By Yijia Jing, Policy & Politics Editorial Advisory Board member, Fudan University, Shanghai

Browsing through the latest April 2016 issue of Policy & Politics, I was ‘inspired’ to review the article entitled ‘Participatory policy making under authoritarianism: the pathways of local budgetary reform in the People’s Republic of China’ by Xiaojun Yan and Ge Xin. Their research touches an interesting innovation in China’s public sector that aims to engage citizens in local budgetary decisions. The fundamental dilemma, as the authors clarify, is the enthusiasm of an authoritarian system in civic participation. Why do local governments of China adopt reforms to empower citizens? To what extent have these kinds of reforms empowered citizens? What is the potential for these kinds of reforms to be expanded and upgraded? These are all critical questions to understand China’s evolving political system. Usually the corporatist strategy, namely the state’s authoritative recognition of an organization as the legal and sole representative of certain sectoral interests, has been adopted to explain Chinese governments’ policy toward external forces, for example the rising economic and social elites (for example, Truex, 2014) and the rising new social organizations (for example, Jing and Gong, 2012). So are there differences in engaging ordinary citizens? Keep in mind that the Communist Party of China(CPC) never lacked citizen engagement in its history. Even after the civil war and the establishment of People’s Republic of China, the CPC frequently used mass movements to engage citizens for multiple political and policy purposes. Continue reading →