democracy. As this term is also closely connected to the political tradition of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its use has caused confusion in Chinese contexts. Specifically, the CPC has transformed the meaning of deliberative democracy to comply with the party line. Based on a review of official documents from the years 1987 to 2018, I argue that the CPC controls the interpretation of deliberative democracy in China by monopolizing the meaning of xieshang minzhu. This discursive strategy serves two purposes. On one hand, the official documents have prescribed a specific genealogy of xieshang minzhu within the CPC’s political tradition; on the other hand, by consistently claiming that China does not copy anything from the West but only learns useful lessons from human civilizations in general, the CPC creates a safeguard against Western influences. Keywords Deliberative democracy . Xieshang Minzhu . tifa . Formulation . Watchword
approach
Introduction Ever since the idea of deliberative democracy was introduced in China, the life of this concept has been closely connected to the Chinese translation of the term as xieshang minzhu. However, studies on this topic rarely problematize the issue of Chinese translation, as conventional investigations have applied Western theoretical models to the empirical reality in China. Although this approach has the advantage of offering a unified, comparable, and common theoretical framework, it cannot explain how the
* Li-chia Lo li–[email protected]
1
School of Social & Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
L.-c. Lo
meaning of a political idea is transformed when it travels from one linguistic context to another. Consequently, the ways in which the idea of deliberative democracy has been translated and understood in China have received inadequate attention. This issue is particularly important in China because the Communist Party of China (CPC) has actively engaged in framing the meaning of this term. Through careful examination of official CPC documents, I investigate how the meaning of xieshang minzhu has been constructed from the perspective of subjective understanding. The connection between xieshang minzhu and deliberative democracy is peculiar as the term xieshang minzhu has long existed and is scattered in various official documents with its own connotation. Scholars and officials started to make this connection when xieshang minzhu became the translation of deliberative democracy in the early 2000s. While Chinese intellectual circles tried to infuse elements of deliberative democracy into xieshang minzhu, discussions of setting xieshang minzhu as the goal for political development had already been u
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