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This article clarifies the evolution and features of Chinese 'deliberative democracy', which has drawn attention with its importance in 'the opinions of the CPC Central Committee on Strengthening the Work of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference', publicly disclosed on February 8th, 2006, and contributed to the construction of the institution by publishing another document proposing to promote socialist consultative democracy on February 10th, 2015. From a viewpoint of 'the modernization of the state governance system and capacity', which was raised in the third plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee on November 12th, 2013, this article seeks to explore not only the purpose of 'deliberative democracy', which is inherent to democracy, but also the political and social context functioning as a tool of state governance. In so doing, this paper examines Zhejiang province as a wide variety of practices about 'deliberative democracy' in Chinese grassroots society including 'democratic deliberation' in Wenling city and 'village sage council' in Deqing county. This paper also considers the process of reconstructing consultative authoritarianism, which is currently attempting to balance democracy with governance in the Chinese government.

Working machines in construction sites or emergency scenarios can operate in situations that can be dangerous for the operator. On the contrary, remote operation has been typically hindered by limited sense of presence of the operator in the environment due to the reduced field of view of cameras. Starting from these considerations, this work introduces a novel real-time panoramic telepresence system for construction machines. This system does allow fully immersive operations in critical scenarios while keeping the operator in a safe location at safe distance from the construction operation. An omnidirectional stereo vision head mounted over the machine acquires and sends data to the operator with a streaming technique that focuses on the current direction of sight of the operator. The operator uses a head-mounted display to experience the remote site also with the possibility to view digital information overlaid to the remote scene as a type of augmented reality. The paper addresses the design and architecture of the system starting from the vision system and then proceeding to the immersive visualization.