The politics of authoritarian empowerment: Participatory pricing in China
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120985511 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120985511
International Political Science Review
2022, Vol. 43(5) 613 –628
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120985511
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The politics of authoritarian
empowerment: Participatory
pricing in China
Xuan Qin
Fudan University, China
Baogang He
Deakin University, Australia
Abstract
Partial and perceived empowerment in the practice of public hearings, widely spreading across China since
the late 1990s and still operating today, is puzzling. Citizens enjoy the right to participation, information,
and formal equality but their political empowerment is constrained without the right to elect and dismiss
officials there. This article examines the politics of ‘authoritarian empowerment,’ which combines partial
empowerment and sophisticated control, and separates psychological empowerment from political
empowerment. Through such a delicate combination and separation, citizens are partially empowered,
paradoxically, to prevent their full empowerment. Our study is a supplement to the previous study of
authoritarian deliberation (consultation) and phantom democracy, discloses the deficiency of the literature
on local deliberative democracy in China, and enriches the literature on sophisticated authoritarian innovation
in Southeast Asia. The article is based on documented research, interviews with 469 non-participants and 72
participants, and an in-depth case study in Shanghai.
Keywords
Public hearing, deliberative democracy, participatory pricing, political empowerment, China
Introduction
As a political byproduct of market-oriented reforms and economic globalization of the past decades,
the gradually increasing and diversified demands of citizens have pushed China, a country with a
long history of authoritarianism, to introduce various participatory mechanisms. These mechanisms
provide citizens with rights to expression, information, and formal equality, but substantial democra-
tization at a regime level is negligible. There are a number of terminologies that describe this specific
form of governance, from authoritarian deliberation (He and Warren, 2011), which highlights the
Corresponding author:
Baogang He, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia.
Email: baogang.he@deakin.edu.au
985511IPS0010.1177/0192512120985511International Political Science ReviewQin and He
research-article2021
Article
614 International Political Science Review 43(5)
combination of deliberative meetings with a nondemocratic context, to participatory authoritarianism
(Owen, 2020), which reveals the twin logics of openness and control in Chinese local governance.
However, despite revealing the coexistence of democratic elements and authoritarian constraints in
these participatory innovations, a further question remains around how this seemingly paradoxical
form of governance can achieve participants’ satisfaction within the political limitations. To answer
this question, we propose ‘authoritarian empowerment’ as a supplementary concept.
Different from the preceding conceptions, which focus on participation or deliberation, empow-
erment is a construct that links matters of political policies with individual psychological factors
(Zimmerman and Rappaport, 1988). It highlights how participants perceive themselves regarding
their strengths and competencies (psychological empowerment) rather than merely focusing on the
facts of whether they play an essential role in decision-making processes (political empowerment)
(Sadan, 1997). This distinction between the psychological and political dimensions is crucial for us
to understand how government-led participatory events function in authoritarian contexts. By
granting citizens partial empowerment to actualize improvements in their self-esteem and a sense
of importance while simultaneously preventing them from developing a capacity for collective
action, participatory events act as a channel to alleviate social pressure without the risk of political
transformation.
We call this ‘authoritarian empowerment’ to distinguish it from traditional ‘democratic empow-
erment,’ through which psychological and political dimensions are mutually reinforcing. In this
article, through the lens of participatory pricing (hereafter, PP), we elaborate on how participatory
events in China do influence the degree to which participants feel empowered but curtail opportu-
nities for actual empowerment.
Although we focus on China, our goal is to contribute to comparative political theory that elabo-
rates normatively significant concepts in ways that are attentive to non-Western contexts. Our con-
cept of ‘authoritarian empowerment’ enables a critique of the West-generated concept of empowerment
and broadens its meaning for comparison across different regimes. This research will enrich the
Western literature on empowerment through providing an empirical study of limited, partial, and
selected empowerment under an authoritarian regime. Chinese citizens, at both individual and com-
munity levels, do achieve a certain extent of empowerment through deliberations, as we show in the
following discussion, but we should not understand these achievements as fulfilled normative inspi-
ration. Empowerment of this kind, including opportunities for voluntary enrollment, access to rele-
vant information, and freedom of speech during deliberations, does not necessarily afford citizens a
real ability to influence the results of policy-making or the significant achievement of their goals. Our
study of China’s sophisticated authoritarian innovation enriches the new literature on the same topic
focused on Southeast Asia (Curato and Fossati, 2020; Morgenbesser, 2020), thus offering a basis for
future comparative study of authoritarian empowerment in Asia.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses the strategy of authoritarian empowerment to address
the dilemma of governance. On the one hand, it is difficult for the CCP to endorse democracy rhe-
torically without empowering citizens. In the current reform era, citizens are learning to challenge
political authorities and force the government to respond by empowering citizens more intensively
and extensively (Lum, 2006; Tanner, 2004). On the other hand, with increasing empowerment, citi-
zens’ political demands and expectations will increase, which may risk the supremacy of the gov-
ernment and the one-party system. Against this backdrop, the authoritarian empowerment strategy
channels citizens’ awakened demand for political power into institutionalized devices and trans-
forms it into orderly political engagement. It acts as a filter that encourages some types of empow-
erment and precludes those too risky for the government. This is consistent with China’s
long-existing agenda of seeking a substitute for electoral democracy to respond to the growing
governance burdens.
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