Deliberative Institutions as Mechanisms for Managing Social Unrest: The Case of the 2008 Chongqing Taxi Strike

By many indicators, 2009 should be a challenging year for the People's Republic of China. The global financial crisis sapped demand for exports and contributed to mass factory closures and layoffs, leaving an estimated 20 million migrant workers likely to lose their jobs in the year and exacerbating already wide urban/rural, east/west, and rich/poor divisions within Chinese society.¹ Combined with the important anniversaries of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the 1959 Tibetan uprising and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the year seemed to spell impending trouble for the communist regime in the form of widespread mass social unrest.

History has, however, shown the PRC to be an adaptive and resilient regime, capable of evolving and addressing ever-changing social and economic conditions. Compared to some popular conceptions of the regime, its resilience in recent years has not been rooted only in its application of coercion against potential opponents, using censorship, arrests and threats to silence dissent, but also in its ability to shape the collective will, win the consent of the public and mitigate the need to resort to force. As examined in this paper, experimental "deliberative" institutions have the potential to play an important role not only as proactive institutions, improving the legitimacy and responsiveness of the regime by incorporating citizen deliberation into decision-making, but also as effective reactive instruments of conflict resolution and the management of social unrest, bringing adversarial parties in a deadlock to an acceptable consensus.

In this piece, I briefly survey the literature concerning "deliberative institutions" and "discursive designs" and their experimental implementation in China. Without addressing the question of whether the emergence of these institutions necessarily constitutes a trend towards the development of a genuine "democracy" with Chinese characteristics or is a step towards eventual liberal multiparty democracy in China, I simply consider the role these institutions play as instruments of the existing state for managing incidents of social unrest and maintaining social and political stability. From a purely Machiavellian perspective, can deliberative institutions be effective tools for managing dissent and sustaining one-party Communist Party of China (CPC) rule? To consider this process in action, I examine the deliberative institutions laid out by the Chongqing Municipal Government in advance of fall 2008 and consider the role they played/did not play in resolving the taxi strike of November 2008. I find preliminary evidence of an emerging trend of deliberative institutions functioning as mechanisms for conflict resolution and the maintenance of social unrest in local-level governments. More importantly, the application of deliberative institutions does not appear to be restricted to experimental "islands" within the Chinese mainland but will likely emerge as important mechanisms for conflict management throughout the country.

Defining Deliberation

Discussions of "deliberative" or "discursive" democracy are premised upon Jurgen Habermas' idea of "communicative action", where two or more competent individuals "seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement".² As noted by John Dryzek, Habermasian communicative action harkens back to the classical ideal of a democracy grounded in free discourse, in which "persuasion reflection upon values, prudential judgment, and free disclosure of one's ideas" determined political activity.³ While not opposed to liberal or representative democracy per se, Dryzek argues that dominant understandings of democracy in existing liberal democratic political systems are troubled by an excessive focus on aggregation, meaning how many votes can be accumulated in support of certain policies and preferences, to the neglect of paying attention to how those preferences actually come to be.⁴ In this sense, liberal democracies accept preset policy alternatives and political divisions and compete for votes and offices to the detriment of finding alternative policies that might better serve the common good that might be mutually acceptable to both sides. Deliberative democrats, instead of accepting preferences as a given and simply seeking to win supporters to "their side", "believe preferences ought to be shaped reflectively by thoughtful and competent citizens".⁵ Dryzek proposes an improved alternative...