According to standard and long-established ways of political thinking in the West, democracy was first and foremost an attribute of the state, because the state claims final political authority over the citizens of a particular territory. The legitimacy of the democratic state then rests on popular control combined with political equality across citizens. Popular control was normally conceptualized in aggregative terms: the preferences of citizens for leaders, parties, or policies must somehow be aggregated in order to produce collective decisions about who should lead and what they should do. Aggregation generally takes the form of the counting of votes in elections, when this conception of democracy becomes representative democracy. Political equality then means that the votes of citizens are counted equally. This conception of democracy becomes liberal democracy when it is linked to a set of rights possessed by each citizen. These rights concern most importantly freedom of opinion, expression and association, and protection against the arbitrary power of government.The theory of deliberative democracy does not necessarily reject these features, but it does lead to a difference in emphasis, beginning with a contrast between aggregation and deliberation. The traditional focus on aggregation meant that little attention was paid to how preferences are shaped; for preferences were simply taken as given, and the focus was on aggregation mechanisms. In contrast, deliberative democrats believe preferences ought to be shaped reflectively by thoughtful and competent citizens (or their representatives), and that such reflection is central to deliberation. Preferences can be transformed in deliberation. In addition, for deliberative democrats, the legitimacy of a political decision rests on the right and capacity of those affected by a decision to deliberate in participation about its content. Those affected do not merely vote, or have their preferences registered (though deliberative democracy does not have to dispense with preference aggregation and voting). This does of course raise some questions about how the deliberation of citizens is to be organized into the political system, especially when the number of those affected by a decision is large. Different answers to these questions point to different locations for deliberation. In this paper I will examine three different locations for deliberation: the institutions of the state, designed forums for deliberation by ordinary citizens and/or political advocates, and the public sphere. A deliberative democracy can be built upon practices in each of these locations. There is no precise or universally-applicable recipe for exactly what kinds of institutions and practices are best in each location. The pursuit of deliberative democracy should itself be a deliberative process to which political theorists may contribute, while allowing that any suggestions they might make require validation by a broader public, who also might have creative ideas of their own. Many lessons can be drawn from the Chinese development of participatory and deliberative institutions in recent years. Of course they may not be perfect. But deliberation is in large part a matter of learning.