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The Meaning of China's Village Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Robert A. Pastor  and
Qingshan Tan
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Extract

Direct elections for village leaders have been conducted in China since 1988, but they remain little known or casually dismissed by urban Chinese and the international community. Those who are aware of China's village elections have sharply divergent views as to their genuineness or effectiveness. Some are sceptical that the Chinese Communist Party would ever permit a competitive election that could threaten its grip on power. Others see the elections as a first stage in the building of democracy in China. In many ways, village elections are a kind of Rorschach test, an ambiguous drawing that is interpreted by people according to their predisposition towards China rather than the quality of the elections.

Type
Elections and Democracy in Greater China
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 162 , June 2000 , pp. 490 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2000

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References

1. Cited in Jingben, Rong, Zhiyuan, Cui, Shuansheng, Wang; Xinjun, Geo, Zengke, He and Xuedong, Yang, Transformation from the Pressurized to a Democratic System of Cooperation (Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 1998), pp. 207–208.Google Scholar

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5. Gang, Bai, Reporton Improving the Legislation of Villagers' Self-Governance (Beijing: Centre for Public Policy Research, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Working Paper No. 971103, 10 1997), p. 52.Google Scholar For a list of the provinces, see p. 55.

6. Ibid. pp. 65, 68, 82.

7. Jingben, Rong et al. , Transformation from the Pressurized to a Democratic System of Cooperation, pp. 337–348, 413.Google Scholar

8. See International Republican Institute, People's Republic of China Election Observation Report, 15–31 05 1994.Google Scholar

9. International Republican Institute, Election Observation Report: Fujian, People's Republic of China, 05 1997.Google Scholar

10. Royal Danish Embassy, Beijing, “Rural village elections,” prepared by Franz-Michael S. Melbin, Political Counsellor, December 1995. Although the author refers to NPC elections, villages do not elect representatives to the NPC. What he probably witnessed was a direct election for the township people's congress.

11. For the two Carter Center Reports, see, Carter Center Delegation Report, The Carter Center Delegation to Observe Village Elections in China, 4–16 03 1997Google Scholar; Carter Center Delegation Report, Village Elections in China and Agreement on Cooperation With the Ministry of Civil Affairs, People's Republic of China, 2–15 03 1998.Google Scholar

12. The village election committee's function is to prepare for the conduct of the elections for the village committee.

13. Interview with Zhan Chengfu, Rural Areas Section, Ministry of Civil Affairs, Beijing, 14 January 1999.

14. In other places, other nomination methods are used, such as household nomination or nomination by township governments. See Table 1.

15. There are other methods of selection that rely on informal consultations between village election committees and village groups, but it is difficult to assess precisely because the method is informal. See Table 1.

16. For an evaluation of the accumulative method, see Niou, Emerson and Shi, Tianjian, “An introduction and evaluation of the electoral system used in Chinese village elections,” unpublished paper, Duke University.Google Scholar

17. Luncheon with Minister of Civil Affairs Duoji Cairang, Beijing, 25 July 1997. When the minister expressed a desire to know the answer to that question, Pastor proposed a national system for collecting election results and assessing the process, and that became the Carter Center project.

18. Cited in Li, Lianjiang and O'Brien, Kevin J., “The struggle over village elections,” in Goldman, Merle and Roderick MacFarquhar, (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 140.Google Scholar

19. Interviews with Zhang Xiaogan, Fujian province, China, 7–8 March 1997, and 24–25 June 1998.

20. We tried to select data that were comparable. The data were scarce and scattered in various local reports. Table 2 only contains a few provinces with the comparable data.

21. For the agreement and the two forms, see Appendices 1 and 5 of the Carter Center's Report on Village Elections, 2–15 March 1998.

22. See the introduction to this volume.

23. See Elklit, Jøgen and Svensson, Palle, “What makes elections free and fair?” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 8, No. 7 (07 1997), pp. 17–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. This definition is developed in Pastor, Robert A., “Mediating elections,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 1 (01 1998), pp. 154–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. The data received from the province were from a long interview with Zhang Xiaogan in March 1998.

26. According to Ann Thurston's interview with a MoCA official, the percentage of non-Party members being elected seems to have grown from 20% in 1993 to 40% in 1995. See Thurston, , Muddling Toward Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute for Peace, 1998), n. 81.Google Scholar

27. Cited in Renmin ribao (People's Daily), Beijing, 28 09 1998.Google Scholar

28. Li Peng's interview with Peter Seidlitz of Handelsblatt (Germany), 2 12 1998.Google Scholar

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