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Citizen volunteers were chosen by lottery to attend the meetings, along with local officials, representatives of the National People's Congress at the city and district levels, and representatives from the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. They all spoke freely and openly on these occasions to express their individual viewpoints and opinions. Especially the citizen representatives actively voiced their concerns and those of the community.
Creating this kind of channel to give voice to the general public and allow an exchange of opinions among officials, experts and citizens is highly commendable. It embodies the people's right to information, to participation and to supervision of the leadership. This case illustrates the critical modern political concept that it should be the citizens who make the final decision on issues closely related to their interests, rather than experts or politicians.
It is the citizens who hold the right to determine the public interest, not the officials or experts. As the name suggests, public affairs are different from private affairs; they are related to the interests of the masses. Thus it stands to reason that the public should be involved in discussions on matters of public interest.
However, the reality in China is that public affairs are often treated as the private concerns of politicians and experts. This is the result of a lack of civic education.
Take for example the issue of environmental protection, a typical matter of public concern. It is the right and responsibility of the people who live within the environment to protect and care for their homeland.
The public should be consulted not only on issues such as the building of a big factory in Xiamen, but also on issues such as the zoning arrangements in cities, the construction of roads, and the type of buildings to be constructed in residential areas -- villas with gardens for the senior white-collar class or economical apartments for ordinary people, for example. All of these issues should be discussed by the citizens, and there should be a system to ensure fair consideration of their views in the decision-making process.
Another reason to emphasize the participation of citizens is that public issues are not simply technical matters that require a certain expertise. Even the opinions of experts must be examined by the public.
Experts should not be the final decision makers on matters of public concern. Their function is merely to offer their opinions for reference or to serve as consultants with a professional viewpoint. While affirming their positive function, we should be aware of the limitations of experts both in understanding the reality of a given issue and in taking a correct moral position.
Experts are not necessarily saints; they can be used and controlled by money or power. It cannot be denied that some experts, in various fields, have been corrupted by temptation and have lied in various situations. The facts reveal that experts have no more resistance or immunity to money and power than do ordinary people.
To settle this problem, experts must insist on maintaining their independence and speaking on behalf of the ordinary people, so their social credibility can be rebuilt. Most importantly, we must stick to the modern idea of people's sovereignty so that the right of final decision making in public affairs can be returned to the common people. This is not only because the people are the owners of the country, but also because their wisdom and judgment should not be undervalued.
Under normal circumstances, given open access to accurate information, ordinary people will most often display correct judgment. Certainly, the judgments of the public won't always be correct, but there will be fewer abuses or mistakes compared to the judgments of experts without public participation.
This is why the jury system makes sense. As is known to all, members of juries are not law experts but common people. Why does this system allow unprofessional people to decide the judgment rather than the judge? It is because the judgments from the ordinary people are reliable.
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(Tao Dongfeng is a professor in the Chinese Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing. He is also editor-in-chief of the scholarly periodical "Culture Research." This article is translated and edited from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online. ©Copyright Tao Dongfeng.)
