Deliberative Democracy and the Digital Transformation of Participation in China

Описание: From Teahouses to Platforms: Deliberative Democracy and the Digital Transformation of Participation in China

9 February, Monday 2pm, Room 24A30 (Fishbowl) and via Zoom

This talk examines the digital transformation of deliberative participation in China by tracing its historical roots in urban tea-house culture and its contemporary institutionalization through digital participatory budgeting in Chengdu. It argues that China's emerging forms of deliberative governance are not merely top-down innovations enabled by technology, but are embedded in long-standing practices of localized discussion, mediation, and civic engagement. Drawing on historical analysis and original empirical evidence from Chengdu's participatory budgeting platforms, the talk shows how digital tools reconfigure—rather than replace—these deliberative traditions by expanding scale, visibility, and state–society interaction. The findings contribute to broader debates on deliberative democracy by highlighting how non-liberal contexts generate distinctive, historically grounded pathways of digital participation.

About the speaker
Kaiping Zhang (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tsinghua University. She currently serves as Director of the Center for Data and Governance and Vice Dean of School of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on deliberative democracy, political communication, Chinese politics, and computational social science. During the 2024–2025 academic year, she was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.