“…Public hearing is one of the oldest and most widely applied arrangements to let citizens participate in governance in Western Countries (Checkoway, 1981). There it was originally applied in judicial processes ('judicial hearing') and gradually expanded to legislative and administrative processes ('legislative hearing' and 'administrative hearing') respectively (Checkoway and Van Til, 1980;Cole and Caputo, 1984). Since 1996, China started to experiment with Western arrangements of public hearings, first on administrative penalties in 1996 and then also on pricing.…”