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During the reform era, analysts argued that China’s “resilient authoritarianism” derived from mechanisms for collecting feedback from citizens, such as online comments for draft laws. Using these mechanisms, the government collected enough information to adjust public policies and avoid the rigid governance trap many authoritarian regimes face. However, Xi Jinping’s goal is to build a “responsive government (huiyingxing zhengfu 回应性政府)” that is the key to Party legitimacy and China’s future success. These reforms differ from previous mechanisms in that they focus on gathering policy-relevant information from atomized citizens instead of through the previous community-based channels. This study evaluates the progress of responsive-government reforms by comparing two cases of public comments on draft regulations for civil society (the Charity Law) in 2016 and again in 2023, and using data collected in the 2022 Local Governance Survey with 1,425 respondents from 28 provinces to examine how gathering citizen feedback has changed under Xi: Is atomized citizen information a good substitute for previous mechanism of collective deliberation?
Jessica C. Teets
Jessica C. Teets
Jessica C. Teets is a Professor at Middlebury College and Templeton Fellow for the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Her research focuses on governance in authoritarian regimes, especially the role of civic participation. She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014), in addition to articles published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Governance, and the Journal of Contemporary China. Dr. Teets is currently working on a new book manuscript (with Dr. Xiang Gao) on changing governance under Xi Jinping, and an edited volume (University of Michigan Press) developing a theory of how to lobby dictators (with Dr. Max Grömping).