The research focuses on public participation in environmental policy process in post-Mao China. It has been a well-agreed scholarly conclusion that the public administration in the China is highly centralised, and the public policies are bureaucratically initiated and administered under the one-party dictatorship. In the monist political system, stakeholders in the policy process are mainly Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres, together with the ‘authorised’ groups of societies but definitely without the participation from autonomous interest groups and society. In general, the ‘western model’ of civil society, which is characterised by the plurality of interest groups participation in public policymaking, implementation and evaluation, is absent in the public policy processes in China. This study prepares to use environmental protection as the platform to examine the transformation that have been undergone in China policy process and use it as a piece of references to revisit the current academic literature on China.
