[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 107 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
VILLAGE ELECTIONS IN CHINA
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 8, 2002
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate
House
MAX BAUCUS, Montana, Chairman DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska, Co-
CARL LEVIN, Michigan Chairman
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California JIM LEACH, Iowa
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota DAVID DREIER, California
EVAN BAYH, Indiana FRANK WOLF, Virginia
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska JOE PITTS, Pennsylvania
BOB SMITH, New Hampshire SANDER LEVIN, Michigan
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
JIM DAVIS, Florida
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
D. CAMERON FINDLAY, Department of Labor
LORNE CRANER, Department of State
JAMES KELLY, Department of State
Ira Wolf, Staff Director
John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Thurston, Anne F., associate professor of China Studies, School
of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins
University, Washington, DC..................................... 2
Liu, Yawei, associate director, the Carter Center's China Village
Elections Project, Atlanta, GA................................. 6
Dugan, Elizabeth, regional program director, Asia and the Middle
East, International Republican Institute (IRI), Washington, DC. 9
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Thurston, Anne F................................................. 34
Liu, Yawei....................................................... 37
Dugan, Elizabeth................................................. 40
VILLAGE ELECTIONS IN CHINA
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MONDAY, JULY 8, 2002
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:30
p.m., in room SD-215, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Ira Wolf,
(Staff Director) presiding.
Also present: John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director; Chris
Billing, Director of Communications; Matt Tuchow, Office of
Representative Levin; Jennifer Goedke, Office of Representative
Kaptur; Amy Gadsden, U.S. Department of State; and Holly
Vineyard, U.S. Department of Commerce.
Mr. Wolf. Let me welcome everyone to the eighth issues
roundtable of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
These roundtables are being held because the Commission
Chairman, Senator Baucus, and our Co-Chairman, Representative
Bereuter, have instructed the staff to delve deeply into a
number of very specific issues of concern to the Commission.
This format provides an opportunity to focus on important
issues dealing with human rights and the rule of law in China.
We have two more roundtables scheduled during the summer--
on July 26, a roundtable on China's criminal justice system,
and on August 5, an open forum where anyone--any group or any
individual--can speak for 5 minutes about any issue of concern.
Of course, anyone who wants to appear at the open forum needs
to check our Website and register.
Today we will address village elections in China--the
background, how they have been carried out, information about
technical assistance, advice, and monitoring from American
groups who are represented here today, and the implications of
village elections on human rights, the rule of law, and
governance in China.
Let me introduce the staff members here today. I am Ira
Wolf, Staff Director. John Foarde is the Deputy Staff Director.
Jennifer Goedke works for Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. Holly
Vineyard is from the Department of Commerce and works for our
Commissioner, Under Secretary of Commerce Grant Aldonas.
Chris Billing is our Communications Director and the
Commission's expert on the media, the Olympics, and many other
areas of concern to the Commission. Amy Gadsden works at the
State Department for our Commissioner, Lorne Craner, the
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor Affairs.
Let us begin. We have three presentations today. First is
Dr. Anne Thurston, who is associate professor of China Studies
at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.
Second will be Mr. Liu Yawei, associate director of the
China Village Elections Project at the Carter Center. And,
finally, Elizabeth Dugan, the regional program director for
Asia and the Middle East at the International Republican
Institute [IRI].
Anne, we will start with you.
STATEMENT OF ANNE F. THURSTON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CHINA
STUDIES, SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (SAIS), JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Thurston. I want to thank my friends and my colleagues
here on the Congressional-Executive China Commission for the
opportunity to share with you some of my experiences with
village elections.
I have been observing village elections in China since 1994
and have both spoken and written about my observations. I
brought one of the pieces I did in 1998 and have some copies
for those of you who may want it.
My two fellow panelists--friends, and colleagues, Elizabeth
Dugan and Liu Yawei--both direct on-the-ground, concrete
programs in China. My contribution today will be to provide
some historical background about how village elections came
into being in China, to give a broad overview about what we
know about how successful those elections have been, and also
to say something about how significant those elections have
been, both for the people in rural areas who participate in
them, and also for their implications for possible political
evolution in China.
Let me start by saying something about how these village
elections came to be introduced into China.
The process, as some of you know, traces to the demise of
the people's communes or the collective system of agriculture
in China, that began in the late 1970s and was completed by the
early 1980s.
One of the unintended consequences of this process of
decollectivization is that many villages in China began to face
serious problems of leadership. Those problems were generally
of two types.
In some villages, previous village leaders were able to
take advantage of the new economic opportunities afforded by
decollectivizations and they thus left their positions of
leadership and searched for other, more lucrative pursuits.
In villages of this type where the leaders actually left,
many villages were faced with a vacuum of leadership. This
vacuum, in some cases, also resulted in a breakdown of social
order: the rise of banditry, of lawlessness, and the rise of
violence, for instance.
In other cases, some villages came under control of what
the Chinese often call ``local emperors,''--strong men who are
capable of exploiting and bullying, and generally making life
miserable for the ordinary people under their control.
By the mid- to late 1980s, many people thought that rural
China was in a State of potential crisis. Above all, the
Chinese Communist Party [CCP] was worried about the potential
for instability and chaos in these rural areas.
At the outset, there was considerable disagreement within
the higher reaches of the Communist Party about what to do
about this potential for chaos and instability. Some people
naturally wanted a strengthening of Party leadership within the
village. They wanted a sort of tightening of top-down controls.
Others, though, began to suggest that perhaps the best way
to restore order in Chinese villages was to institute village
elections. What they reasoned is that by instituting popular
elections, village leadership would fall to more popular, more
respected members of the village community.
Moreover, there was also the thought that if those people
who were elected at the village level were not members of the
Party, then perhaps they could be recruited into the Party,
thus infusing the Party with--at local levels, in any case--a
new respect.
So the debate surrounding village elections as it played
itself out was not really about the ``good of democracy'' as an
ideal, but rather a very practical question about whether
elections could, in fact, promote or would impede stability or
chaos. The question was: What effect would village elections
have on this potential for chaos?
In the end, those people who argued that elections would
promote stability won. In 1987, the Chinese National People's
Congress passed an Organic Law on Village Elections, which
promoted village elections on an experimental basis.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs [MCA] in Beijing was
responsible at the national level for overseeing implementation
of these village elections and every province was responsible
for coming up with its own concrete regulations governing how
each province would carry out these experiments.
By 1998, more than a decade later, these experiments had
been going on long enough and with sufficient success that they
were mandated finally into law. As of 1998, all villages in
China have been required by law to hold competitive elections.
At that time, in 1998, the guidelines for how to carry out
village elections were also more clearly and thoroughly spelled
out. Most of these measures, as we read them, move village
elections further along the democratic spectrum.
Candidates have to be chosen by the villagers themselves
rather than by outsiders; secret ballots are required; and the
number of candidates must exceed the number of positions to be
chosen.
One of the great frustrations of anybody working on this
issue of village elections is that we simply do not know yet
how widespread they are or how well and how universally they
have actually been implemented.
There are some 930,000 villages in China, and some 900
million people live in those villages. But the number of
villages visited by foreigners like those of us in this room is
painfully limited.
My own experience has also been very limited, but I have,
nonetheless, seen a broad spectrum of types of village
leadership in China, and also different ways of choosing
village leaders.
I want to mention the various types of leaders that I have
seen in China, but dwell particularly on the more positive side
of what I have seen.
First, the local emperors who came to power with the
collapse of communes still exist in some parts of China. There
is little doubt about that.
Second, many villages continue to exist in the same vacuum
of leadership they found shortly after decollectivization.
Third, I have also seen cases where these local emperors are
actually elected, ostensibly democratically.
Finally and most importantly, and what I want to talk about
a bit here, is that I have also seen elections that, by any
measure anywhere in the world, would be recognized as genuinely
competitive, fair, and democratic.
If I could generalize about some of the most successful
elections I have seen, I would say, first--and pretty
obviously, I suppose--that the issues confronting the
electorate and addressed by the candidates are very local,
practical, and economic.
The rural voters behave in exactly the way that democratic
theory says they should behave, which is to say they vote in
their own self interests. They want very simple things. I
mentioned some of those things in my longer statement.
Most of the people who I have seen elected have been
younger, entrepreneurial, better educated, and generally
significantly richer than the older generation of collective
leaders.
Whether these newly elected village leaders are members of
the Communist Party or not seems not to be an issue with the
voters, although in my own experience--and I think probably in
the experience of everybody else here who has witnessed village
elections--most often the newly elected leaders are members of
the Party, simply because Communist Party members have more
connections at higher levels, and thus they have a greater
ability to make things happen at the village level.
We do not really know the percentage of village leaders
being elected now who are members of the Party, but we know
that figure is pretty high, probably as high as 80 percent
nationwide.
It is hard, given the limited number of elections that we
have observed, to say why some elections are successful and
some are not, although it seems to me that the key is generally
in leadership.
In order for elections to be successful, you really have to
have significant political commitment at every step of the
political ladder, from the top, which is to say the Ministry of
Civil Affairs, to the province, to the township, right down the
chain to the village.
I would also say, and I think others who have observed
village elections would agree, that elections are also very
much a learning process. With good leadership, with experience,
they do tend to get better over time.
One of the most important things I have learned observing
village elections over the years is that the technical details
that we take for granted about how to organize an election are
by no means obvious to the Chinese. Election officials have to
be properly trained.
Here, I would commend heartily the work of both the IRI and
the Carter Center for what they have done in training election
officials at several levels of the election hierarchy, and also
in directly monitoring those elections, which gives them also
an opportunity to make recommendations for improvement in how
elections are carried out.
So the question is, what difference did these elections at
the village level make? I think, certainly, they are definitely
a major advance over the previous ways of selecting village
leaders in China. They present rural people with choices that
they did not have before. They give them a real voice in the
selection of their leaders. They provide a sense of political
participation, of community, of empowerment.
Moreover, there is some evidence--although I think we need
a lot more research on this--that governance in villages that
have had competitive elections does improve, that finances
become more transparent, that corruption declines.
Above all, though, it seems to me that by giving rural
people the experience of electing their local leaders,
elections at the village level are putting in place the
mechanisms for elections of higher-level officials. That, of
course, is the final question.
The question is, can we expect elections at the village
level to begin working their way up, which is to say, to the
township, the county, the province, and eventually the national
level? This is, of course, how Taiwan began its long-term
process of democratization.
There is pretty universal agreement both in China and among
western academics that reforms that actually begin this upward
movement from the village, to the township, to the county, to
the province, and so on is going to have to be instituted from
above, which is to say from China's top leadership.
We all know that China's current leadership has been
decidedly conflicted about the issue of further democratization
there. We also know that China is currently in the process of a
major leadership change, which also means that this is not the
time for political innovation. That is to say, full-blown
democracy is not likely to come soon to China.
But, having said that, I think the note that I would like
to close on is that I have been going to China for some 24
years now, and never at any time since I have been going to
China have I heard more sentiment in favor of democracy as I do
now.
Among China's intellectuals, in particular, I think there
is a general understanding that democratization in the long
term is both necessary and inevitable. The question is--and it
is a very big question for everybody--how to proceed along a
more democratic path without risking the chaos and instability
that so many people in China fear.
Many people in China, like people in the United States,
believe that democratization is tied to China's continued
economic development, and also to the spread of economic
benefits from urban to rural China, and from the coastal to the
inland areas.
But to conclude, I will say that in the meantime, before
this process actually gets under way, I think that the Chinese
Government's continuing commitment to village elections offers
us in the United States a rare opportunity to cooperate with
China in a very positive way in their long-term, but still
uncertain, political evolution. Thank you all.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Thurston appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Mr. Liu Yawei, please go ahead.
STATEMENT OF LIU YAWEI, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, THE CARTER CENTER'S
CHINA VILLAGE ELECTION PROJECT, ATLANTA, GA
Mr. Liu. Thanks. Thank you for inviting me to speak about
China village elections.
I am going to skip the first part of my statement because
Dr. Thurston has sufficiently covered it. The second issue I am
going to talk about in some detail is the impact of China
village elections, and third, a little bit about the Carter
Center's activities in China.
A general objective assessment of the consequences of the
village community elections in China, what we call the enormous
preliminary exercise of democracy, is as follows: That it has
provided a safety valve to the hundreds of millions of Chinese
peasants who are angry and confused as their life is often
subject to constant exploitation and pressure.
Second, it has introduced legal procedures of elections
into a culture that has never entertained open and free
elections. Third, it has cultivated a new value system, a much-
needed sense of political ownership among Chinese peasants that
do not have any leverage in bargaining with a heavy-handed
government.
However, the popularity of these elections, the loss of
influence and power on the part of officials at the township
and town level, and the fear that these elections will
eventually dislodge the embattled Party apparatus from the
villages has triggered a backlash that is so ferocious, that it
may render these elections into a hollow and meaningless
practice.
The assault seems to have come from two sectors: the
political sector and the academic sector. While the motivation
for the political attacks is easy to comprehend, the charges
are lethal in the Chinese political discourse.
There is, seemingly, a systematic effort to label village
elections as a source of evil forces that are: (1) undermining
the Party's leadership in the rural areas; (2) affecting rural
stability; (3) turning the rural economy upside down; and, (4)
helping clans and other old forms of power and control to grow
in the countryside. These attacks came from the political
sector.
The scholars' criticism might be well-intentioned, but is
equally detrimental. These scholars tend to argue that village
elections are government-imposed, that they have unexpectedly
destroyed traditional rural fabrics of self-government.
What Chinese peasants really need are farmers' alliances
and free disposal of their land. No country has ever seen any
meaningful democracy taking hold from the bottom up.
So, in this context, thousands of Chinese officials,
particularly from the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the local
Departments of Civil Affairs, are fighting very hard to keep
this small opening of political reform alive. They are becoming
a little pessimistic, but never, ever hopeless.
As of now, all eyes are trained on the upcoming 16th Party
Congress, whose endorsement of grassroots democracy will be
another clarion call for bolder, and more expensive forms of
popular choice and accountability.
The second issue, is the impact of China's direct village
elections. One could hardly exaggerate the impact of direct
village elections. Yes, these elections are conducted only at
the level of China's self-governing social and political units.
Yes, the right to cast a ballot is only exercised by the
supposedly most stubborn, conservative, and backward group of
the Chinese people. Yes, the very powerful government can still
render the popularly elected leaders powerless. However, it is
going to be very hard to take away a right that has been
granted to any particular group before.
A Chinese scholar recently commented, ``True, Chinese
peasants are not terribly enthusiastic about exercising their
right to cast ballots nowadays. But, if one wants to take that
right away, the situation will be rather explosive.''
Furthermore, over the past 14 years direct village
elections and villager self-government have become accepted as
a valuable alternative to the otherwise arcane and opaque
manner of selecting government leaders and people's deputies.
In many places, the candidates for the Party positions are
required to receive a direct popularity test. A low approval
rating will disqualify the candidates for running for the Party
positions.
In 1998 and 1999, during the last round of township/town
people's Congress deputy elections, new experiments of
selecting township government leaders appeared in no less than
three provinces, including an unprecedented direct election of
a township magistrate in Buyun, Sichuan Province.
Although these experiments were either declared
unconstitutional or unsuitable to be implemented, they created
a sense of hope and urgency. Many officials were preparing to
introduce new procedures to expand the nomination process and
make determination of formal candidates competitive and
transparent. This anticipated boom of political experiments did
not take place due to a Party circular in July 2001.
Despite this, on the last day of December 2001, Buyun
township went ahead again with its own direct election of a
township magistrate. One province in China introduced public
elections of magistrates in 45 percent of its 5,000 townships
and towns by June 2002.
More locales are going to use this so-called public
election method to choose township leaders. It is said that one
county in Sichuan Province used the same measure in picking a
county magistrate.
A scholar boldly predicted recently that one measure to be
adopted by the Party's 16th Congress will be the direct
election of Party leaders at the grassroots level. All these
progresses are being made in the context of direct village
elections.
Finally, no matter how democratic China is going to become
and what forms of electoral systems China is going to adopt,
voter education, voter registration, nomination and
determination of candidates, the use of secret ballot booths,
are all going to be great problems and logistical nightmares
that could lead to potential political violence and
instability.
The practice of direct village elections involves close to
600 million out of the 900 million Chinese voters. They have
always experienced these procedures and are getting more and
more familiar with the standardized procedures. This will
become the single most valuable asset in China's quest for
greater democracy.
Which way to go from here? No one has a definitive answer.
The flurry of experiments of the selection of township
magistrates in 1998 and 1999 were carried out under Jiang
Zemin's call for promoting grassroots democracy at the 15th
National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1997. It is
only logical to go down this road if the so-called ``three
represents'' are implemented according to its true essence.
If Jiang is determined to write the ``three represents''
into the Party charter and claim it to be his legacy, there is
little doubt that China will back away from the small steps it
has taken toward greater political reform.
The last topic is the Carter Center's China Village
Elections Project. The Carter Center initiated the China
Village Elections Project in 1997. After a successful pilot
phase, a 3-year agreement of cooperation was signed with the
national Ministry of Civil Affairs in March 1999.
This agreement allows the Carter Center to work primarily
in four Chinese provinces to install computers and software to
collect village elections data, to conduct training of election
officials at all levels, and the elected village committee
members in any province in China to observe village elections
everywhere, to help conduct civic education, and to invite
Chinese election officials to observe United States elections
and the elections that are monitored by the Carter Center in
other parts of the world.
In addition to working with the Ministry of Civil Affairs,
the Carter Center is also working with the National People's
Congress, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and other
NGOs [non-governmental organizations] in the area of designing
electoral procedures for the county and township people's
Congress, for the township and county magistrates, in
empowering the People's Congress system in China, and other
areas of cooperation.
The Center has provided substantial assistance in
conducting civic education, printing civil education materials,
and spreading information through the Website. We are about to
launch another Website called ``China Elections and
Governance'' in the near future.
The Center has also been coordinating its work in China
with other American and Western organizations, including IRI,
the Ford Foundation, NDI [National Democratic Institute], UNDP
[U.N. Development Program], and particularly the European
Commission [EC].
China is a significant nation whose international
responsibility, domestic stability, and economic prosperity
will directly impact the Asia-Pacific region and the world. All
these things cannot be sustained without an open and
transparent political system through which the government
derives its legitimacy and the people hold their leaders
accountable.
No single group of nations can initiate this most important
sea of change in China. China will have to do it by herself.
However, the involvement of the Western government and the
NGOs, in sowing the seeds of reform, sustaining the change, and
consolidating the gains is indispensable.
Imposing Western values on China without considering
China's unique circumstances is counterproductive. Ignoring
China altogether in its cautious and sometimes confusing quest
for greater democratization is outright erroneous. Working
outside China is helpful. Providing assistance inside China is
safer and all the more effective.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Liu appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thank you. Liz Dugan.
STATEMENT OF ELIZABETH DUGAN, REGIONAL PROGRAM
DIRECTOR, ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST, INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICAN
INSTITUTE [IRI], WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Dugan. Thank you. For me, it is an extreme honor to be
invited to be invited to participate on this panel, and I thank
you very much for that invitation.
It is also a distinct privilege to serve with such well-
respected colleagues and experts in this field not only here in
the United States, but most certainly on the ground in China.
I have a prepared statement which is available, but I think
if I can I will just speak a little more informally about some
of the more important thought that I would like to make.
IRI has been working on electoral reform issues in China
for about 8 years now. We have been active in 10 provinces. We
have observed more than 50 elections. These election
observation missions that we conduct are really not as
significant as some of the other activities that we have, but
we try always to present those officials who are responsible
for administering these elections with a set of recommendations
that are meant to help them strengthen the process that they
have already started.
We have also been very much involved in training of
election officials and of newly elected village chairmen to
help them understand better about how they can be responsive in
their new roles and how they need to be held accountable to the
voters who put them in place.
Another activity that we have tried to enact are regional
networking conferences, which allow for cross-fertilization of
ideas among provincial leaders who, again, have taken on this
task and responsibility of creating electoral reform efforts.
I mention, also, training and field work for domestic
monitors. These, of course, would be the Chinese themselves who
have some experience in the whole realm of elections throughout
China and who now can go and observe and make their own
recommendations. We have found this to be a particularly
successful effort because it is Chinese to Chinese.
I want to speak briefly about one particular village
election experience which I think allows an institute like IRI
to demonstrate a real sense of the progress that we have seen
in China.
Then, if you will indulge me, I will speak briefly about
urban election experimentation that is taking place in China
now and which I had a chance to observe firsthand in May.
In Fujian Province, IRI had its first experience as an
international observation team in 1994. We used Fujian Province
as perhaps the best example of how we have been able to track
progress over the course of time.
As you know, village elections are on 3-year cycles, so we
had a chance to observe, in two counties, these elections in
1994, and then again in 1997 in the same counties.
In 2000, we returned for the third time. This obviously is
the best kind of indicator of progress and this is what we were
able to note. The technical process has taken root.
There still is room for improvement, there still is room
for strengthening, but the very fundamental things have not
only been rooted in Fujian Province, but they have been
implemented in a very across-the-board way.
It is useful for us to kind of see that it does not remain
static. It is hard for us to know this in other provinces
because we have not had, as I say, this consecutive election
monitoring experience.
While it is true that elections vary in their level of
competitiveness, what we also saw in Fujian, and I have seen in
other places as well, is that challengers are winning. Not
always is the Party candidate being returned to his seat.
Write-in candidates are allowed on ballots. These are all signs
of some sense of real competitiveness there.
It is clear to us that the demand for reform is great.
There have been expressions of a desire to see direct elections
at higher levels, at the township level, as Liu Yawei has
mentioned. This has been voiced to us by not only villagers,
but also by local officials.
The pace of reform is not clear, and I think this is a
sentiment that we all feel strongly. It is very hard to
determine how quickly, or in fact how slowly, some of this may
happen.
Support for reform from Beijing is a wild card at this
point. The outcome of the 16th Party Congress this fall is
clearly a bit of an unknown variable for us. As Anne Thurston
has suggested, this is not a time when a commitment to
political reform or innovation is going to take place. It will
not be for some time to come after the results of the Party
Congress have had a chance to settle in.
Let me speak, briefly, about these urban elections that I
mentioned to you. For the past 2 years or more there have been
12 pilot cities that have been allowed to experiment with
elections for urban residence committees.
In the history of the People's Republic of China [PRC], the
primary organizing unit in most large Chinese cities was the
work unit, or the danwei, which provided the cradle-to-grave
social services known collectively as the ``iron rice bowl.''
Although urban residence committees existed, positions on
those committees were appointed by the municipal Party
apparatus and held primarily by the elderly, many times barely
literate people. Functions of these committees were limited to
menial neighborhood tasks and snooping into the urban citizens'
lives.
China's cities have been undergoing massive social and
economic change in recent years. With more and more state-owned
enterprise failures and increasing unemployment, the danweis
have become less important, in good part because they have
become less effective in many cities.
Simultaneously, the influx of migrant workers into urban
areas has dramatically altered the urban landscape. Crime has
increased, as have street protests and labor unrest. Residents
committees, as they were formerly conceived and structured, no
longer meet the needs of China's city dwellers.
The Chinese Government decided to permit elections for
urban residence committees on an experimental basis in the
interest of modernization and social stability. This is the
same rationale, as Anne so thoroughly pointed out, that was
first used to permit village elections more than 10 years ago.
It is worth noting, though, that in the absence of detailed
central government directives on urban elections, local
officials have a great deal of autonomy in designing and
implementing them. There is a lot of variety.
The hope, I believe, is that younger, more qualified
individuals will run for positions on the committees and that
elections will make these residence committees more accountable
to urban citizens.
The effort in Guangxi Autonomous Region, as elsewhere, is
brand-new. The people who are driving the effort have not
organized elections before. But this experiment also suggests
to me hope and urgency of the same kind that Liu Yawei suggests
in his remarks. These urban officials are using the village
regulations as their model, and they are most certainly headed
in the right direction.
It is clear that there need to be new applications of that
village model in the urban setting. In the interest of time,
perhaps I will not discuss that at great length now, but would
be delighted to address it during one of the questions. But let
me say that whatever those applications may be, they will stem
from nothing more than a learned competency and a technical
understanding.
So, let me try to make some summary points here before we
move on. The first one takes a page right out of Anne
Thurston's book, because she taught me so much about all of
this and she was a really fine mentor--still is.
Anne Thurston taught me that elections are not intuitive,
and she has already made the point herself.
They are learned skills. Training, therefore, is essential.
IRI is beginning to learn also that, during this training, we
need to focus not only on the how-to, but on the why.
The majority of provincial officials that we have had the
privilege to work with are very committed to trying to not just
fill a box by complying with the 1998 law in village elections.
They are dedicated to implementing sound practices and finding
ways to strengthen what has always been put in place.
Guangxi was a very good example. In Yunnan Province, we had
a chance also to observe elections. Yunnan was the last
province to initiate village elections, and they determined
that they would spend as much time as they could learning from
the mistakes of other provinces before they would put their own
rules in place.
I think that the Chinese have a luxury of some time that is
not existing in other countries that are trying to put on
elections. They have time to craft regulations that will limit
the opportunities for manipulation and defrauding of the voting
process. There is a long road ahead, there is no question about
it.
But the exercise of democracy is no small thing. It is hard
to quantify the results, despite demands to do so. I know this
is something that Liu Yawei also deals with on a consistent
basis. There is anecdotal evidence that exists. But, in our
minds, the genie is out of the bottle.
This process that villagers, and now urban dwellers, and
perhaps township dwellers also are beginning to experience, is
one that brings to them an evolution of the habit of selecting
your leaders and the habit of holding them accountable.
I will leave it at that. I appreciate your kind attention.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Dugan appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thank you all very much.
Let me start out. In earlier roundtables, some of the
panelists spoke about their concerns with the low level of
United States Government financing of NGO activities in China,
especially assistance in the area of legal reform.
They were worried that the legal standards and principles
that the Chinese were learning were more European-focused than
American. They saw that as something that was not particularly
in our own national interest.
They were asking for more American Government support for
American NGOs and other U.S. organizations, such as U.S. law
schools working in this area in China. I am wondering if there
is any parallel with the work you are doing with village
elections.
Go ahead, Liz.
Ms. Dugan. Thank you. If I understand you correctly, you
are asking whether there is a perceived need or an actual need
for U.S. Government funding.
Mr. Wolf. At the national legal reform level, Americans
involved in assisting believe that there is not enough American
involvement, and therefore legal reform in some areas are going
the road of non-American models, that is, European models or
perhaps Australian, Canadian, Japanese, depending on where the
money is coming from. I am wondering if there is any parallel
to that at the village election level.
Ms. Dugan. I will start off here, and then Yawei, you
correct me if you think I am wrong. It is my inclination to say
that American involvement in village election reform efforts
with Chinese partners is probably the deepest of any other. We
are not exclusively there, but more so than the European Union
[EU], more so than Norwegians, Dane. I am trying to think of
some other groups that I have run into along the way.
We are very, very interested in trying to find ways to
cooperate with those groups and make sure that we have
coordinated our efforts so that whatever program we are putting
in place is not a duplication of effort, or most certainly is
not working at cross purposes. But I think it is safe to say
that our efforts there are as broad as any other group's, if
not broader.
Mr. Liu. I agree with Liz, that the American organizations
are working very closely with the Chinese Government. That
includes IRI, the Ford Foundation, and the Carter Center.
But in terms of the amount of funds available to these
NGOs, and also a list of promised funds, the United States
Government is not close to the European Commission. The EU is
launching a huge project on rural governance and they are
setting up 10 training centers around China to conduct training
of elected village officials, as well as election officials at
all levels.
Although the EC is a big bureaucracy, it takes time for the
two big bureaucracies to iron out all of the differences. It
took them 4 years to finally hammer out the details of the
cooperation, which is going to start in August.
Ms. Thurston. I would echo what both Liz and Yawei have
said. I mean, certainly the EU has a lot more money to spend in
China. I think its problem has been, it also has a lot more
bureaucracy to cope with. So, it has been very, very slow
getting off the ground. Once it does, they do have the money
and they do have the commitment to work with the Chinese.
I want to say a couple of other things, though, about the
way you phrased this question. You phrased it in the context of
efforts at legal reform in China and the possibility that maybe
what is happening is that the legal reforms may be more like
Japan, or more like Europe.
I think my sense is that what both IRI and the Carter
Center are doing, and what we should be doing, is providing the
Chinese with the tools to make their own decisions. The last
thing that China wants is an ``American form of democracy.''
I would also say that I think there is considerable
skepticism in China in terms of working directly with the
American government, and therefore what we need is more money
going to NGOs like IRI, the Carter Center, and other NGOs as
well to work outside the government, but on issues that the
government would also support.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Next is John Foarde.
Mr. Foarde. This question is also for any or all of the
panelists.
I take it from what Anne and Yawei said that we have not
really observed very many village elections of the many that we
hope are going on out there.
How much is the Ministry of Civil Affairs or the government
generally receptive to additional observer groups from Carter
Center, or anywhere in the United States, do you think?
Mr. Liu. If I may, I think the MCA has no problem with
receiving any Western or American delegations to observe
elections. So far, I do not think any official American
delegation has observed residence committee elections.
There was one attempt by Congressional Members to observe
it, but due to weather, the plane never landed. I think we
asked some of the diplomats from the U.S. Embassy to observe
elections in the past several years, but other than that, there
is no official observation. The MCA is open to all foreign
observation of the elections.
Also, though the election cycle in China is every 3 years,
there are no nationally restricted dates. So, just about every
month, there are elections in China somewhere. So if you do go
and contact MCA, they will make it possible for foreign
observers to see these elections.
Ms. Dugan. I concur with that remark. We have had nothing
but fine support and coordination with the Ministry of Civil
Affairs. I think they are very interested in being able to
demonstrate that this exercise is going on.
Mr. Foarde. So we would not be pushing the envelope to be
able to come forward and say we would like to see more
elsewhere in China, and we would like to possibly see some at
the official level, that is, having officials from the United
States observe them during an official visit?
Ms. Dugan. I can think of no reason why they would decline.
Ms. Thurston. I think the problem is usually a logistical
one, where elections are taking place, when, and who from the
Ministry is available.
Mr. Foarde. The further away from Beijing, Shanghai,
Guangzhou, the harder to get to, probably.
Ms. Thurston. Yes. Although once you have made the contact,
as IRI has, sometimes the easier it is to work with them.
Ms. Dugan. Right.
Mr. Foarde. Let me change subjects just slightly and ask
any of you who want to respond if you have any sense of what
the new generation of Chinese leaders that we expect to come
forward over the next year or so feel about or think about the
village election process, either anecdotally or by rumor, or
anything they might have said in public. Any sense at all?
Mr. Liu. Let me respond. I think the next generation, that
is, the generation that is going to emerge at the 16th Party
Congress, I do not think they have paid sufficient attention to
the issues of rural elections or introducing these electoral
measures to higher levels of the government, although they
began to take them into consideration.
I think we probably will not see any bolder or deeper
reform measures being taken up until maybe the next generation
in about 10 years. I think there is a growing critical mass in
the middle level of the Chinese officials that this is
something, as Anne said, is inevitable that has to be adopted.
Mr. Foarde. But I take it that you agree with Anne when she
says that the general consensus in China is that it has got to
come from the top down and not be a bottom-up process. Is that
right?
Mr. Liu. No. I think the pressure will have to come from
both sides. There is pressure from the bottom, such as social
unrest, unemployment, a decrease in income for the peasants,
the growing protest movement. These are the pressures from the
bottom. Then it is going to push, and the top will have to
respond.
But the problem is in the middle, particularly at the lower
middle level the township and county officials, that are most
resistant to these kinds of elections.
Mr. Foarde. I am out of time, and we have other colleagues
who want to ask questions. So, let us keep going.
Mr. Wolf. All right. Next is Jennifer Goedke with
Representative Marcy Kaptur.
Ms. Goedke. Thank you all for being here today.
My first question would be for Anne or Yawei. You both
spoke about motivating factors for the voters, including self
interests like local infrastructure or pricing of household
needs.
Are there any motivating social concerns that you are
seeing, anything like health care rights, workplace rights,
political freedom, anything along those lines, or are you
seeing that it is much more related to self interest of a local
community?
Ms. Thurston. Good question. I mean, it is actually a very
interesting one, and one that I think we need to know more
about. People in rural areas are not actually losing their
health care now as people in urban areas are, as the danwei
begins to fold.
That is a major issue in Chinese cities, and it should be
an issue in the countryside. But I have not seen an election
where that is the case. That does not mean that it will not
happen, cannot happen.
Similarly, with political freedom there is, as Yawei I
think has pointed out, a growing sense of rights, that the laws
governing village elections are being made public, so people
know that they have a legal basis for demanding that elections
be carried out according to the law.
In my own personal experience, it is quite a few steps
further up the ladder to think in terms of one's own individual
rights, human rights, civil rights, and that sort of thing.
I tell a story in a larger piece that I wrote about trying
to get a sense in villages of whether there is some sense, even
if it is not called human rights, of something that is
inalienable, that cannot be taken away from you, that is yours,
that you absolutely need and deserve.
When I have asked that question, the answer has always been
the same: roads. That is, what people think is very practical.
What they deserve, what they need, what is their right, is more
roads.
Mr. Liu. Yes. I think the issues during the elections are
always economic treatment, but also about education, about road
building. At the most recent village elections we observed, all
five candidates talked about the WTO [World Trade
Organization], to the surprise of all of the observers.
This was in a remote village in the Shandong Province. So,
they do not talk about political freedom.
They very rarely talk about the Party. National politics
are irrelevant here, so it is always issues that are very close
to them.
Ms. Goedke. For Elizabeth, we were talking about some of
the mass emigration from the countryside into the urban areas.
Are you seeing the influence of experience in village
elections, people who are coming from the countryside into
urban areas with this expectation for something, not
necessarily widespread democratic elections, but something from
their past experiences?
Ms. Dugan. Sort of the importation of that experience. I
have no evidence to suggest it, but ultimately it occurs to
me--it is an interesting question--it may be too early to
really have a sense of how that will work.
But, again, it speaks to the habit of voting, the
understanding that this is how we choose our leaders. To find
themselves in an environment in which they no longer have
control over that, it may supply some impetus for an
acceleration of that upward movement.
Ms. Goedke. Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Holly Vineyard with the Commerce Department.
Ms. Vineyard. Thank you.
Several of you have mentioned the connection between
village elections and economic prosperity. I was wondering if
you could draw out that link a little more.
Is one driving the other? I would be very interested in
that, as well. I am very curious about the comment that the WTO
has become an issue in local elections. Any additional comments
you have on that would be welcome.
Mr. Liu. In terms of the WTO, the village that we observed
happened to have some vegetable gardens that exported
vegetables to Japan and other countries. That is why it became
an issue.
In terms of whether the economy is driving the elections or
the elections are driving the economy, I think Amy wrote an
article a long time before about the impact of economic
development. It is not very clear. I do not think there is
sufficient data proving that one way or the other.
In provinces like Guangdong where they are economically
very developed, they were very late in adopting village
committee elections. Once they adopted it, it went very far.
Now the government, the Party, is coming down on the elections
in Guangdong, so it is becoming more and more backward. So, the
relationship is not very clear.
But one thing that is clear, is that in areas that are
economically well-developed, there are always funds available
to conduct elections. This is becoming a growing issue, where
the funds are going to come from to conduct these elections,
particularly the township and county elections.
In poorer areas, they do not even have the funds to conduct
elections. In Fujian and Guangdong, there are always available
funds to conduct these elections. It is a huge, costly business
to run elections. The joke is, every time you have a round of
elections you will be able to build several highways throughout
China.
Ms. Thurston. Can I add to that? I think the theory that
says that political democratization goes hand in hand with
economic prosperity also suggests that the standard of living,
the annual yearly income, needs to be much, much higher than it
is in China today before you really begin to see this
correlation. I think that is probably one of the reasons we may
not be seeing the correlation at the village level.
But I would also say, in my own experience--and I think
there is other research being done now by other academics in
the China field--there may be some correlation between the
nature of ownership in the village and the types of elections
they have.
I think one of the dangers, is that in some areas of China
there is a concentration of ownership at the village level in a
very few hands. That is also an opportunity for the sort of
corruption of elections at the village level.
I mentioned that I have seen elections where the local
emperor gets elected, and that is often because he has access
to a lot of resources that he can use then to work in the
peasants' self-interests, which is more money, where they can
actually distribute the profits from some of these collective
enterprises to their own political benefit, and that is a
danger.
Ms. Dugan. I might just add, briefly, my experience in
observing elections in the villages of China is that the kinds
of issues that the candidates talk about, sometimes in a very
articulate fashion, sometimes maybe not so sophisticatedly, but
they tend to be the same kinds of things. The roads, of course.
Always, the roads. Clean water supply. Schools.
It occurs to me that it is so very similar to those very
local elections that we know here in the United States, and
that the issues are rooted in exactly the same things that
people living in small towns here in the United States care
about, too.
Ms. Vineyard. Interesting. Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Mr. Foarde. I will remark while we are talking about this,
that this means that Tip O'Neill was not wrong when he said
that, ``All politics is local,'' and the corollary to that was,
``All local politics is public works.''
Ms. Thurston. That is true. Roads.
Mr. Wolf. Chris Billing.
Mr. Billing. I was wondering if any of you have any good
anecdotes that would help us get a sense of what it is like on
the scene during these elections. What are the people saying?
Are they all wearing tattered suits and coming in horse-drawn
carriages, and that sort of thing? Maybe, Anne, you could
start, but I would love to hear from all of you.
Ms. Thurston. Oh, I love anecdotes. Well, actually, the
visual setting of these elections looks different in different
parts of the country. In some parts of the country, the village
elections take place in a schoolyard. All of the villagers
arrive long before the foreigners get there.
You get there, and they are all lined up in their chairs
that they have brought from home. You see a variety of
clothing. The elderly people are generally wearing the
tattered, old, blue uniforms that they have worn for probably
centuries, and the younger people are dressed very brightly and
colorfully. It also is a very festive sort of occasion. I love
the visual impact of these elections.
Again, it does look different in other places, because in
some places there are literally polling stations. They are open
from early in the morning until sometime in the afternoon, and
people come one by one, or small group by small group over the
course of the day to vote. That looks very different.
The one anecdote that sticks in my mind, which is also an
anecdote that suggests what tremendous power some of these
higher-level units have--and I am not sure it is even
appropriate to tell it here--but I think I was with IRI, and I
think maybe Amy and Liz were there. I cannot quite remember.
But we were at an election where the election was being held
outdoors in a schoolyard.
The word that the foreigners were coming to observe the
election had gone out long before we got there. People from
villages around wanted to come and observe the foreigners
observing the elections, but there was a sort of perimeter
beyond which the villagers from other villages could not enter.
But, as the elections went on, and on, and on, these villagers
from other villages got closer, and closer, and closer.
And as they got too close, one of the upper-level officials
just turned around and he went like that [gesturing] to these
people who were coming closer and closer, and they all started
moving away. That, to me, was a little bit frightening in terms
of how much power these people still have just with the wave of
their hand.
Ms. Dugan. I would like to tell a story of when I had an
opportunity to participate in some of the training that we do
for newly elected village chairmen. There was an election I
observed in Shanxi Province.
Some 410 voters in this particular village participated in
the election this day, and it was what they call a ``sea
election.'' We would think of it as a primary, the first step
in voters actually determining who the candidates will be that
appear on the general election ballot. I had never seen one of
these elections before.
Now, the villagers all gathered in this election meeting
schoolyard setting, as Anne described. And, theoretically
speaking, each of the 410 villagers could have nominated
themselves on the piece of paper they were given for the
position of chairman, for example, and you would have 410
different nominees that were put forth.
But, of course, it does not really end up working that way,
because there are natural leaders that emerge in a village and
people know kind of who they would turn to to trust and to keep
their confidence. So, the results came and 273 ballots were
cast for candidate X, and 219 for candidate Y.
We presume, of course, that one of these two is the
currently seated chairman. In fact, no, the incumbent
candidate, who also was the Party branch secretary in this
particular village, had received 9 votes, which I think was a
pretty clear message from the voters in that particular village
on that particular day.
I cut my friend Yawei off here from telling his own story,
but maybe there will be another question of the same nature. At
any rate, I would like to express that story of two village
chairmen who have just come into their own new seat and need to
understand that if they want to be reelected and serve the
village on a more continuous basis, that the voters do have the
power to send a very clear message.
Mr. Wolf. We will give you a minute, Yawei, for an
anecdote.
Mr. Liu. All right. Thanks.
A very quick one. This last election we observed in
Shandong, where they talked about the WTO, the incumbent lost
the election and the Party secretary was elected. So, Chuck
Costello insisted on talking with the two candidates who lost
the election and who won the election.
The incumbent basically said, ``I was less capable.'' I
think what he did not dare to say, is really the government
supports the Party secretary to be elected. So, therefore, he
was not even in the running for that position.
But the winning person, the Party secretary, when asked why
he was able to beat the other guy, said, ``Because I understand
the marketplace better than the other guy.'' So, you see that
economics are in play.
A second anecdote which is very interesting, is when we did
the training in Ningxia last year, the MCA sent observers which
worked with IRI a lot. He went there and told them, your
nomination process is totally screwed up. It is going to create
problems.
The township Party secretary said, ``You city dwellers, you
do not know anything about what is going on over here. I
promise, this election is going to be smooth. There are not
going to be any problems.'' But, by the end of the day, no
candidate won enough to be elected. The voters just exploded.
One of the voters went up to the platform and grabbed the
microphone and said, the whole process was fraudulent. They
were almost on the verge of having a fist fight in a
schoolyard, because they could easily get the chairs and start
beating on each other.
Interestingly, all the provincial officials disappeared
from the scene. So, the MCA, the Party secretary, and the
township had an emergency meeting and then declared, these are
my cell numbers, fax numbers, home numbers: please report to me
in the next 3 days what went wrong. That calmed the situation.
This was last year in Ningxia.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. Amy Gadsden.
Ms. Gadsden. I have a bunch of questions, and you can feel
free to answer any of them.
Liz, you mentioned in your anecdote, and one of the things
you pointed out, was that governance is as important or more
important than the elections themselves. I was wondering if any
of the panelists would comment on the impact of elections on
governance at the village level.
The second question I have has to do with the relationship
between the village committee and the Party committee. One of
the things that the election process has done is revealed a lot
of the problems between those two committees and the unclear
delineations of power or authority between those two branches
of government at the village level, and how some of those
problems are coming to the surface now as elections have taken
hold.
A third, related question--again, feel free to answer any
or all of these--is how have elections changed political
discourse in China more generally, not necessarily with regard
to villages and village governance, but in terms of how the
Chinese themselves are looking at politics and political
change.
I think one of the things that we have done as foreigners
observing elections is sort of filter it through a lens of,
``what does this mean for political reform? ''
Would you talk about whether the Chinese themselves filter
their experience with elections through this same lens or
whether they see elections as part of another phenomenon, or
lack of phenomenon, for that matter?
Ms. Thurston. Actually, I want to answer one of these
questions. Of course, you could answer all these questions,
too, Amy.
I think that one of the things that we as NGOs do not
really know, because most NGOs come in, observe elections, and
do not usually stay afterward to see what happens.
I think a next step, a next very important and certainly
very interesting step, would be to return to villages where we
have observed elections, and then see what happens to
governance. We are working on a very nice presumption that
somehow governance gets better with elections, but I do not
think we know that for sure. I think it would be very nice to
start trying to learn that. I think that there are academics
now who are beginning to try to investigate that.
Ms. Dugan. I will pick up on the bead and echo clearly what
Anne says, that there is a lot that happens that we maybe guess
at, we do not know empirically.
Amy, you will remember that we actually did have a chance
to go back and visit a village committee that had been elected
in Heqing County in Yunnan, where we had actually observed the
election and gone back and had a chance to speak with them.
They were also new to that process. It was hard to get any
real depth of either, yes, this is what we have learned and
here is how we are taking it, applying it, and really we have
made a lot of progress, or we do not have any idea what we are
doing and we are really just foundering here.
It was kind of a difficult interview, so it is hard to get
this kind of data, no question about it. But I do think it is
an important thing to try to get at. The training that we do
for governance, we try to make it as broad-based and moving out
to all the counties as we possibly can so that at least people
have some rudimentary tools they can use.
Mr. Liu. I will address the second question, which is the
relationship between the Party branch and the village
committee, which has a lot to do with governance.
You could have perfect elections, but who has the power?
Who controls the purse, is the ultimate issue in all
villages.
Now it is the growing contention and conflict between the
popularly elected villager and the non-popularly elected Party
secretary that are going against each other.
It is this very issue that is pushing village committee
elections to the verge of being reversed, because you have the
Organic Law, which says the villager assembly has the ultimate
power in making decisions, and then you have people working for
the grassroots Party organizations which say that the Party
branch controls all decisionmaking processes in China.
So you have a national law against the Party's internal
working measures. No one dares to say that the Party's working
measures are less important than the national laws. This is an
inherent problem that has to be dealt with down the road.
In terms of political discourse, just one thing. I think
there is a growing envy on the part of the urban dwellers, that
our peasant brothers and sisters are directly electing their
immediate leaders. What about us? We are being left behind. Are
we going through another cycle of the countryside encircling
the urban centers? So, they felt they were left behind.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. Matt Tuchow.
Mr. Tuchow. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China
is charged with developing an annual report, and in that
report, making recommendations to Congress and to the President
on how to go about promoting rule of law, including
democratization in China. I am wondering if you have some
recommendations for us on what those recommendations in the
report should look like.
Ms. Dugan. Is it for all of us?
Mr. Tuchow. For all of you, yes.
Ms. Dugan. Well, let me start here. The answer is, yes,
please recommend that we are as fully funded as we can be. What
I would love to have the opportunity to do, is to respond to
you in a more comprehensive fashion after I have given it some
very serious thought.
What occurs to me, based on IRI's longstanding experience
in China in trying to work with reformers there, is that the
road left ahead is a long one and there are boulders in it, but
there are many ways to maneuver around those boulders and there
are many, many opportunities to not only accelerate the kind of
program that we have begun and that Carter Center has been
involved in, that NDI does, and the other NGOs, and Ford
Foundation, not only accelerate it, but expand it. To be honest
with you, the only thing that holds us back is the dollar
signs.
Ms. Thurston. I would certainly echo that. One thing I
would say, and it is very trite to say, but there are 1.3
billion people in China. There are 930,000 villages. There are
900 million people in the Chinese countryside. What we are
doing right now is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket.
It is a huge country with lots of people, lots of problems,
and lots of opportunities for cooperation. Yes, it takes money.
It would certainly take a lot more people here on the American
side, too, to cooperate at a broader level. But the opportunity
is certainly there.
Mr. Liu. Yes. I think the report has to acknowledge that
there are meaningful village committee elections in China and
that these elections should be supported.
Members of the Administration, Members of Congress, and
their aides, each time they go to China, need to raise this
issue. They need to say, we want to know more about these
elections, just to raise the profile of this issue.
Instead of criticizing that you do not have human rights,
why do you not just go ahead and say, we heard you have
elections. Could we talk a little bit more about these
elections? Could we observe these elections?
I think the Chinese saying is, ``It is easier for the
foreign monks to burn incense.'' The Chinese officials can talk
about this, but they will not get the necessary attention. But
once a visiting American Congressman or Senator raises this
issue, then this is an issue that the leadership is going to
look at.
In terms of funding, I have already said it. I think the
Carter Center's experience is that we are extremely short-
funded. We have to beg United States and European corporations
to give us funds.
Most of these corporations say, what you are doing is very
risky. We do not want to be portrayed as an organized company
that is getting involved in providing funds for political
activities. So, it is pretty hard for us, but we are determined
that we are going to continue our work there.
Mr. Tuchow. I think I speak on behalf of Ira and John in
saying that if you do have further thoughts on recommendations,
we would welcome them.
Mr. Wolf. Absolutely. We would certainly appreciate any
material you want to provide to supplement your presentation.
Are women candidates emerging in village elections, or is
this mainly a male activity?
Ms. Dugan. Let me give you the good news. Invariably, we
see women candidates emerge for perhaps one of the member
positions. Usually there is a chairman, a vice chairman, and
some number of members. It is not unusual to see women emerge
as candidates for member, or sometimes vice chairman, not as
often for chairman.
But in these two urban election committees, the elections
that I had a chance to view in May, in the first election the
incumbent was a male challenged by a female. He won reelection.
In the second election, two females. The older one won.
They were both highly articulate. They were both very well
experienced, very impressive presentations to the voter
population who had assembled.
It was very compelling to me to see that they were the two
candidates that the resident representative assembly had put
forth in this one particular urban community of some 2,000
voters.
Mr. Wolf. I know you have not observed hundreds of
thousands of villages, but as an off-the-cuff estimate, are 99
percent plus of the candidates males?
Mr. Liu. That is correct. I think less than one percent of
the village committee chairs are women. But in most cases,
there is a woman member on the village committee. That woman is
usually the chairman of the women's federation in that village.
But in Shandong Province, what we saw is there are no women who
came out to run.
In Hunan, the provincial measure stipulated that the
village committee will have to have one woman member, otherwise
they will just keep voting until they get one elected. So, the
provincial stipulations are different.
In some places there are people saying, we have got to have
one woman member. In other places, they just do not give any
attention to this. But, overall, the women are drastically
under-represented at the village committee level.
Mr. Wolf. Can I get some examples of the most seriously
fraudulent problems you have observed in the elections?
Ms. Dugan. In my experience, fraud is not the issue. You do
not see purposeful fraud committed, you see incompetencies,
people who are the election workers, but they do not understand
why a certain thing needs to happen or how it needs to happen.
Again, let me go back to my experience in Guangxi with these
urban elections.
Mr. Wolf. I would rather stick to the village elections,
please. If it is not fraud, do you observe cases of heavy-
handedness, corruption, fixed elections, pressure from the
establishment--all the kinds of things that election observers
are supposed to be observing? Did you see any of this or does
none of this exist in the villages that you have observed?
Mr. Liu. We have seen township officials onsite giving,
sometimes, subtle or naked messages to the voters. For example,
in 2000, in one place where we observed the election, the
township minister was saying, to elect the Party secretary as
the chair will actually save you money because you are
combining the two positions together and it is going to reduce
your burden. That is, of course, a veiled attempt to manipulate
the voters' decisionmaking process.
Others that we do not have opportunity to observe but we
have read and heard of, are making empty promises during the
campaign speeches or when they were making the tours inside of
the village, such as, if I am elected I am going to help you
reduce the fees you are going to pay to the government.
But a growing number of people are talking about vote
buying, that is, making actual cash payment, or taking people
to dinner, and some other offerings such as packs of
cigarettes, and those things. The MCA's approach to this is, if
there is vote buying, that is an indication of competition. It
is better than no competition.
But the law itself is insufficient in terms of defining
what can be characterized as vote buying, because there are no
clear definitions as to what can be considered as vote buying.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. John.
Mr. Foarde. I think sometimes we say the words ``observe
elections'' or ``monitor elections,'' but do not really
understand what we are talking about.
Could you, for the record, give us a sense of what specific
activities you do when you are out in the field as either
monitors or observers, if there is any difference?
Ms. Dugan. Certainly. When we first arrive at, usually, the
county level--or let me start at the provincial capital. We
meet with the provincial Bureau of Civil Affairs, who are
involved with local governance issues, and usually have a
relatively thorough briefing from them about the nature and
history of elections in that particular province.
At the county level, sometimes township, we have a chance
for a more in-depth briefing about the particular elections
that we will have a chance to see and what is happening in
those particular villages, and some of the very raw data
regarding them.
We try to have as full an understanding before we actually
go to the election site of what is the economic base, what
issues are driving this particular election, what do the voters
in this particular village care about, so you have got a kind
of foundation to stand on.
The process itself of observing the elections, as Anne has
already started to describe, usually they are at a schoolyard.
It is a meeting. It begins at 9 o'clock in the morning.
There is a great sense of rite, of ceremony regarding these
elections, a very ordered presentation of steps that are taken,
with great ceremony in demonstrating that the ballot box is
empty, and in the passing out of ballots, in the summoning of
voters.
Then, in a way that is unique and also helps to ensure that
there is a transparency in the process, most of the time after
the ballots have been cast the counting and the marking of
ballots under each candidates' name is done in the same public
area, and the voters remain and they watch that process.
Then there is the announcement of the results, and what we
might call ``peaceful transition of power'' so the new village
committee is presented with their certificates then and there.
That usually is the sum total of the observation process
itself. Again, we are missing a step, and that is what happens
next.
Ms. Thurston. And also what happens before the primary, the
selection of candidates, which we do see sometimes.
Mr. Liu. Yes. One of the things we try to do is to find out
exactly what happened before the election, the nomination
process. We want to see the records. We want to see how many
candidates were nominated by the villagers and how they were
reduced to the official roster of candidates. So, that is one
thing we try to find out.
On the election day, of course, in all elections, foreign
organizations get to observe. There is a certain level of pre-
election preparation for the Westerners to come. There will be
officials visiting right before us to make sure that the
setting is good, that the villagers are all going to come out.
Occasionally there will be a cash payout to the voters, or
at least a bottle of water, instant noodles, those kinds of
things, to get them to come over.
Two other things we observe on the election day will be the
number of proxies, and also how the roving ballot boxes are
used, particularly at elections at higher levels. The abuse of
proxies and the use of the so-called roving ballot boxes are
just intolerable. That reduces the quality of the elections.
It basically makes the election a charade when you just
allow one person to carry nine votes or more without checking
the voter IDs or authorization. When you get a roving ballot
box to households, there is no integrity to that voting process
at all. So, these are the two issues we try to find out each
time we go there.
Ms. Thurston. This also sort of touches on--I did not get
to respond to Ira's question--the issue of fraud. I think the
fact is that the presence of foreign observers has a
significant impact on how the election works and impact to the
good. I mean, people are very, very careful and very attentive
to make sure that all the rules are being followed as they are
watching.
Mr. Wolf. Holly.
Ms. Vineyard. Thanks.
How do you measure the effectiveness of what you are doing?
Maybe this is related, but have you seen any signs, in the
areas that do not have local elections might be clamoring to
have them?
Mr. Liu. By law, all of the villages--I think as of now the
number is reduced to 730,000; a lot of the villages merged--all
have to have elections. If there are no elections, that is
illegal and the villagers can report it. Of course, there are
areas where there were no elections being held because the
local officials were opposed to it. But they have to have it.
The MCA and the local Department of Civil Affairs can go down
there.
But the problem is that the law itself does not have any
muscle. That is, if a village does not carry elections and this
is a problem of the township officials, there is no way for the
Ministry of Civil Affairs or the local Department of Civil
Affairs to deal with it. In the law, there is no measure or
penalty and the court will not take up any suits filed by the
peasants.
So now it is very clear to the MCA scholars that the law
will have to be revised to make it useful and applicable, so
when the violations do occur the perpetrators can be punished,
as required by the law.
Ms. Dugan. The first question you asked is the bane of my
existence: how to measure whether what we are doing is making a
difference, what kind of impact does it have, because it is
very hard to come up with empirical data to support it. There
is no profit and loss statement at the end of the month to let
us know whether things are working. The anecdotal evidence is
what propels us.
To a certain degree, our experience in Fujian also was
buoying, because recommendations that we had made from our
first observation took root. They were put in force. We got to
go back and see, 3 years later, that they took that seriously.
They took it to heart and they made it part of the body of
regulations that they use now in Fujian province. So things
like that, perhaps, give you some sense of being able to
measure the effectiveness of what it is we do, but it is a
very, very difficult thing. I thank you for the question.
Mr. Liu. I want to add to what Liz just said on the Fujian
model. Before, elections in Fujian were always held in a
schoolyard and people would have to come. But then the
officials were invited by the IRI and other U.S. agencies to
observe U.S. elections, and then they adopted the polling
station method.
That is, it will be open at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning
and it will close at 5 o'clock, which is being applied to all
models. I mean, that is one thing they have learned through
this interaction between U.S. involvement and the officials
over there.
Also, the unlimited access. The IRI, the Carter Center, the
Ford Foundation being able to see the elections, to participate
in internal discussions, the meetings, I think is another
measurement of the success, and also the way they take our
recommendations very seriously.
In the revision of the law, they did take into
consideration all the recommendations by the foreign observers.
I think these are all, again, anecdotal reflections of the
success that United States agencies have had in China.
Ms. Thurston. Can I just add, you mentioned places that do
not have elections. Yawei is saying that now, mandated by law,
every village is supposed to have elections.
I do not very often get the opportunity to go down to
villages without somebody from the Ministry of Civil Affairs or
a provincial level Ministry of Civil Affairs office taking me
there, but I have on a number of occasions been able to be
taken down to villages by Chinese friends.
I have to say that in those few cases that I have had that
opportunity, I have gone to villages that did not seem to have
village elections. Sometimes there were just too many
contradictions, it was too complicated, we could not do it, so
the Party secretary is serving also as the head of the village
committee.
The other sense I have gotten, which I think that you do
not get when you go down to look at village elections, is the
strength of informal leadership at the village level.
The people that we are seeing being elected are, as I have
said, generally young, they are entrepreneurial, they are go-
getters. But I have been struck, in the villages I have been to
with friends, of how much respect the older members of the
village get.
In two cases I am thinking of, both of those older people
had also been head of the collective during the time that the
village was a production brigade. So, there is a lot of
informal leadership that takes place at the village level too
that we really do not have the opportunity to see.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. Chris.
Mr. Billing. One school of thought says that the Chinese
Government allows these elections in order to give the peasants
an opportunity to let off some steam and perhaps to avoid
social unrest that way.
Do you think there is a viable threat of that in the
Chinese countryside, and are the elections successful in
appeasing the peasants? Perhaps, Yawei, you could start.
Mr. Liu. Yes. I think it certainly has played a role of
releasing the peasants' anger and frustration to a certain
extent, because you are sort of giving them an opportunity to
vent their anger by either electing a new leader or recalling
the leader that is incompetent or corrupt.
But, again, I do not think this is going to solve all of
the problems. The government does work very hard to prevent the
farmers from forming any cross-border or cross-region
organizations.
One of the things I said that the scholars have been
talking about, is that despite the nature of these elections,
no matter how direct they are, the people who are elected are
ultimately servants to the government because the township
government is using them to serve the purpose of family
planning, raising revenue, taxes, and all that.
So what the scholars are suggesting is that we need to have
farmers' alliances, making them truly independent, making them
able to bargain with the government. This is something the
village committee elections and the elected village committee
members cannot accomplish.
Ms. Thurston. I think that is a really good question. In
terms of my own personal observation of the Chinese
countryside, one of the things that distresses me right now is
that there is a sort of disconnect between what we are hearing
now about the increased level of violence and protest in the
Chinese countryside and going down to observe village
elections.
I mean, you are not observing violence and protest in the
countryside when you observe village elections. Since we do not
have figures and numbers, it is very hard to know where the
balance lies and how significant and important that protest may
be. So, that is another plea for more research in the Chinese
countryside.
The one case that the Ministry of Civil Affairs used to use
a number of years ago was the incidence of protests in Renshou
County in Sichuan. The argument of people at the Ministry of
Civil Affairs was that the people from Renshou County who had
gotten together to protest had not participated in village
elections and they were being taxed without their permission.
But when they tried to go next door to the counties on
their outskirts and solicit participation in their protests by
people from those counties, they were refused because people in
those counties had held village elections and they were voting
their own taxes.
So, this is a case that used to be used many years ago by
the Ministry of Civil Affairs to suggest that participation in
village elections would mediate against violence and protests.
Mr. Wolf. Amy.
Ms. Gadsden. No questions.
Mr. Wolf. Matt.
Mr. Tuchow. I wanted to come back to the ultimate question,
which I think Anne Thurston raised in her remarks earlier. That
is, how do you believe China should move to a more democratic
and open society without creating uncontrollable chaos and
unrest?
Ms. Thurston. Well, that is a book. That is a big, huge
question. I think the first answer is that we have been
addressing here very specifically questions of village
elections, but China has a tremendous set of problems, sort of
grassroots level problems, that it has to face and it has to
overcome in the next 5 to 10 years.
I think that a lot of the protests, a lot of the unrest
that we are seeing in China today is a result of the fact that
the government has not been able to solve some of these
problems, and the problems are problems of unemployment, or
unemployment in the cities, surplus labor in the countryside,
growing inequality between urban areas and rural areas, between
the coast and inland areas, this transition that the country is
going through in terms of going from state-owned enterprises
into private and joint venture companies. But there are just a
whole lot of very upsetting, destabilizing things taking place
in China right now.
I also have to say that, much as I would like China to move
more quickly in a more democratic direction, the more time I
spend there and the more time I see the extent of their
problems, and again just the vastness of the number of people
in that country, the more I think that China really does have
to go very carefully, step by step.
So my bottom line would still come back to, somehow you
need this gradual merger or this gradual sort of coming
together of the top and the bottom. Yawei mentioned that you
cannot take this away from people at the grassroots level now,
but you still, in the end, are going to need the cooperation,
the initiative, and the leadership from the people at the top
in order to begin moving these elections upward.
But I think that that is what ultimately has to take place:
You gradually do have to begin to move these upward to the
township, to the county, to the province, and hopefully to the
national level.
Mr. Liu. I think this often raises the issue that if we go
democratic, then the country is going to be turned upside down.
It would be chaotic. It will be running amok. It is a myth that
we all have to debunk.
That is, if we are going to introduce universally accepted
democratic measures, then China is going to go chaotic because
our people are not very well educated, they do not know how to
choose.
I think that is a very elitist view from top down in China
to a lot of the urban dwellers, saying the Chinese peasants are
not very civilized. You give them 5 bucks, they are going to
vote for any person you tell them to vote for.
I think the MCA officials have a very clear view on this,
that it does not matter how less well-educated these peasants
are, they know where their interests are and they know how to
cast a ballot. If they are given the opportunity to cast an
unfettered and free ballot, they will be able to make their
choice in a very wise way.
Ms. Dugan. Yawei is 100 percent correct in that, that
though they may not be highly educated, they know what is in
their hearts, they know what it is that they want. This process
that we have all had the privilege to observe is one that does
not produce immediate results. As I mentioned before, it is not
for the impatient. So, it will take a long time.
I think Anne is correct. I think in some conversations that
I have had with the Chinese you are left a very distinct
impression that they are highly concerned about not following
the Russia model, and to steer clear of that, of moving too
fast in one specific direction. That is to say, as they move
forward it will be incremental, it will be slow.
Mr. Tuchow. Do the peasants see this as in any way related
to Western democracy or the West, or do they just see this in
the small confines of their village?
Ms. Thurston. I think if you use the word ``democracy,''
they see that as related to the West and they see it related to
the United States. For all of the sort of anti-American
sentiment that you see or you hear about in China today,
certainly there is also a lot of very pro-American sentiment as
well, both in terms of our economy and in terms of our
politics.
I would, by the way, like to echo this. I have to say that
some of the people in China who I admire the most are people
down there in the countryside who have overcome difficulties
the likes of which you and I could not even imagine. I mean,
families starving to death.
They are always one step ahead of what the government will
allow. Despite the fact that they are not educated, they have
just done remarkable things for themselves and their families.
I think that they do not, by any means, get enough credit from
people in China's urban areas who do tend to look down on them.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Given the powerful role of the Chinese Communist Party, its
political and economic strength, constitutional power, why
would one expect that grassroots activities such as helping
promote village elections, occupational safety and health
training in individual factories, legal clinics in a few
locations, or trying to teach women what their rights are under
Chinese law, would have a measurable impact on the political
dynamics and the political and social structure of the nation?
Ms. Thurston. That is a good question. I would have to
think about it. One answer, and I think I said it in at least
part of my written piece, is that it seems to be that, in the
long term, what these village elections are doing is putting in
place the structure by which elections could be held at higher
levels.
I mean, so long as the process of expanding and improving
upon village elections continues, when the time comes and you
do begin to see them move upward, all of the technical details
have sort of already been ironed out, the structure is in
place. So, in that sense it is good preparation.
Mr. Liu. I think all of these things, though they are
minor, if you consider the population and how big China is,
cumulatively, I think they have a huge impact on the future
transformation of China.
Another anecdote over here, is we invited the Ministry of
Civil Affairs officials to observe the U.S. Presidential
elections in 2000. In other circles, people were talking about
it being a joke, but the officials that we invited were saying,
we do not see it as a joke. We see the supremacy of the law. It
is an election that comes out by the court.
I mean, all these people, when they were in Atlanta, they
were watching TV until 2 o'clock in the morning. They keep
talking about how these issues are being resolved. That is, you
have to obey the law. It does not matter whether you are
president or vice president, it is not going to make a
difference in the court. Everyone is equal.
It is these visits, these trainings we do in China. We have
trained 300, IRI probably trained more. These are the trainers.
They go down, they train others. It is mushrooming. It is a
chain reaction. I think, overall, the impact can never be
exaggerated.
Ms. Dugan. Well, I concur. It is a difficult question. But
I think of it a little bit like squeezing toothpaste out of a
tube, and there is no really easy way to put it back in once it
is out there.
To the extent that, again, there is just this engendering
of empowerment that takes place and people get used to it, and
they have a general understanding that this is their right,
this is due them, to be able to select their own leaders and
participate in this process, it is not without its own value.
Mr. Wolf. Well, if, in the coming couple of weeks you think
about this or could refer us to some people who have, in a
fairly rigorous way, addressed this issue, please let us know.
I think it is important that we on the staff be able to
explain to our Commissioners who, rightfully, are looking at
the use of Federal funds going into grassroots activities in
China in the future with some skepticism, why this is money
well spent.
The question is, how to get a rigorous analysis of the
impact of these programs on our broader goals?
John.
Mr. Foarde. No questions.
Mr. Wolf. Holly.
Ms. Vineyard. Following up on Ira's point there, I am
wondering, would it be a useful exercise to have some of the
Commissioners who sit on this Commission go to China to observe
a local election? Would that be, do you think, helpful for them
to understand the process or would it get in the way? Would it
be helpful in having a brighter spotlight shining on the good
works that you are doing?
Ms. Dugan. I think it would be a very useful exercise for a
number of reasons, not the least of which is, in my experience,
people who do not spend time in China receive most of their
information about what is happening in China straight through
Beijing.
The usefulness of being able to be out in the middle of
nowhere in China to observe this process just brings you a
little bit closer to real information. So, I would
wholeheartedly support such an effort, and we would be
delighted to try to help make the arrangements for it.
Mr. Liu. I would echo Liz, that it would be extremely
useful if there is time and opportunity for Commissioners to go
to China to see the elections. I think it can be done.
Also, when the Chinese officials come, either invited by
the IRI or the Carter Center, I hope there will be meetings
between the Commissioners and the MCA officials, or even
between the officials and the aides over here.
We are going to bring a group at the end of October, early
November to see the mid-term elections over here. That would be
a great opportunity for you guys to look at these officials who
are trying so hard to implement this grassroots democracy.
Ms. Thurston. I would obviously echo that. China, I think,
in general is a country that really has to be seen and
experienced in order for us even to begin to understand it. I
think the same is true of village elections.
I mean, my suspicion is that very few people can even
conceive of what a Chinese village looks like or how it is
organized, and very few of us in the United States could. I
just think the importance of being there, observing, feeling,
and seeing what it is like would be very important to anybody
who is interested in this issue.
Ms. Vineyard. Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. Chris.
Mr. Billing. Yawei, you mentioned Buyun in your testimony.
What do we know now about what happened there, and what can we
learn from Buyun County in Sichuan Province?
Mr. Liu. In the Buyun case, of course, there was a direct
election of a township magistrate in December 1998. Thereafter,
it was declared as being unconstitutional. Then there was
endorsement by a legal daily in China saying this is the
Xiaogong Village of political reform. Xiaogong Village is the
village in Anhui Province that divided the land among the
peasants themselves in 1979 and started the household
responsibility system.
The last day of 2001, the Buyun township had another
``direct election'' of a magistrate. This is despite the Party
circular banning such activities. But they became a little bit
more creative this time.
Instead of having the voters directly electing the
magistrate, they were asking the voters to nominate one
candidate to be submitted to the township People's Congress.
So, therefore, it is a quasi-direct election because the voters
directly elect only one candidate to that position.
This person who was elected last time got reelected, but
with a very small margin. The challenger almost beat him,
although he said he was going to win this hands-down. He was
going to win 75 percent of the vote. Instead, he only won 51
percent of the votes, a clear indication of competition and a
clear indication that the voters thought he himself used his
position to maximize his influence and tried to get the voters
to cast his ballot. So, there is a reaction to his efforts.
There probably will be more cases in China in the near
future to model their elections after Buyun. We are still
holding our breaths to see if that is going to spread.
Mr. Tuchow. Is the central government actually trying to
stop that from happening?
Mr. Liu. There is no clear warning from the central
government, other than the circular issued July 2001, saying
that all indirect elections are going to be strictly in
accordance with the Constitution and the organic law of local
governments.
So, basically they stopped it in the name of the law. But
local officials are still challenging this, although in a very
creative and original way, without jeopardizing their career.
Mr. Wolf. Matt.
Mr. Tuchow. I am wondering if you could just say a word or
two more about urban elections, and particularly the unique
challenges that they create. I imagine, if it is one work unit
and not another, that may create some competition, animosity,
or jealousy among one another. I am wondering if you have
observed unique issues relating to urban elections.
Ms. Dugan. Thank you for the opportunity. It is a very new
thing and it is being done very differently in a lot of
different places. In Liuzhou, where we had a chance to observe,
one of the elections had many different work units represented
in the voting constituency, in another one, only one.
The interesting thing to my mind about these urban
elections is that, though the voting populations are much
larger, 2,000 in one of these cases, 4,000 in another, these
are, as a general rule, much larger than you would find in a
rural village election. But you are also dealing with a much
more concentrated geographical area.
As a result of these two variables, one thing that occurs
to me--which is anathema to Chinese in our experience--is that
campaigning, telling voters what it is that you intend to do
for them and letting them understand how to make their choice
on election day, becomes much more important. In a village of
300 or 400 people, all right, I will give it to you, those
villagers know who the candidates are. They know what they
stand for. This is like just one big neighborhood.
In these residence committees, or what they represent, you
are talking about more people that are not going to know every
candidate. It becomes impossible for a candidate to be known by
that many people without taking the effort to reach them
somehow. So, that becomes a very important element.
I think that no longer does the sense of having an election
meeting actually work in the villages for everybody to come and
congregate, and there is a place for them to sit, there is
enough room for them. You cannot do that with the urban areas.
There is not a place large enough to hold the entire voting
population.
So, polling stations become another sort of important
element that needs to be included as they begin to put down
these regulations that will guide the fashion in which these
elections are administered. Those are a couple of things I
might offer.
Mr. Tuchow. Have some of these urban elections taken place
in the biggest cities, like Shanghai and Beijing?
Ms. Dugan. They have, but not in the same way that they are
being experimented with in places like Shenyang, which I speak
about in my more formal presentation, and in Qingdao. Guangxi
is the first province to really take it on as, we are going to
do this province-wide. But I do not answer your question. I
apologize.
In Beijing, they do have, in a fashion, an election for
these neighborhood committees, but it is not a direct election
as we have come to know it. It is certainly not being mirrored
in these exercises, this experimentation that is taking place.
Would you agree, Yawei?
Mr. Liu. Yes. The Ministry of Civil Affairs is also in
charge of urban elections and they are about to revise the law,
called the Organic Law of Urban Residence Committees.
I think the officials in Beijing and officials in provinces
are divided on what is going to be the focus of this law that
is going to be revised, whether it is going to focus more on
electoral procedures or it is going to focus more on service to
be delivered to these urban residence committees.
The voters are different, as Liz mentioned earlier. They
all belong to a work unit, but at the same time, they have to
return home. All their services used to be provided by the work
unit, so they do not have this tie with this urban committee.
So the officials, I think, argue very heatedly as to the
core of this law that is going to be revised, whether the focus
is going to be on elections or trying to organize these
committees in such a way that services to women, to old people,
to children, to the sanitation issues can be delivered as soon
as possible and in a money-saving way.
Ms. Thurston. May I add? I stopped by a year ago just sort
of unannounced to a residence committee in Beijing and talked
with a woman there, and she actually was a laid-off worker. She
was in her early 40s. She had lost her job. She was then being
trained by the City of Beijing in a sort of service capacity.
After that, she expected to be elected to this position. So, it
is an evolving thing, obviously.
But at least my experience in Beijing was that there are a
lot of new issues being faced by these neighborhoods and that
some of these committees are being set up to serve people as
they face some of their problems.
Mr. Wolf. Well, we have had you here for 2 hours. We
appreciate you giving us your time and your insights. I think
all of us learned a lot. And it is useful for our Commissioners
as they put together their annual report. So, thank you all.
[Whereupon, at 4:32 p.m. the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Anne F. Thurston
july 8, 2002
I want to thank my friends and colleagues on the staff of the
Congressional-Executive China Commission for the opportunity to be here
today and to share with you some of my experiences with village
elections in China.
I have been observing village elections in China since 1994 and
have both spoken and written about my observations over the years.\1\
Since my two fellow panelists and colleagues, Elizabeth Dugan and Liu
Yawei, each direct active, on-the-ground programs related to village
elections in China, I think my contribution to today's hearing can best
be made by providing some historical background to how village
elections came into being, by giving a very broad overview about what
we know about how successful those elections have been, and by saying
something about how significant these elections may be both to the
rural people who participate in them and to the possible evolution of
the Chinese political system. I should also point out that I have
traveled to China with both the International Republican Institute and
the Carter Center as part of their ongoing efforts to monitor and
advise on the electoral process at the village level. I have the utmost
respect for the work of both these organizations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ See, for instance, Muddling Toward Democracy: Political Change
in Grass Roots China (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1998);
and with Amy Epstein Gadsden, Village Elections in China: Progress,
Problems, and Prospects (Washington, DC: International Republican
Institute, 2000)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let me begin by saying something about how village elections came
to be introduced in China. The process traces to the demise of the
people's communes, the collective system of agriculture, that began in
the late 1970s and was complete by the early 1980s. Most people who
study rural China now probably agree that the dissolution of collective
farming was the result of both top down and bottom up efforts. In the
greatly liberalized political atmosphere that followed the death of Mao
Zedong and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping, it was Chinese farmers
in areas that had suffered greatly from Maoist rule who first began
disbanding their collective farms. In a matter of years, all of the
Chinese countryside had followed their example.
In the initial few years after collective farms had been disbanded,
only the fruits of decollectivization seemed apparent. Agricultural
production shot up. So, too, did the incomes of most of China's
farmers.
After a few years, however, some of the unintended and less
beneficial consequences of decollectivization began to be evident.
First, the earlier increases in agricultural production began to level
off. Second, and more important from Beijing's perspective, villages
began to face serious problems of leadership. Those problems were
basically of two kinds. In some villages, previous village leaders were
able to take advantage of the new economic opportunities afforded by
decollectivization and left their positions of leadership for other,
more lucrative pursuits. Villages were thus left with a vacuum of
leadership. This vacuum in turn often resulted in a breakdown of social
order--the rise of banditry and lawlessness, and an increase in
violence, for instance. In other cases, villages came under control of
what the Chinese often call local emperors--strong men capable of
exploiting and bullying and generally making life miserable for
ordinary people within their control.
Both Chinese who were early advocates of village elections and
Western scholars who have studied the period agree that by the mid-to
late 1980s, rural China was in a State of potential crisis. Above all,
the Chinese Communist Party was worried about the potential for
instability and chaos in rural areas. Anyone who has studied China for
any length of time soon learns how greatly both the Chinese leadership
and the Chinese people fear chaos and thus how important stability is
to virtually everyone in China.
There was at the outset considerable disagreement within the
Chinese leadership about how to counter this growing instability. Some
people naturally wanted a strengthening of party leadership within the
village and a tightening of top down controls. These people, aside from
being fundamentally anti-democratic, were afraid that without tightened
party controls, enforcing such not-very-popular policies as family
planning and grain procurement might be impossible to implement.
Others, however, including some of China's senior revolutionary leaders
who were generally considered quite conservative, suggested that the
best way to restore order was to institute village elections. The
faction who favored elections seemed genuinely afraid that without the
institution of elections, China's peasants might revolt. By instituting
popular elections, they reasoned, village leadership would at least
fall to more popular and respected members of the village community.
Moreover, if those elected were not party members, perhaps they could
be recruited to the party, thus infusing the party at the local levels
with a new respect.
Thus, the debate surrounding the issue was not about the ``good''
of democracy as an ideal but rather whether elections would promote or
impede chaos. In the end, those who argued that elections would promote
stability won the first round. In 1987, the National People's Congress
passed the Organic Law on Village Elections which promoted village
elections on an experimental basis. Elections were not mandatory under
the new law. They were simply encouraged. Nor were the instructions and
regulations as to implementation very well spelled out. The Ministry of
Civil Affairs in Beijing was responsible for overseeing overall
implementation, but it could only provide guidance and direction. Each
province was responsible for coming up with its own concrete
regulations.
Implementation of these guidelines was, not surprisingly, stalled
after June 4, 1989, when the army moved into Beijing to quash the
peaceful protests that had been going on for weeks. But efforts to
implement village elections were revived in the early 1990s. By 1998,
these experiments had been going on long enough and with sufficient
success that they were mandated into law. Since 1998, all villages in
China have been required by law to hold competitive elections. At that
time, the guidelines for village elections were also more thoroughly
spelled out. Most of these measures move village elections further
along the democratic spectrum. Candidates must be chosen by the
villagers themselves--not, for instance, by either the party or higher
level township officials. Secret ballots are required. And the number
of candidates must exceed the number of positions to be chosen. On the
other hand, the leading role of the party has also been firmly
reasserted.
One of the great frustrations of anyone trying to make sense of
these village elections is that we simply do not know how widespread
they are--how well and how universally they have actually been
implemented. Nor, it must be pointed out, do we have any real idea how
widespread the protests and occasional violence that we still hear
about in the Chinese countryside is. There are some 930,000 villages in
China. Some 900 million people live in them. The number of villages
visited by foreigners is painfully limited. I hesitate to hazard a
guess, but surely the number could not be more than several hundred.
My own experience has also been limited. I have nonetheless seen a
broad spectrum of types of village leadership and ways of selecting
village leaders:
First, the local emperors who came to power with the collapse of
the communes still exist in some places. Usually they are able to exert
control because they are also very rich, are in control of much of a
village's resources, and are able to influence higher levels in the
government and party hierarchies.
Second, many villages continue to exist in a vacuum of leadership.
When, for instance, I have had the opportunity to visit Chinese
villages with friends rather than through official sponsorship, it
seems I invariably happen upon villages which are suffering crises of
leadership, villages where elections, if they have been held at all are
only pro forma, and the village leader is generally weak and
ineffectual.
Third, I have seen cases, too, where the local emperors are
actually elected, ostensibly democratically. These are instances, for
instance, where the second candidate seems to have been put there only
for the sake of complying with election regulations and where the
village chief who is running for re-election also controls a major
portion of the village resources, some of the profits of which he may
distribute to villagers, perhaps because he is magnanimous but also as
a way of insuring his re-election.
Finally, and most important, I have also seen elections that by any
measure anywhere in the world would be recognized as genuinely
competitive, fair, and democratic. I should also say that I have seen
such elections while accompanying both the IRI and the Carter Center.
If I could generalize about the most successful elections I have
seen, I would say first, that the issues confronting the electorate and
addressed by the candidates were (not surprisingly) local, practical,
and economic. The voters behaved they way democratic theory says they
should have behaved: they voted in their own self interest. They wanted
very simple things. They wanted stones placed under their dirt roads so
they could still be navigated in the rain. Better yet, they wanted a
paved road that could take them quickly to market. They wanted cheaper
prices for plastic sheeting so they could build greenhouses to grow
crops in the winter. They wanted better ties with the county seat so
they could get more licenses to market their produce there. They wanted
better schools and educational opportunities for their children. They
wanted fewer taxes and fees. And they wanted their leaders to be people
who could make those things happen.
Most of the people I have seen being elected have been younger,
entrepreneurial, better educated, and richer than the older generation
of collective leaders. Whether these new leaders were members of the
communist party or not seemed not to be an issue with the voters,
though most often in my experience the new leaders were members of the
party--simply because communist party members generally have more
connections with higher levels and thus more ability to make things
happen at the village level. We do not really know what percentage of
village chiefs are also party members, but the figure is high--perhaps
as high as 80 percent nationwide, though in some places it is lower--
only 60 percent, I have been told. Remember that the party is also
using village elections as a tool for recruiting popular new members.
It is hard to say why some elections are successful and others not.
The key, from my own experience, is leadership. In order for elections
to be successful, you need commitment at every step of the political
ladder, from the top, which is the Ministry of Civil Affairs, to the
province, to the township, to the village, right down the political
chain. I would also say that elections are a learning process. With
good leadership and experience, they get better over time.
One of the most important things I have learned observing village
elections over the years is that the technical details of how to
organize an election are by no means intuitively obvious. Election
officials have to be properly trained. The details of election
procedures must be taught, supervised and learned. Here I would again
commend both the IRI and the Carter Center for the work they have done
both training officials at several levels of the election hierarchy and
in directly monitoring elections, which gives them an opportunity to
make recommendations for improvement.
What difference do these elections make? Certainly they are a major
advance over higher-level appointments of village leaders, election by
acclamation and non-competitive elections. They present rural people
with choices they did not have before, give them a voice in the
selection of their leaders, and provide a sense of political
participation, community, and empowerment. Moreover, there is some
evidence, though we certainly need more research, that governance in
such villages has improved, finances have become more transparent, and
corruption has declined. Above all, by giving rural people the
experience of electing their local leaders, elections at the village
level are putting in place the mechanisms for elections of higher level
officials.
And that is the final question. Can we expect elections at the
village level to begin working their way up--to the township, the
county, the province, and eventually the national level? This is how
Taiwan began its long-term process of democratization, starting with
the grass roots, at the village level, and working gradually upward.
This, of course, is also the hope of many reformers in China and
certainly the hope of champions of Chinese democracy in the United
States and other parts of the world.
But there is nearly universal agreement, both in China and among
Western academics, that reforms of this type will have to be instituted
from above, from China's top leadership. China's current leadership has
been decidedly conflicted about the issue of democratization. Jiang
Zemin on the one hand has called for socialist democracy with Chinese
characteristics and on the other warned against the possibility of
chaos were China to introduce Western-style parliamentary democracy.\2\
And as we all know, China is currently in the process of a major
leadership change, and there is increasing nervousness in China as the
time for those changes to begin approaches. In recent days, we have
begun hearing about Jiang Zemin's growing reluctance to give up some of
his posts. This is not a time for political innovation in China--nor
can we expect much political reform in the early months and possible
years after the leadership transition is in place. Full-blown democracy
is not likely to come soon to China.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Compare, for instance, the following two statements: Without
democracy there can be no modernization. We will ensure that our people
hold democratic elections, make policy decisions democratically, carry
out democratic management and supervision, and enjoy extensive rights
and freedoms under the law. The overall goal of our political
restructuring is to build socialist democracy with Chinese
characteristics while upholding and improving our basic political
system. (Jiang Zemin, October 30, 1997); and Should China apply the
parliamentary democracy of the Western world, the only result will be
that 1.2 billion Chinese people will not have enough food to eat. The
result will be great chaos, and should that happen, it will not be
conducive to world peace and stability.( Jiang Zemin, August 8, 2000)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having said that, I nonetheless hear more sentiment in favor of
democracy in China today than ever in the 24 years I have been visiting
there. Among China's intellectuals in particular, there is a general
understanding that democratization in the long term is both necessary
and inevitable. The question is--and it is a very big question--how to
proceed along a more democratic path without risking the chaos and
instability that everyone in China fears. No one seems to have an
answer to that question, but many believe that democratization is tied
to China's continued economic development and to the spread of economic
benefits from urban to rural China and from the coast to inland areas.
In the meantime, however, the Chinese government's continuing
commitment to village elections offers us in the United States a rare
opportunity to cooperate with China in a very positive way in their
long-term, albeit uncertain, political evolution.
Anne F. Thurston is an associate professor of China
studies at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies and has spent more than six years in China. She
is the author of several books, including Enemies of the People, The
Private Life of Chairman Mao (with Li Zhisui); and Muddling toward
Democracy: Political Change in Grass Roots China.
______
Prepared Statement of Yawei Liu
july 8, 2002
Thank you for inviting me to speak about China's village elections
and The Carter Center's efforts to provide advice and assistance in
improving the quality of these elections since 1997. In my statement I
will briefly talk about three issues:
1. The current status of China's villager committee
elections;
2. The impact of direct village elections on other forms of
elections in China; and
3. The Carter Center's growing involvement in China's slow
but firm quest for greater choice and accountability.
the status of china's villager committee elections
Following the collapse of the people's commune, the Chinese
countryside slid into anarchy, instability and chaos. The peasants
first began experimenting with various forms of self-government in the
early 1980s. These creative initiatives were soon seized by the central
government in order to maintain social stability and raise revenue.
After tenacious battle led by a few reform-minded political leaders,
the self-governing procedures were written into a law that could only
be passed by China's National People's Congress on a provisional basis
in 1987.
It took another decade before the Organic Law on the Villager
Committees were implemented in earnest and finally revised in 1998 to
include universally recognized procedures that guarantee electoral
openness, fairness and competitiveness. For the first time, all
administrative villages in China, totaling about 730,000, have to
conduct direct elections every 3 years. For the first time, local Party
committees cannot openly intervene in the nomination phase. For the
first time, more and more elected village chairs begin to challenge the
Party's control in the villages. For the first time, more villagers
complain to the officials at higher levels of government about
violations of the Organic Law than anything else.
The relatively objective official and academic verdict of this
enormous preliminary exercise of democracy is as follows:
1. It has provided a safety valve to the hundreds of millions
of Chinese peasants who are angry and confused as their life is
often subject to constant exploitation and pressure;
2. It has introduced legal procedures of elections into a
culture that has never entertained open and free elections; and
3. It has cultivated a new value system, a much-needed sense
of political ownership and rights awareness among the Chinese
peasants that do not have any leverage in bargaining with the
heavy-handed government.
The popularity of these elections, the penetration of the rights
awareness among the peasants and the urban dwellers, the loss of
influence and power on the part of the officials at the township/town
level, the fear that these elections will eventually dislodge the
embattled Party apparatus from the villages have triggered a backlash
that is so severe and ferocious that it may render these elections into
a hollow and meaningless practice.
The assault seems to have come from two sectors, political and
academic. While the motivation for the political attacks is easy to
apprehend, the charges are lethal in the Chinese political discourse.
There is systematic and almost conspiratorial effort to label village
elections as a source of evil forces that is (1) undermining the
Party's leadership in the rural areas, (2) affecting rural stability,
(3) turning the rural economy upside down, and (4) helping clan and
other old forms of power and control to grow in the countryside.
The scholars' criticism might be well intentioned but equally
detrimental. They tend to argue that village elections are government
imposed, that they have unexpectedly destroyed traditional rural
fabrics of self-government, that what Chinese peasants really need are
farmers' alliances and free disposal of their land, and that no country
has ever seen any meaningful democracy taking roots from the bottom up.
Thousands of Chinese officials are still fighting very hard to keep
this small opening of political reform alive. They are becoming a bit
pessimistic but never hopeless. After all, in the current climate of
the rule of law in China, it takes the National People's Congress to
repeal the Organic Law in order to abolish these elections. As of now,
all eyes are trained on the upcoming 16th Party Congress whose
endorsement of grassroots democracy will be another clarion all for
bolder and more expansive forms of popular choice.
the impact of china's direct village elections
One could hardly exaggerate the impact of direct village elections.
Yes, these elections are conducted only at the self-governing social
and political units. Yes, the right to cast ballot to directly choose
their immediate leaders is only exercised by the most stubborn,
conservative and backward group of the people in China. Yes, the much
powerful government can still render the popularly elected leaders
powerless and turn them into governmental servants.
However, it is going to be very hard to take away a right that has
been denied to any particular group before. A Chinese scholar recently
commented, ``True, Chinese peasants are not terribly enthusiastic about
exercising their right to cast ballot nowadays. But, if one wants to
take that right away, the situation will be rather explosive.
Furthermore, over the past 14 years, direct village elections and
villager self-government have been gradually accepted as a valuable
alternative to the otherwise arcane and opaque manners of selecting
government leaders and people's deputies. For example, in many
villages, the candidates for the Party branch positions are required to
receive a direct popularity test. A low approval voting will disqualify
the candidates from running for the Party positions. Many provinces
have adopted this so-called two-ballot system.
In 1998 and 1999, during the last round of township/town people's
Congress deputy elections, new experiments of selecting township
government leaders appeared in no less than three provinces, including
an unprecedented direct election of a township magistrate in Buyun,
Sichuan Province. Although these experiments were either declared
unconstitutional or unsuitable to be implemented, they created a sense
of hope and urgency. Many officials were preparing to introduce new
procedures to expand the nomination process and make determination of
formal candidates competitive and transparent.
The anticipated boom of political experiments did not take place
due to a Party circular which declared,
``In the past, a few areas proposed to experiment with the
direct election of township/town magistrates and in a few
isolated places there were direct elections of township/town
magistrates by all the voters. This violates the relevant
articles of the Constitution and the Organic Law of Local
Governments. During this round of election of township/town
level people's Congress deputies, the election of township/town
magistrates must be conducted strictly in accordance with the
stipulation of the Constitution and other laws.''
Despite this, on the last day of December 2001, Buyun went ahead
again with its own ``direct'' election of a township magistrate. One
province in China introduced public elections of magistrates in 45
percent of its 5,000 some townships/towns by June 2002. More locales
are going to use this so-called public election method to choose
township/town leaders. It is said that one county in Sichuan used the
same measure in picking a county magistrate. A scholar boldly predicted
recently that one measure to be adopted by the Party's 16th Congress
would be the direct election of Party leaders at the grassroots level.
All these progresses are being made in the context of direct village
elections.
Finally, no matter how democratic China is going to become and what
forms of electoral system China is going to adopt, voter education,
voter registration, nomination and determination of candidates, the use
of secret ballot booths, the application of the proxies and roving
ballot boxes are all going to be great problems and logistic nightmares
that could lead to potential political violence and instability. But
the practice of direct village elections involves close to 600 million
out of the 900 million Chinese voters. They have already experienced
these procedures and are getting more and more familiar with the
standardized procedures. This is indeed a democracy seminar promised by
Peng Zhen, China's leading advocate of direct village democracy. This
will become the single most valuable asset in China's quest for
democracy.
Which way to go from here? No one has a definitive answer. The
flurry of experiments of the selection of township/town magistrates in
1998 and 1999 were carried out under Jiang Zemin's call for promoting
grassroots democracy at the 15th National Congress of the Chinese
Communist Party. The following is what he said,
``The most expansive practice of socialist democracy lies in
increasing the basic-level democracy and guaranteeing the
people's rights to engage in direct democracy, to manage their
own affairs according to the rule of the law and to pursue
their happiness. All basic-level governments and popular
organizations of self-governance in the cities and the
countryside should perfect the democratic electoral system,
practice political and fiscal transparency, allow the broad
masses to debate and determine matters of public concern and
interests and conduct democratic supervision of government
officials.''
It is only logic to go down this road if the so-called ``three
represents'' are implemented according to its true essence. If Jiang is
determined to write the ``three represents'' into the Party's Charter,
there is little doubt that China will back away from the small steps it
has taken toward greater political reform. Nonetheless, any expansion
of direct democracy is going to be extremely difficult since it will
deprives the power and influence of those who are using the current
cadre selection system to augment their own selfish pursuit.
the carter center's china village elections project
The Carter Center initiated the China Village Elections project in
1997 during President Carter's visit to China in 1997. After a
successful pilot phase, a 3-year agreement of cooperation was signed
with the national Ministry of Civil Affairs in March 1999. This
agreement allows the Center to work primarily in four Chinese provinces
to install computers and software to collect village election data, to
conduct training of election officials and elected villager committee
members in any province in China, to observe village elections
everywhere, to help conduct civic education, and to invite Chinese
election officials to observe US elections and elections that are
monitored by The Carter Center in other parts of the world. In
September 2001, President Carter observed a village election in
Zhouzhuang, Jiangsu and opened an international conference on village
elections in Beijing attended by over 150 Chinese and international
scholars, NGO workers and officials.
In addition to working with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the
Center also works with the National People' Congress that, besides
making and amending laws, supervises all elections above the village
level. In 1999, the Center was invited to observe a township election
in Chongqing. Recently, a team from the Center has worked together with
a political reform study group from the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences and the National People's Congress participated in the work of
conducting several township election pilots, reviewing the problems of
township and county people's Congress deputy elections and offering
suggestions to the possible revision of China's Election Law and the
Organic Law of Local Governments, the two paramount laws whose
amendment will fundamentally change the procedures of all direct and
indirect elections in China.
The Center has provided substantial assistance in printing the
National Procedures on Villager Committee Elections, the waterproof
copy of the Organic Law on the Villager Committees, the electoral
procedure posters, and a total of nine research and work experience
books on rural elections and governance. The Center is supporting the
maintenance of the most informative website on China's villager self-
government and grassroots democracy and will soon launch another
Chinese/English website on Chinese elections and governance.
The Center has been coordinating its work in China with other
American organizations such as the IRI, the Ford Foundation and the
NDI. It has also shared its working experience with government agencies
and NGOs from Canada, Great Britain, Spain and other Western countries.
It has been in direct communication with the UNDP whose village
elections related project was completed in December 2001 and with
European Commission whose ambitious rural governance training program
begins in August 2002.
China is a significant Nation whose international responsibility,
domestic stability and economic prosperity will directly impact the
Asia-Pacific region and the world. All these things desired by her own
people and the people of her close and distant neighbors cannot be
sustained without an open and transparent political system through
which the government derives its legitimacy, the people hold their
leaders accountable, and the global community conduct its relationship
in a reliable manner. No single or group of nations can initiate this
most important sea change in China. China will have to do it by
herself. However, the involvement of Western governments and NGO's in
sowing the seeds of reform, sustaining the change and consolidating the
gains is indispensable. Imposing Western values on China without
considering China's unique circumstances is counterproductive. Ignoring
China altogether in its cautious and sometimes confusing quest for
greater democratization, choice and accountability is outright
erroneous. Working outside China is helpful. Providing assistance
inside China is safer and all the more effective.
______
Prepared Statement of Elizabeth Dugan
july 8, 2002
IRI in China The International Republican Institute has conducted
programs to encourage legislative, legal and electoral reform in China
since 1993. Institute delegations have observed more than 50 local
elections for rural village committees in China since 1994, and IRI was
the first international organization to do so. In 1995, IRI began to
sponsor workshops for election officials to discuss the Ministry of
Civil Affairs' regulations for conducting elections and new guidelines
for training materials, emphasizing the importance of secret ballots,
multi-candidate elections and transparent vote tabulation. The
Institute has supported these kinds of programs in Fujian, Guangxi,
Hainan, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Sichuan, Jilin, Liaoning and Yunnan
provinces.
In 1997, IRI began working directly in several provinces to train
newly elected village committee leaders, and subsequently assisted
provincial officials with the drafting of implementing methods and
regulations for the 1998 NPC law governing village committee elections.
Additionally, IRI has worked to provide information and support
training for election monitors in 1996, 2000 and 2002. Since 2000, IRI
has held regional networking conferences for provincial officials from
several provinces, and in 2001 IRI began training Chinese election
officials in effective campaigning techniques.
IRI now also claims the distinction of being the first
international organization to observe urban community elections after a
staff delegation visited the industrial city of Liuzhou, located in the
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China in May 2002. Due to the
strong commitment of local leaders to the principles of accountability,
transparency and the rule of law, urban elections in Guangxi are
considered to be among the most advanced and democratic in China.
what are urban elections in china?
Urban community elections have been occurring on an experimental
basis in China since 1999. In that year, 12 pilot cities were allowed
to hold elections for positions on urban residence committees, the
lowest level of State power in Chinese cities. In some cities, a number
of residents committees have been combined into what are called ``urban
community committees'' and elections are held for positions in the
bodies. The law governing urban elections was first passed in 1989 and
was patterned on the experimental village committee law of 1987.
For most of the history of the People's Republic of China,
residence committee leaders were appointed by the municipal Party
apparatus, and the primary organizing unit in most large Chinese cities
was the work unit, or danwei, which provided the cradle-to-grave social
services known collectively as the ``iron rice bowl.'' Although urban
residents committees existed, positions on those committees were
primarily held by elderly, often barely literate women, and functions
of the committees were limited to menial neighborhood tasks and
snooping into urban citizens' private lives.
China's cities have been undergoing massive social and economic
change in recent years. With more and more state-owned enterprise
failures and increasing unemployment, work units have become less
important and less effective in many cities. Simultaneously, the influx
of migrant workers into urban areas has dramatically altered the urban
landscape. Crime has increased as have street protests and labor
unrest. Residents committees as they were formerly conceived and
structured no longer meet the needs of China's city dwellers.
what is the chinese government's interest in allowing urban elections?
In the interest of modernization and social stability (the same
rationale first used to permit village elections more than 10 years
ago), the Chinese government decided to permit elections for urban
residents committees on an experimental basis. It is worth noting that
in the absence of detailed central government directives on urban
elections, local officials have a great deal of autonomy in designing
and implementing them, and there is a lot of variety. Myriad types of
urban elections are now occurring in approximately 26 urban areas
across the country. The hope is that younger, more qualified
individuals will run for positions on the committees, and that
elections will make these residents committees more accountable to
urban
citizens.
One example is Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province in
northeastern China's rustbelt, with widespread unemployment and
increasing labor unrest and crime as well as corruption among the
political elite. The municipal government there was supposed to pay SOE
workers a bonus in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Communist
revolution, but was unable to do so, prompting large street
demonstrations. In response, the mayor of Shenyang made three trips to
Beijing in 1999 to petition the Ministry of Civil Affairs to include
Shenyang on the list of cities allowed to
conduct urban community elections on an experimental basis. Permission
was eventually given. In Shenyang's Heping District 363 neighborhood
committees were merged into 144 communities and elections for positions
on the community committees have been held. Shenyang has a system of
indirect democracy, in which candidates (one more than the number of
positions on the committee) are selected by an election committee made
up of officials from the district government. Not everyone is permitted
to vote in community elections; housing complexes within the
communities elect representatives, and those representatives elect the
members of the community committee. Though it is far from a perfect
system of direct democracy, it nonetheless gives residents more of a
voice in their local government than they have ever had in the past.
how democratic are china's urban elections?
As is the case with village elections, the degree to which urban
elections can be considered democratic varies widely by region. In some
cities, elections for community committees are indirect and the process
is deeply flawed and far from ``one person, one vote.'' Instead, lists
of candidates are prepared by an election committee controlled by the
municipal government, and elected representatives from residents
committees then vote on those candidates. It's important to keep in
mind, however, that even the very limited franchise described above
represents a quantum leap forward from previous periods, when residents
committee members were chosen exclusively by the municipal government
and Party branches.
In other cities, the nomination process is much more open, and
elections are direct, using secret ballots and generally following the
procedures guided by the Village Committee Organic Law. Urban elections
tend to be less democratic and less prevalent in cities where the
danwei structure is still firmly entrenched. In those cities, it is
difficult for citizens to see any direct connection between residents
committees and their own interests; the community committee doesn't
control any benefits that people value, so they do not value the
community committee. Elections tend to be more democratic in rustbelt
cities like Shenyang, where many SOEs have gone under and unemployment
rates are high. Urban elections also tend to be more developed in
medium-sized cities, like Liuzhou (Guangxi Autonomous Region) than in
major metropolises, although the reasons for this are not entirely
clear.
village elections and urban elections: what are the implications for
democratization in china?
It may be obvious that the ruling party in a one-party State isn't
apt to do things that it doesn't believe are in its own interests. For
that reason, many have argued that village elections are controlled by
the Party and little more than window dressing. But the fact remains
that elections have now been held in most Chinese
villages, and peasants have found themselves empowered to organize,
criticize
authorities and in some cases even dismiss corrupt or incompetent
leaders. Local elections and the right to freely nominate candidates
are becoming increasingly institutionalized, and Chinese villagers are
more and more familiar with their rights under the law and are willing
to defend those rights by protesting, submitting petitions and going to
court. Since their inception, rural elections have often had unintended
consequences: As Chinese peasants have become accustomed to choosing
their own leaders, they have often become less susceptible to party
control and more willing to defend their rights to autonomy and self-
governance. It is likely that urban elections will have some of the
same effects as they mature and spread. In rural China, the Party's
attempts to reassert control by installing Party chiefs as village
committee heads and Party branch and township government attempts to
interfere and encroach upon village government affairs have been
resisted by villagers, although not always successfully.
Beyond just minimizing the importance of village elections in
themselves, for years critics have claimed that their implications for
larger political change in China were negligible. But now urban
communities are holding elections using laws that are based on and
almost identical to the Village Committee Organic Law. Direct popular
elections with such procedures as open nominations, secret ballots,
more candidates than posts, and open vote tallying now exist not only
in rural villages, but in urban areas as well, and this is a
significant step forward.
Like village committees, urban residents committees are not
officially part of the State structure and thus they lack formal
coercive power. However, they do provide many services that are
important to residents. The social and political surveillance functions
of the committees have greatly declined in importance as the State has
retreated from micro-managing private life. Functions of the
communities now
include elderly care, job retraining, day care for children,
sanitation, dispute resolution, literacy classes, landscaping and
environmental improvements, and public safety and security, and may
also include managing local neighborhood enterprises.
Some residents and community committees also lobby the district or
municipal government on behalf of residents. For example, in one
community the committee lobbied the municipal government to force the
police to shut down a noisy karaoke bar in the area; in others,
residents committees have compelled property management companies to
undertake repairs, or pressured the district or municipal governments
for street lighting and pollution abatement. Additionally, the
committees offer legal education and services, discussing new laws
passed down from higher levels, and also provide advice about citizens'
rights under the law and how to file a lawsuit, as well as daily life
services such as beauty parlors, home repair and takeout food. Some
committees have telephone hotlines so residents can call in and report
problems, and some conduct surveys to see how satisfied residents are
with the performance of the committee.
why is iri is interested in chinese urban elections?
IRI's commitment to supporting both village and urban elections is
grounded in the same rationale: These elections provide a democratic
training ground and hold local leaders accountable to their
constituents. It is also our belief that elected leaders will use their
popular mandate to enact policies that will be beneficial to the
citizens who elected them.
It is IRI's intent and plan near-term to provide training in the
Guangxi Autonomous Region to those responsible for administering urban
elections in the province, enabling them to have a comprehensive
understanding of the mechanisms and the rationale of transparent
elections. We are also prepared to conduct programs for newly elected
residents committee chairmen, with an eye toward providing them with
tools and techniques to perform their duties in a responsive and
responsible way.
In our longstanding work with elections in China, IRI has been most
deeply impressed with the willingness and eagerness of local and
provincial officials to root systems of direct elections. Guangxi was
no exception. There, as elsewhere, we have cultivated relationships
with officials who are dedicated to reform. We concede that China
doesn't have a strong historical tradition of democracy, and a
democratic political culture has to be built from scratch. But
organizations like IRI can--and will--help with that task.
As the Chinese are trying to institutionalize the rule of law for
their own reasons, we see a close relationship between the rule of law
and the development of a Chinese public that understands their own
rights and responsibilities as citizens of a modern state, including
participating in free and fair elections, the significance of self-
governance, transparency and accountability and the mechanisms to
enforce compliance on the agents of the state. All of these things are
crucial building blocks for democracy at higher levels. Democracy may
not come to China as quickly as we would like, but when it does, an
important part of the pressure for change will come from the grassroots
level.
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