Inequality and CCP Legitimacy: Regime Resilience and Adaptation in China

Authoritarian political systems – especially their communist variants – are conventionally portrayed as offering few opportunities for citizens to participate in politics beyond mass mobilisation. This paper’s contribution is to set out new non-electoral participatory mechanisms encouraged in China by the Chinese Communist Party as a means of broadening its legitimacy. These mechanisms include deliberative decision-making forums and measures that enable Chinese citizens to evaluate government performance, contribute to decision making, shape policy agendas and feed back on implementation. The paper argues that the Chinese party-state orchestrates citizen participation and the policy process, but members of the public nevertheless do have influence. Political participation is still controlled, but it is widening. This is not yet clearly a part of democratisation, but it does establish the principle of citizen rights to oversee government. Perhaps because new participatory mechanisms are locally variable, national opinion polls indicate that they have so far failed to stem the decline in regime legitimacy.