China in the Lottocratic Turn

Abstract In the fourth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” Nadia Urbinati criticized the lottocratic turn in political thought by, in part, using the case of China to cast doubt on whether lottocracy is a democratic form at all. This article, in response to Urbinati's prompt, focuses on the place and role of China's experimental lotteries and citizen assemblies in the global discussion of sortition and democracy. Those experiments, at the national but mostly local levels in China, are understood differently from each of the three prevailing perspectives on Chinese governance: China as an orthodox authoritarian state, or a progressive and deliberative authoritarian state, or a kind of social science laboratory. Each perspective has its intellectual advantages and disadvantages, and the three are intricately interconnected. To consider the issue of China's experiments with sortition as a part of the lottocratic turn, we each need (a) to develop self-consciousness about which perspective we have adopted, (b) to realize the limits of each, (c) to learn from the other perspectives, and (d) to learn how to combine them. The complexity of, and manifold possibilities inherent in, Chinese governance have eclipsed the simplistic uses made of China in the Western social sciences.