Predictive Authoritarianism in Beijing’s Digital Citizen Complaint System

• In Event: Poster Session: Urban Politics & International Order, Environmental Issues, and IPE
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Urban Politics

Abstract

While existing scholarship on regime responsiveness and grassroots governance focuses on the rationalities and impacts of control and complaint mechanisms for state-society relations, the consequences for intra-government relations have been mostly overlooked. This article examines Beijing municipality’s recent effort to improve and digitalize citizen feedback channels and ultimately establish what the party-state refers to as a system of “proactive governance” that addresses citizen concerns before they even arise.
In January 2019, Beijing’s municipal government introduced a new digital platform to receive and handle complaints by citizens. The platform represents an extension of municipal government hotlines and websites through which citizens can launch questions and complaints with local governments nationwide. Touted as a “bridge of mutual trust” between the government and citizens, the platform requires grassroots and local government actors to handle citizen complaints promptly, follow newly established reporting procedures, and ultimately find ways to anticipate citizen concerns.
This paper analyzes the evolution of the new platform, focusing on, first, how this quasi-democratic channel reshuffles intra-governmental and inter-departmental responsibilities and, second, what this means for conceptualizations of responsive authoritarianism. Our qualitative analysis builds on a diversity of sources, including 1) 12 individual and group interviews conducted between June 2018 and September 2022; 2) internal and public government documents and feedback reports by grassroots officials on the policymaking process that accompanied the development of the platform; 3) protocols of bureaucratic meetings and workshops that discussed the platform, its policy design, legal aspects and local officials’ feedback.
Our paper contributes to debates on authoritarian responsiveness and grassroots (digital) governance in China. We argue that the introduction of the platform constitutes another element in the Communist Party’s repertoire to increase its role in (urban) grassroots governance and extend the control of party-state actors over society. We show that building upon existing quasi-democratic channels, the Chinese party-state is creating what can be referred to as a system of predictive authoritarianism that continues to utilize techniques of control and discipline but seeks to maximize techniques of planning and anticipation within its system of governance.

Author

• Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla, Freie Universität Berlin