Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 4, 2021

A Possible Smart Democracy

(Abstract)

Zhao Tingyang

Contemporary democracy has degenerated into “publicracy,” a failure or misuse of democracy, distorted and manipulated by the dominion of systematized power due to the lack of social consensus. A better future for democracy depends on a return to rationality and transformation from “opinion-centered democracy” into “knowledge-centered democracy.” A democratic system based on a “two-vote (for and against) voting program” and “Jizi democracy” based upon the intellectual resources furnished by the ancient Chinese philosopher Jizi would ensure that democracy makes more reasonable and wiser public choices through technological advances, so that democracy involving the aggregation of preferences will be replaced by “knowledge-weighted democracy,” thereby discovering and implementing a focal point of the heart and mind.