1©Jamie P. Horsley September 2009 Public Participation in the People’s Republic: Developing a More Participatory Governance Model in China By Jamie P. Horsley Although they have delivered extraordinary and rapid economic growth over the past 30 years, China’s leaders understand they need to do a better job of governing their complex country. Incidents of mass unrest increased nearly 50 percent from 58,000 reported in 2003 to an estimated 90,000 incidents in 2006,1 and occurrences of civil unrest, often violent and prompted by diverse causes, continue seemingly unabated. Local leaders frequently still resort to force to quell criticism and protest, but the central leadership realizes their governance model has to change in order to better address the underlying issues prompting social unrest and achieve a more “harmonious society.” Chinese leaders now espouse the people’s “rights to know about, participate in, express their views on and supervise” government administration, and the need to exercise government power responsibly “in the sunshine.” Indeed, for more than a decade, China has been exploring and beginning to institutionalize mechanisms to make governance more transparent and participatory, and to permit the general public to have greater input into the government decisions, laws and regulations that affect their daily lives. Use of the term “public participation” (gongzhong canyu, 公众参与) is of relatively recent vintage in China, although the concept itself is not. In its loose sense, “public participation” is used by Chinese observers to refer to a variety of participatory mechanisms, ranging from innovative deliberative democracy experiments at the local level (Leib and He 2006), to lawsuits against or complaints and petitions to the state, to requesting information from government agencies pursuant to China’s recently promulgated government information disclosure regulations, to online activism by China’s “netizens,” to various kinds of protest. In a country that does not yet permit contested and meaningful political elections, all of these mechanisms of public interaction with the Party-state can be viewed as seeking through greater participation to ameliorate the “democratic deficit” in China. However, “public participation” as used in this essay will refer more narrowly to the public’s participation in the government decision-making process, which in China is differentiated into regulation or rulemaking (zhiding tiaoli, guizhang, 制定条例，规章) and public policy-type decisions referred to as administrative decision-making (xingzheng juece, 行政决策) by the government at all levels, as well as the public’s participation in law-making by the National People’s Congress (NPC) and local people’s2congresses (PCs). Both government rulemaking and congressional lawmaking are referred to by the Chinese and in this paper as legislation (lifa, 立法). At the national level, both the NPC and China’s cabinet, the State Council, are promoting and standardizing greater public participation in legislation, even while not yet subjecting it to detailed legal procedures. Both of these law-making institutions have incrementally introduced a more transparent and participatory legislative process, involving advice from academics and other experts, the discretionary use of public hearings and less formal public workshops, and publishing draft laws and administrative rules and regulations for input from the general public. Local PCs and governments have in many cases progressed even farther along the road toward regularizing more participatory governance. Chinese Communist Party ideology has long endorsed the concept that government action should reflect the will of the people, manifested in the “mass line” principle of “from the people, to the people.” Chinese leaders, however, have traditionally made law and policy through selective consultations with trusted groups of government officials, academics and other identified experts, supplemented by orchestrated “field investigations” to ascertain the “will” of the people. The establishment of regular and transparent channels for the general public to provide input into the legislative and policy-making process is a recent phenomenon. This essay will outline and discuss recent Chinese experience with public participation and its significance in the development of a more open, participatory and accountable governance model in China. The Policy and Legal Framework for Public Participation in China China’s post-Cultural Revolution Constitution adopted in 1982 establishes the principle that all power belongs to the Chinese people, who are to manage state affairs, and requires state organs to “heed their opinions and suggestions, accept their supervision and work hard to serve their interests” (Constitution 1982, Articles 3, 27). China’s opening and reform program that promoted greater interaction with the outside world introduced in the 1980s the concept that all laws, regulations and policies should be publicly known to ensure that the public (including foreign investors) would comply. The next stage was development of the idea that the general public should also know about and participate in the process of formulating the legislation and policies that apply to them. The term “public participation” was first used by the Chinese leadership in a decision of the Third Plenum of the 16th Communist Party Congress in October 2003 (Central Committee 2003). However, the concept can be traced to the legacy of farmer participation in the rural collectivization and commune programs of the 1950s, especially in overseeing local finances (Zhou 2003, chapter 4). This experience helped shape the subsequent development of participatory villager self-governance and related village transparency policies in the 1980s and 90s (Horsley 2006).3 The expansion beyond China’s villages of a more participatory decision-making model began in the late 1990s in response to China’s rapid economic and social development. As Chinese leaders were called on to make increasingly complex decisions, they came to recognize that public participation in the decision-making process could help provide more data, technical expertise and popular sentiment to make better decisions. Moreover, they realized that public