Deliberative Institutions As Mechanisms for Managing Social Unrest: The Case of the 2008 Chongqing Taxi Strike (Report‪)‬

By many indicators, 2009 should be a challenging year for the People's Republic of China. The global financial crisis sapped demand for exports and contributed to mass factory closures and layoffs, leaving an estimated 20 million migrant workers likely to lose their jobs in the year and exacerbating already wide urban/rural, east/west, and rich/poor divisions within Chinese society. (1) Combined with the important anniversaries of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the 1959 Tibetan uprising and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the year seemed to spell impending trouble for the communist regime in the form of widespread mass social unrest. History has, however, shown the PRC to be an adaptive and resilient regime, capable of evolving and addressing ever-changing social and economic conditions. Compared to some popular conceptions of the regime, its resilience in recent years has not been rooted only in its application of coercion against potential opponents, using censorship, arrests and threats to silence dissent, but also in its ability to shape the collective will, win the consent of the public and mitigate the need to resort to force. As examined in this paper, experimental "deliberative" institutions have the potential to play an important role not only as proactive institutions, improving the legitimacy and responsiveness of the regime by incorporating citizen deliberation into decision-making, but also as effective reactive instruments of conflict resolution and the management of social unrest, bringing adversarial parties in a deadlock to an acceptable consensus.