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Hegemonic Discourses and Their Critics in China’s Authoritarian Deliberation: A Study of Price Public Hearing Meetings

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Abstract

I study the content and dynamics of Price Public Hearing Meeting (PPHM) in China by analyzing 711 talking points delivered by 140 participants in six deliberative meetings on price adjustments. By examining the “modes of action” and the content of these speeches, this study demonstrates that the participants at these six PPHM’s collectively employed a set of discursive strategies to show deference to the state’s authority and, simultaneously, to expand the discursive space at the PPHM’s beyond the parameters set by the state’s hegemonic discourses. Discussion of government responsibilities and criticism of the state-sanctioned price hikes took place in this new space. The Confucian political value of “people’s livelihood” (minsheng) was widely drawn upon by grassroots representatives to stress the government’s role as the guardian of people’s welfare.

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Notes

  1. According to Article 42 of the Law, “regarding administrative penalties such as termination of production, termination of business, nullification of business license, and financial penalty of larger sums, parties involved should be notified of their rights to call for public hearing before the punitive decisions are made.” Full text of the Law is available at http://www.law-lib.com/law/law_view.asp?id=307.

  2. As He and Warren noted, other institutional innovations in this vein include “approval and recall voting at the local level… deliberative polls, citizen rights to sue the state, initiatives to make government information public, and increasing use of Peoples’ Congresses to discuss policy, and acceptance of some kinds of autonomous civil society organizations” (2011, 269).

  3. See He and Warren 2011 pp. 277–278 for a brief history of the development of these three types of PHM.

  4. Full text of the Price Law is available at http://www.gov.cn/banshi/2005-09/12/content_69757.htm.

  5. According to the Price Law, city-level (shi) and county-level (xian) government do not have the “price setting” power and thus need to be authorized by governments at higher levels to set or adjust prices and to call for PPHM (Article 20).

  6. Full text is available at http://www.sdpc.gov.cn/zcfb/zcfbl/2008ling/t20081022_241784.htm.

  7. The most famous “PHM Specialist” is Ms. Litian Hu, who allegedly participated in 19 PPHM’s held in Chengdu in 7 years. On July 14, 2011, Chengdu-based writer Mr. Nie Zuoping questioned why a few “consumer representatives” have been repeatedly invited back to participate in PPHM’s on microblog. Within 24 h, this microblog entry was forwarded for more than 16,000 times and “PHM Specialist” became one of the most heated discussed issues related to PPHM in the media in the ensuing months (Mengqi [37]).

  8. For example, at Ha’erbin Water PPHM in December 2009, journalists found that two participants--one retired cadre and one hotel manager--were marked as “unemployed workers” (xiagang zhigong) (Chao [36]).

  9. See chapter One of Laclau and Mouffe [15] for a genealogy of the concept of hegemony. Hegemonic discourse, evidently, refers to the discourse of the “hegemon.” Largely following a Foucaultian-inspired research tradition, the concept of hegemonic discourse describes “a confluence of knowledge, discourse, and power” ([29], 186).

  10. For example, several participants at Beijing Water discussed that field trips to water treatment facilities organized for the upcoming PPHM helped them to understand how scarce Beijing’s water resource was and how important it was to conserve water resources.

  11. Although more practical and issue-specific matters are also included in the organizers‘ justification, in this study I focus on those ideas that correspond to national political discourses and are thereby incorporated in multiple PPHM’s.

  12. For example, Wodak, Kwon, and Clarke discovered that five key discursive strategies--bonding, encouraging, directing, modulating, and re/committing--were used by corporate executive to build consensus in meeting rooms. In the Chinese context, Han discussed "symbolic substitution" and "multiple articulation" as two strategies that journalists in China used in reporting on the Olympics touch relay in order to construct homogenous and nationalistic accounts of the Beijing Olympics.

  13. Although a large number of PPHM’s have taken place, only six full meeting records were available when I was collecting data for this study from April to September 2011. Another dozen or so records of PPHM’s are also available in various sources but these are “abbreviated accounts” where only the main ideas of each speech are included in the record. My personal efforts of acquiring PPHM records in Shanghai and Xi’an have been largely unsuccessful. In recent years there has been an increasing demand from some CPPCC members and People’s Congress Representatives for PPHM organizers to make all meeting records accessible to the public.

  14. There are no widely accepted and precise estimates of how many PHM’s or PPHM’s have been held. Based on his personal observations in “Hangzhou, Fujian, Shanghai, Beijing, and other urban areas,” He estimated that “more than a hundred public hearings per year being held in each district” ([13], 277).

  15. Judging from the meeting records, in many cases the participants deliberately did not articulate a clear position on the proposal due to their reservations of the proposals. However, the possibility that such information has been deleted from the meeting records should not be precluded. In such cases, these participants’ votes could also be interpreted or presented differently by the meeting organizers or the media. For this study I rely on the authenticated meeting records. There are three cases where a vote choice could not be identified in the meeting records, which are coded as “vague” (0).

  16. “Full text record of Beijing Gas.” See Table 1 in Appendix for the sources I used for the full-text records of these six meetings. To simplify terminology and save space, unless otherwise noted, all direct quotations and other information related to the meetings are cited from these meeting records which I refer to as the “full text record of abbreviated meeting title.”

  17. Results available upon request.

  18. Two suggestions/person in the Yes Meetings vs. 0.85/person in the No Meetings; 1.1 validation/person in the Yes Meetings vs. 0.7/person in the No Meetings.

  19. Nods to “scarce resource” and “cost increase” are concentrated in only two meetings. I focus the analysis on those ideas with wider appeals.

  20. The hegemonic discourse of Guangdong Bus included the idea of “ensuring fair and just rights of the consumers,” which is a different concept of “people’s livelihood” rooted in the Confucian tradition.

  21. Jieti Jiage--tiered price structure--has lower unit prices for users with low usages. The unit price increases when usage exceeds certain thresholds. Consumer participants argue that a tiered price structure would more effectively encourage conservation.

  22. Chunyun--an abbreviated term for “transportation during the Spring Festival”--refers to a specific period of time designated by the government each year that covers the spring festival where the volume of transportation is exceedingly high.

  23. These principles are “power is used for the people, affectionate consideration is extended to the people, and benefits are pursued for the people (quan wei min suo yong, qing wei min suo xi, li wei min suo mo; translation mine). See Li, Liu, and O’Brien 2012 for an analysis of how these new principles motivated the “high tide” of Beijing petitioning.

  24. These include two lawyers, two People’s Congress Representatives, one CPPCC representative, two representatives from the Worker’s Union, two representatives from the Consumers’ Association, and three individuals from the grassroots representing their residential community, the citizens and the consumers in general.

  25. See Wang [38] for a discussion on the need to indigenize Chinese political science. Efforts in this “traditionalist turn” have largely taken place in the area of Chinese foreign policy (e.g., [42, 44]). A special issue of Journal of Chinese Political Science provides theoretical discussion [35], empirical analyses (e.g., [5]), and critical assessment of this approach [14].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93405, USA

    Shanruo Ning Zhang

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Correspondence to Shanruo Ning Zhang.

Additional information

I am indebted to M. Kent Jennings, Dorothy Solinger and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Sources of full text meeting records and authentication procedures
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Zhang, S.N. Hegemonic Discourses and Their Critics in China’s Authoritarian Deliberation: A Study of Price Public Hearing Meetings. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 18, 139–162 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-013-9239-1

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