Is deliberative democracy a creation of the West, or a tradition of China? What is the difference between deliberative democracy and representative democracy? Beijing Review reporter Ji Jing posed these questions to three scholars. Excerpts as follows:

Beijing Review: How has the concept of deliberative democracy been proposed and developed?

Wang Xinsheng: The concept of deliberative democracy was first mentioned by U.S. scholar Joseph M. Bessette's article Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government, which was published in 1980. Bessette opposed concentration of power in the hands of a ruling class and lobbied for greater public political participation, aiming to forge new legitimacy for the U.S. constitution in modern society. However, deliberative democracy is a very complicated concept that has developed and changed in a number of ways since it was first proposed.

Generally speaking, deliberative democracy in the Western academic tradition means that a democratic government must guarantee citizens are involved in the political process, so as to realize the legitimacy of its political decisions. The individual preferences of the citizenship are translated into a mutual agreement. In this way, a decisive foundation for social and political questions can be obtained. Deliberation or consultation is significant when this common understanding is reached.

From this, some questions arise. For example, is the academic deliberative democracy proposed by Western scholars the same as China's deliberative democracy? Does the deliberative democracy we are talking about come entirely from the West? Considering the basic connotations of the concept of deliberative democracy, there are some similarities between China's deliberative democracy and that discussed by Western academics, because both of them refer to a process in which citizens influence public policy through political participation. However, from other angles, like the social background, the founding of institutions and realization of such democracy, there are huge differences between the deliberative democracy of China and that proposed by Western scholars.

Ma Depu: The essence of deliberative democracy is citizen participation in public policy making, which is a special feature distinct from the West's representative democracy and constitutional democracy. China had practiced a form of deliberative democracy before the concept was introduced into the country. After translations about the West's deliberative democracy were introduced into China, we started to refer to our previous democratic practice using the same term.

Chen Yanqing: In the report made by Hu Jintao, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, to the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, the concept of a socialist deliberative democracy was mentioned. The report said that the socialist deliberative democracy "is an important form of people's democracy in China." This officially established the theory of deliberative democracy in China.

Actually, the practice of deliberative democracy in China appeared much earlier than that. The concept of China's socialist deliberative democracy is the inheritance and development of the CPC's past practice of political consultation.

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