Newsletter, November 2008

Contents this month

• Main article - Public Engagement in China
• Project news

Public Engagement in China

Regular readers of this newsletter will remember that in December 2006 I attended a conference on the island of Hainan south of the Chinese mainland. The conference's main focus was on the theory of public and stakeholder engagement, with much debate on how this fits with the Chinese government's recent pronouncements on the role of citizens in creating social and political harmony in this rapidly evolving society.

At the time I had no great hopes that anything would come of this event beyond the insight it gave into how China had changed since my previous visits a few years before. So I was delighted this summer when an invitation arrived to deliver a two-day course on public participation in urban planning in Shenzhen, in south-east China just over the border from Hong Kong, and to observe some public participation in practice.

The event was sponsored by The Rights Practice, supported by the European Commission and hosted by the Constitutionalism Research Institute of the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing, the Urban Management Research Centre of the China Development Institute, and Public Participation and Social Harmony - which is probably China's nearest equivalent to Dialogue by Design.

The training brief was to initiate urban planners from all over China into the methods and benefits of public participation. The plan was to run the course as much as possible as we would such a course in the United Kingdom: some key concepts and participative exercises intermingled with de-briefing and discussion. In the event this was not quite what transpired, largely because the 40 or so participants ranged from those for whom the idea of public participation was completely novel and decidedly alien, to those for whom it was already an operational reality. So mostly we just talked, very intensely, with many questions and much debate.

Our visit, on the final day, to a public participation exercise in the village of Xialilang in the district of Longgang outside Shenzhen, was almost more interesting than the course. The purpose of the exercise was to collect public comments prior to the development of a structure plan for the area, using a mixture of two-dimensional Planning for Real (though at a very general level), together with survey questions and an opportunity to provide qualitative comments using - yes - Post-It notes.

So what conclusions can be reached on the basis of this short but packed visit? First, it has to be said that Shenzhen and its surrounding districts are not typical of the rest of China. Thirty years ago this was a fishing village with a rural hinterland; it is now a city with a population of some 12 million. It is in many ways typical of the new urban, thrusting, commercial, high-tech China: its proximity to Hong Kong probably exacerbating all these factors. The people here are pioneers and exemplars for the new China in many respects - so why not also in public participation? This is certainly how they see it.

They are also on the cutting edge of the dilemmas that the new China presents to her rulers. Can you have rampant capitalism without political pluralism? How can you encourage material aspirations without relaxing social control? Change is all around; but change to what?

We agreed on many things: that approaches to public participation cannot be imported wholesale from the West but need to be developed locally; that methods need to be made corruption proof; that somehow the age-old respect for rank and status must not be allowed to distort what the public says. And we debated a fine chicken and egg dilemma: will the practice of public participation lead to its institutionalisation in law; or will it need to be institutionalised in law before it can be practised?

Our conversations also came back, many times, to the meaning of the term 'harmony', so avidly endorsed by the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee in October 2006. This recognised the importance of the participation of the whole of society for creating harmonious relationships between reform, development and stability, but was also clear that it needed to be done under the leadership of the Party.

The great challenge for the pioneers of public participation in Shenzhen and elsewhere in China will be to find ways to express the multifarious demands of this increasingly complex and sophisticated society that do not contradict these political demands for social harmony.

Andrew Acland