Over the last decade, the world’s most populous country has begun a range of new experiments in public decision-making to improve transparency, reduce corruption, and create new space for the voices of everyday citizens.

Many of these experiments have involved groundbreaking collaborations with international partners. Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy has helped facilitate deliberative polling in the city of Wenling; the Carter Center has advised the Chinese government in electoral practices for 600,000 villages; and in 2014, the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) awarded the Chinese city of Chengdu its “Best Practice in Citizen Participation Award” for participatory budgeting in services to rural areas.
In June 2015, D21 added its name to the list of partners helping build new models of civic participation in China. Shining Stone Community Action, a Beijing-based NGO supporting civic engagement projects, organised a two-day workshop on local budgeting which allowed residents of a Beijing neighborhood discuss and vote on which community projects should be prioritized for public funding.

Leading up to the workshop, D21’s team in Prague worked with SSCA to adapt D21 voting for the context of the Beijing experiment, including calculating the right number of votes per voter given the procedures and options available to them. D21’s team member Lan Fang was present during the workshop and facilitated the voting process, in which many participants were casting votes for the first time.

The results of this first test were very encouraging. Wang, the SSCA trainer and facilitator of the voting process at the workshop, concluded that D21 has “extraordinary potential” to promote consensus and avoid extreme outcomes. Others felt motivated to communicate and discuss with others once they saw their preferred project received negative votes and became more concerned with their favourite project for the fear of its rejection. “The minus-vote is very helpful in reducing conflicts and encouraging voters to consider other points of view,” said one of the Beijing residents.

A new kind of civic conversation is beginning in China, and D21 is excited to be a part of it.