[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
WHAT DEMOCRACY MEANS IN CHINA AFTER 30 YEARS OF REFORM
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ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 22, 2009
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Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CO N T E N T S
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Page
Opening statement of Charlotte Oldham-Moore, Staff Director,
Congressional-Executive Commission on China.................... 1
Grob, Douglas, Cochairman's Senior Staff Member, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China.................................. 2
Cheng, Li, Director of Research and Senior Fellow, Foreign
Policy, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution... 4
Manion, Melanie, Professor of Public Affairs and Political
Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison....................... 6
Liu, Yawei, Director, China Program, The Carter Center........... 9
Dickson, Bruce J., Professor of Political Science and
International Affairs, The George Washington University........ 13
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Cheng, Li........................................................ 26
Manion, Melanie.................................................. 35
Liu, Yawei....................................................... 37
Dickson, Bruce J................................................. 40
WHAT DEMOCRACY MEANS IN CHINA AFTER 30 YEARS OF REFORM
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FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2009
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:33
a.m., in room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Charlotte
Oldham-Moore, Staff Director, presiding.
Also present: Douglas Grob, Cochairman's Senior Staff
Member; Anna Brettell, Senior Advisor; and Toy Reid, Senior
Research Associate.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHARLOTTE OLDHAM-MOORE, STAFF DIRECTOR,
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Good morning. It's a pleasure to have all
of you here, a lot of frequent attendees and some new ones,
which is really lovely to have new faces in the crowd.
My name is Charlotte Oldham-Moore, and on behalf of
Chairman Byron Dorgan, thank you for coming today to our, I
think, fifth roundtable of the 111th Congress. Today we will be
examining ``What `Democracy' Means in China After 30 Years of
Reform.''
I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Doug Grob, and
please begin.
STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS GROB, COCHAIRMAN'S SENIOR STAFF MEMBER,
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody. On
behalf of Cochairman Sandy Levin, I would very much like to
welcome you here today, and appreciate your attendance at
today's event.
The topic of today's roundtable is democratic governance in
China, an issue of considerable debate both in China and
outside of China. Chinese leaders have said that China needs to
improve its institutions of democracy. The question we ask
today is: how do China's leaders define democracy, especially
given China's one-party state, and, what are the democratic
practices that China's leaders have instituted, or attempted to
institute, in China in the last three decades, especially in
recent years?
China's leaders describe China's political system as a
``Chinese socialist political democracy'' that includes
``political consultation'' and ``elections'' for local
legislatures at the county level and below and village-level
committees. At the same time, China's leaders assert that China
will never adopt Western-style democracy, nor a separation of
powers system, free press, or extensive elections.
China's leaders uphold China's one-party system, and
scholars and experts, both in China and outside of China,
continue to utilize the concept of authoritarianism to describe
China's political system. However, in recent years, some have
described China's authoritarianism with various adjectives such
as ``soft,'' or ``deliberative,'' or ``resilient.'' So how are
we to understand this variety of perspectives, and what are the
implications, ultimately, for U.S. policy?
Those are the general questions we ask our distinguished
panelists to address today from a number of different vantage
points. Dr. Cheng Li will open with general remarks on the
official Chinese conception of democracy and how it differs
from the West, and then discuss in more detail so-called inner-
party democracy. Dr. Melanie Manion will discuss local people's
congresses' elections, which only take place at the level of
counties and townships in China, and concepts of
representation. She'll discuss the meaning of representative
democracy in mainland China today. Dr. Liu Yawei will discuss
developments in local village committee elections and their
impact, and will provide commentary on the future prospects for
electoral democracy in China. Dr. Bruce Dickson will speak
about the relationship between economic and political reforms
and the prospect that Chinese entrepreneurs may be agents of
political change.
Before I turn it over to Professor Cheng Li, I'd like to
introduce each of our panelists in greater detail. Cheng Li is
Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Brookings
Institution's John L. Thornton China Center and the William R.
Kennon Professor of Government at Hamilton College. He's the
author and editor of ``Rediscovering China: Dynamics and
Dilemmas of Reform,'' as well as the author of ``China's
Leaders: The Next Generation, Bridging Minds Across the
Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange,'' and ``China's
Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy.'' He's
also the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese
Thinkers series published by the Brookings Institution Press,
and we are truly honored to have you with us today.
Also to my left, Professor Melanie Manion, Professor of
Political Science and Public Affairs at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Manion studied philosophy and
political economy at Peking University in the late 1970s and
was trained in Far Eastern studies at McGill University and the
University of London, and earned her doctorate in political
science at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of
numerous research awards, most recently from the National
Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the
University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School. Her
publications include work on the Chinese bureaucracy,
grassroots democratization, and the political economy of
corruption and good governance in China. Her current research
examines the ongoing transformation from descriptive to
substantive representation in Chinese local congresses, and we
are very pleased to have you with us today.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. That's very impressive. Okay. Off we go.
Mr. Grob. And to my right, Professor Yawei Liu is Director
of the Carter Center's China Program. He's been a member of
numerous Carter Center missions to China monitoring Chinese
village, township, and county people's congress deputy
elections from the period stretching from 1997 all the way up
to 2006. He's written extensively on China's political
developments and grassroots democracy. He's the founder and
editor of China Elections and Governance, which can be accessed
online at www.chinaelections.org and chinaelections.net. It's a
Web site sponsored by the Carter Center on political and
election issues in China from 2002 forward and it's an
outstanding resource. Professor Liu taught American history at
Georgia Perimeter College from 1996 to 2008. He earned his B.A.
in English Literature from Xian Foreign Languages Institute in
1982, a Master's degree in Chinese History from the University
of Hawaii, and a Ph.D. in American History from Emory
University. We are really very privileged to have you with us
today.
Mr. Liu. Thanks.
Mr. Grob. And finally, also to my right, Professor Bruce
Dickson, is Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs at the George Washington University. He earned his
Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His current research
examines how economic reforms are changing the Chinese
Communist Party's control over China's political system, its
relations with society, and especially its relations with the
emerging private sector. In short, he is looking at whether
economic reforms are rejuvenating the party or weakening its
authority. Professor Dickson is the author of several books,
including ``Wealth Into Power: The Communist Party's Embrace of
China's Private Sector.'' He is also the author of ``Red
Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and
Prospects for Political Change.'' He is also the author of
``Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of
Leninist Parties.'' So, we are extremely fortunate, Bruce, to
have you with us today as well. This is a fantastic panel. I
will not say anything further, and turn the floor over to Cheng
Li for his remarks.
STATEMENT OF CHENG LI, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AND SENIOR FELLOW,
FOREIGN POLICY, JOHN L. THORNTON CHINA CENTER, BROOKINGS
INSTITUTION
Mr. Li. I would like to applaud the CECC for hosting this
roundtable discussion on political changes in China. The
conventional wisdom in the West is that since the 1989
Tiananmen incident, China has made progress only in the realm
of the economy. Many China watchers believe that despite--or
because of--China's
economic transformation, the Communist regime has been able to
resist genuine political reforms. This belief, however,
overlooks
several significant socio-political dynamics that are building
momentum for further political openness. An understanding of
these Chinese political dynamics and experiments is critically
important for the United States, as such knowledge will help us
formulate better policy options. If our vision is narrow, our
options will be inadequate.
In the next 10 minutes, I would like to discuss three
issues: the first one is a question that is frequently asked:
Is the Chinese official conception of democracy similar to that
of most people in the world, especially those in the West?
Second, I want to outline some new and far-reaching socio-
political forces that can contribute to democratic development
in China. And third, I argue that an evolution is taking place
in the Chinese political system, especially regarding
leadership politics.
First, is the Chinese official conception of democracy
similar to that of most people in the West? The answer is not
simple. Let me answer it by making some observations. Even
those who are most optimistic about the potential
democratization of China do not expect the country to develop a
multi-party system in the near future. Chinese leaders and
public intellectuals have every reason to argue that the
People's Republic of China's [PRC] version of democracy will,
and should, have its own unique features. After all, British
democracy, Australian democracy, Japanese democracy, Indian
democracy, and American democracy all differ from each other in
some important ways.
Chinese leaders clearly have widely different views of what
democracy is. On one hand, Chairman of the National People's
Congress Wu Bangguo recently stated that the Chinese political
system is democratic and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] will
never give up one-party rule. This kind of reference is what
Andrew Nathan calls the ``label of democracy for practices that
are anything but.''
On the other hand, Premier Wen Jiabao consistently
advocates for the universal values of democracy. He has defined
democracy in largely the same way as many in the West would.
``When we talk about democracy,'' Premier Wen said, ``We
usually refer to the three most important components:
elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on
checks and balances.''
Premier Wen's emphasis on universal values of democracy
reflects new thinking in the liberal wing of the Chinese
political establishment. He likely represents a minority view
in the Chinese leadership, but like many other ideas in China
during the past three decades, what begins as a minority view
may gradually and eventually be accepted by the majority.
Now let me move to the second issue: new and far-reaching
economic and socio-political forces in present-day China. Let
me briefly mention three such forces, the first is the new and
ever-growing middle class, the second is the commercialization
and increasing diversity of the media, and the third is the
rise of civil society groups and lawyers. These new players are
better equipped to seek political participation than the
Chinese citizens of 30 years ago.
Let me use the commercialization of the media as an
example. I grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. At
that time, the whole country only had a couple of TV stations,
a few radio stations, and a handful of newspapers. In the mid-
1970s, most people in China believed that official media
outlets, such as People's Daily, contained only lies. At the
time people joked that the only thing published in the
newspaper that could be believed was the date it was published!
Even the weather forecasts were manipulated so that they would
be in line with the political needs of the regime.
Today, things are quite different. There are over 2,000
newspapers, more than 9,000 magazines, about 300 radio
stations, and 350 TV stations in the country. They, of course,
do not all tell the same stories. Corruption, the lack of
government accountability, and industrial and coal-mining
accidents have been among the most frequent headlines in the
country in recent years.
Now, my third and final point: Political dynamics in the
Chinese leadership. China is a one-party state, but the leaders
of this ruling party are not a monolithic group with the same
values, outlooks, and policy preferences. I argue that the
Chinese leadership today is structured by the checks and
balances between two informal major coalitions or factions. I
call it a ``One Party, Two Coalitions'' formula.
One coalition is called the ``elitists'' and the other the
``populists.'' These two camps represent two different socio-
economic classes and different geographical regions. Elitists
represent the interest of the coastal region--China's ``blue
states''--entrepreneurs, the middle class, and foreign-educated
Chinese nationals--known as the ``sea turtles''--while the
populists often voice the concerns of the inland region--
China's ``red states''--and represent the interests of farmers,
migrant workers, and the urban poor. The Chinese leaders call
this new political dynamic ``inner-Party democracy.'' At
present, this ``One Party, Two Coalitions'' practice is neither
legitimate nor transparent--although many taxi drivers in
Beijing are able to tell you which leader belongs to which
faction. But this inner-Party competition will not remain
stagnant. Its dynamic nature will probably inevitably make
political lobbying somewhat more transparent, factional
politics more institutionalized, and elections more genuine. In
the long run, legitimate competition may be expanded so that
citizens can seek representatives in the government,
contributing to a Chinese-style democracy.
In conclusion, let me make it clear that the Chinese
political system is still constrained by its one-party monopoly
of power, lack of independent judiciary, and media censorship.
The Chinese government has a poor record in human rights and
religious freedom.
Political participation through institutional means remains
very limited. Yet, the ongoing political and intellectual
discourse about democracy in the country, the existence of a
middle class, commercialization of the media, the rise of civil
society groups, the development of the legal profession, and
checks and balances within the leadership are all important,
contributing factors for democratic change in any society. In
all these aspects, China is making significant progress.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Li appears in the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF MELANIE MANION, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND
POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Ms. Manion. I'm going to be talking about the local
congresses or local legislatures. I'll call them congresses.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, American scholars and
policymakers easily and appropriately dismissed these people's
congresses of elected representatives in mainland China as
rubber stamps. In recent years, however, without challenging
the Communist Party monopoly, the Chinese congresses have
become significant political players: they veto government
reports, they quiz and dismiss officials, and they reject
candidates selected by the Communist Party for leadership. The
liveliest congresses are found not at the center of power in
Beijing, nor in provincial capitals, but below in the cities,
counties, and townships.
The new assertiveness we see in the local congresses is not
a grassroots movement. It was set in motion by rules that were
designed and promoted by authoritarian rulers in Beijing, so
understanding what has and has not changed in these local
congresses is a window on the officially acceptable meaning of
representative democracy in mainland China today.
So my argument this morning, in the next 10 minutes, is
that congressional empowerment exemplifies a difficult, risky,
strategic, and partly successful Communist Party effort to
strengthen authoritarianism by opening up politics to new
players, giving them procedural status in the political game,
and accepting losses in particular instances in order to win
the bigger prize of authoritarian persistence.
It is a difficult effort. It's a difficult effort because a
legacy of congressional irrelevance cannot be easily erased in
the minds of ordinary voters and local party and government
officials. It's a risky
effort. It is a risky effort because credibility requires that
the effort go beyond authoritarian cheap talk.
But the regime certainly does not want to encourage runaway
democratization in the form of new democratic parties or too
many independent candidates. It is a strategic effort. It is a
strategic effort in the sense that it is designed not to
promote liberal democracy, but to strengthen authoritarian rule
with more responsive political institutions under the
guardianship of a single Communist Party.
Finally, the effort is only partly successful. Local
congress representatives do see themselves as substantive
political players with electoral legitimacy, not the
congressional puppets of the Maoist era. This is especially the
case in congresses at lower levels. Popularly elected congress
representatives speak and act the new language of voting
districts, constituents, constituent interests. They help their
constituents with private matters. They work to privatize local
public goods, and they see this as their most important
responsibility, in surveys we've conducted.
They see their second most important responsibility as
electing government leaders. This is a quasi-parliamentary
system. In electing government leaders, local congresses are
not the simple stooges of local Communist Party committees as
they were in the past. In nominating candidates for government
leadership, the Communist Party committees can no longer treat
the congresses as reliable voting machines.
When local Communist Party committees fail to take local
interests into account in nominating their candidates for
leadership, these Party committee candidates can, and do, lose
elections. Again, this is especially the case in congresses at
lower levels.
At the same time, and despite official voter turnout
figures of over 90 percent, reliable survey evidence indicates
that very high proportions of ordinary Chinese know little or
nothing about local congress candidates on election day, say
they didn't vote in the most recent congress election, and can
recall nothing their congress representatives have done in the
past term. Most alarmingly for the Chinese authorities, these
proportions have increased, not decreased, over the past 15
years.
In short, if local congress representatives now think and
act as agents of their constituents, it is not because ordinary
Chinese voters see themselves as principals. Put another way,
if representative democracy is working, most ordinary Chinese
do not yet see it that way.
To understand these different perspectives it is useful to
understand what has and has not changed in the rules. Now, let
me first summarize a few important unchanged features of
Chinese representative democracy. First, direct electoral
participation by ordinary Chinese is restricted to the lowest
congress levels. Only
township and county congresses are elected in popular
elections. Above the county level, elections only involve
congress insiders. Each congress is elected by the congress
below it. This reflects an elitist notion of guardianship that
is both Leninist and traditionally Chinese.
Second, congresses are large, unwieldy, they meet
infrequently, and most representatives are amateurs with
neither the time nor material resources for congressional work.
The working congresses are the much smaller standing
committees, but not all standing committee members at all
levels work full-time for the congresses, and there are no
standing committees at all at the lowest congress level. These
large, amateur congresses reflect a Marxist view that only by
continuing to work on the front line, at the grassroots, can
representatives forge a meaningful relationship with their
constituents.
Finally, and not least of all, a single Communist Party
monopolizes political power. Competing political parties are
banned. This is important in at least two ways. Communists
numerically dominate all Chinese congresses at all levels. They
make up about 65 percent of township congresses and about more
than 70 percent of congresses above this level. So as a matter
of organizational discipline, as a matter of Party discipline,
the Communist Party should be able to impose its will on all
Congresses.
A second consequence of Communist Party monopoly has to do
with interest representation. Without competitive interest
aggregation along Party lines, or any other observable lines,
Party has no meaning as an organizing category for voters.
Voters cannot sort out their representatives and assign,
through votes in a popular election, credit or blame for
governance outcomes. Put another way, the Communist Party
monopoly strips representatives of labels that reflect policy
orientations, and this places a truly impossible information
burden on voters.
Let me turn now to what has changed. In the interest of
time I am going to focus on the most fundamental set of rules,
and that is congressional electoral reform, particularly this
direct popular election of congresses at the township and
county level.
In 1979, the first local Congress elections of the post-Mao
era introduced three new electoral rules: elections must be
contested; voting must be by secret ballot; and groups of
ordinary voters may nominate candidates. Now, these rules were
a radical departure from Maoist-era practices. They remain the
basic organizing principles of congress elections today. These
and other electoral rules created new opportunities for
ordinary Chinese and new challenges for the authorities.
For example, voter nomination. Voter nomination of
candidates mobilizes ordinary Chinese to bring them into the
electoral process at the very beginning, only to disappoint
them even before election day, so any group of 10 voters may
nominate a candidate. This is a really low threshold of
support.
One result is a large number of voter-nominated candidates,
tens, sometimes hundreds of candidates for two or three
congress seats. Winners in congress elections must win a
majority, not a plurality, of votes. So to produce a decisive
election the rules set a ceiling of no more than twice the
number of candidates on the ballot as congress seats. This
means that, by default, the process of winnowing out many tens
of candidates, called fermentation--rough translation from the
Chinese--to choose a few candidates for the ballot has to
eliminate a large number of voter nominees.
Most nominees are passive. They don't take the initiative
to seek congressional office. There are a small proportion of
voter nominees who are independent candidates who orchestrate
their nomination by voters and actively seek office to promote
individual or collective goals.
The law permits independent candidates, but there are
plenty of ways for election committees to harass them. This
harassment is routine. In addition, the election committees
manage this pivotal process of winnowing out, and that is much
criticized as a ``black box.'' Election committees are also
instructed to induce candidates--to induce congresses that
satisfy certain electoral quotas--20 percent women, for
example.
So to reduce that electoral uncertainty which is created by
real contestation and secret ballots, this winnowing out
process takes these quotas into consideration. Overall, we find
that candidates who are nominated by the Party and who are
nominated by Party-controlled organizations do better than
voter nominees in the winnowing out process, and they also do
better in the elections themselves. This creates a credibility
problem. In the words of two preeminent Chinese congress
scholars, ``This situation disappoints voters, especially
voters who nominate candidates, and leads to suspicion about
the fairness of the elections.''
From initial nomination of candidates to election day is a
mere 15 days. Electoral campaigns are prohibited by law. With
little time, without campaigns, without competitive Party
labels, a high proportion of Chinese vote blindly.
In the late 1990s, some localities allowed election
committees to arrange face-to-face meetings between the
candidates and voters and they also organized de facto primary
elections instead of the winnowing out process. The system did
not implode with this modest local tinkering. Indeed, the
political center responded. In 2004, the electoral law was
revised to include these features.
Let me conclude. So I commented earlier that if
representative democracy is working, most ordinary Chinese do
not yet see it that way. What has and has not changed in the
rules that govern congresses and congress elections goes some
way toward explaining this. Representative democracy in
mainland China is not authoritarian, cheap talk.
At this point in time, however, it remains essentially a
game of congress insiders. For them, what is most salient about
elections is a new electoral uncertainty; with secret ballots
and electoral contestation, they can lose. As winners, then,
they have electoral legitimacy; representatives in popularly
elected congresses think and act responsively as agents of
their constituents. By contrast, ordinary Chinese pay attention
to local congresses once every five years when they are
immobilized to vote in elections that are not yet well-
structured to generate their interest.
Thank you.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you, Ms. Manion.
Dr. Liu, please.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Manion appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF LIU YAWEI, DIRECTOR, CHINA PROGRAM, THE CARTER
CENTER
Mr. Liu. I want to thank the CECC for inviting me to speak.
The last time I spoke here was seven years ago on a subject I
feel passionate about. I have a written statement which is
outside, so I'm not going to read my statement. Reading it
would be like Hu Jintao reading his political report to the
National Party's Congress.
So what I'll do is tell you stories. I want to use the
sound and fury of China's elections to enliven the discussion
here, and then I will draw tentative conclusions from these
stories. Toward the end, I will say something about where to go
and what to see in terms of electoral democracy in China, and I
will offer some suggestions for policymakers in the United
States on what to do.
Stories now. In 2006--this is a personal story--I was in
the office of the Ministry of Civil Affairs [MCA]. I was
talking to an official. We work with them to observe village
elections. Then he received a phone call from the county Party
secretary of Qingxian. This is a county in Hebei Province. The
Party secretary was literally crying like a baby into the phone
of the MCA official.
I asked why was he crying? He said he was crying because he
introduced what we call the Qingxian model, an effort to
resolve the tension between popularly elected village committee
chairs and the Party branch secretaries. So he came up with an
idea. He said, the Party branch at the village level should be
in charge of big things, village committees should be in charge
of small things.
So the organization apparatus people asked him, what do you
mean by ``the Party branches are in charge of big things? '' He
said, ``big things'' means recruitment of Party members,
ideological
purity of the Party members, and small things means budgeting,
decisionmaking, all the other things. So the organization
apparatus officials immediately realized this is not the way to
go, they want to toss him. That's why he cried.
The second story. The first story happened in 2006, the
second story in 2007. This was April 20. There was an election
in the village in Liaoning Province in the northeastern part of
China. There was a total of 560 voters. The winner won the
election by 307 votes. Later on, he found out the township
government would not certify the election. After some
investigation, he found out one villager reported that he
engaged in vote buying. The villager said he received one
pineapple and two bottles of liquor from him.
So he started the process of trying to clear his name,
trying to get the township government to confirm his election.
Six months passed, nothing happened, and he was so outraged
that he went to the other villager's home who reported vote
buying and killed all five members of the family, including the
daughter of the person who just was about to graduate from a
good university in China.
When he was interviewed by the reporters, he said this is
not personal, this is political. He said he was trying to use
the legal process to get the situation corrected. Nobody
responded to him. When the reporters went to the village and
talked to the other villagers, everyone was sympathetic with
the murderer, not with the one who reported it, because
apparently the township government didn't like him and
therefore they didn't want to confirm him. The township
government never looked into the charges against him.
The third story took place on November 4, 2008, election
day here in the United States. On that day, in the Great Hall
of the People, the Minister of Civil Affairs held a meeting to
commemorate the 10th anniversary of the formal promulgation of
the organic law of the villager committees--the law that
mandated direct village elections. According to the minister,
one of the accomplishments of villager self-government is that
the law was going to be amended very soon. It was finally put
on the legislative agenda of the National People's Congress. So
toward the end of the year or early next year, this law was
going to be amended. Now, the law was first passed on a
provisional basis in 1986. Twelve years later, in 1998, the law
finally became a real law in China. It's going to take another
12 to 13 years for the National People's Congress to amend the
law.
The fourth story took place in December 2008, in my home
province, Shaanxi. There was an election to be taking place the
next day. There were two candidates. One candidate circulated a
flyer saying, if elected, in the next three years he would
guarantee that each villager's income would increase by 20,000.
The other candidate was an entrepreneur.
On the election eve, when all dogs were barking in the
village, everyone received a flyer from the entrepreneur
candidate indicating that if he was elected he was going to
give 20,000 Chinese dollars--which is equivalent of 3,300 U.S.
dollars--to every eligible voter in the village the next day.
He won the election by 30 votes. On the following day, as
promised, he put the money into the bank accounts of all 700
voters. We're talking about 2 million U.S. dollars.
So there's a huge debate on whether this is vote buying.
The money was distributed after the election was over. He
didn't care whether he was voted by this voter or not, everyone
was going to get 20,000 RMB.
The fifth story took place March 30 of this year. The
murder story I mentioned earlier appeared in a news magazine
run by the New China News Agency. Dr. Li Cheng talked about how
liberal the Chinese media has become. So there was this very
negative publicity on village elections. The next day, the
Ministry of Civil Affairs worked with New China News Agency to
file a wire story, which I quoted in my written statement. This
is a three-scholar dialogue on how good village elections are.
My sixth and final story is about a blog written by a
professor from Renmin University--also known as People's
University--one of the best universities in China. In the blog,
which was viewed by hundreds of thousands of Chinese net
surfers, he basically said democratic elections in developing
countries never work. They never deliver stability and
prosperity. He had a long list of violence taking place in
different countries in the world in the wake of national
elections. He also talked about how violent Chinese village
elections have become. He said democratic elections will only
lead to murder, hatred, and resentment. He used Pakistan, Iraq,
Haiti, and other countries as an example to declare that ``we
need to stop this great leap forward of elections in China.''
These are my stories so you can get the feel, the sound,
and the fury.
Now, what conclusions can we draw from these stories?
First, the Party apparatus organization, the [zuzhibu]
apparatus is very resistant to the idea of allowing villagers
to govern themselves. It seems to be an alien concept to them
to let people govern themselves. I wrote in my written
statement that these officials have to learn and to adapt. This
is going to be a long process.
Second, the township government does have huge control of
every election. By law, they're not allowed to intervene, but
if they don't offer support, if they don't deal with
complaints, that is going to have huge ramifications for the
villagers themselves.
Third, there is what I call the power elite, made up of
officials and scholars who basically use these isolated cases
of violence, vote buying, and electoral fraud to say that
democratic elections Western-style will never work in China. We
need to stop that.
Fourth, the absence of a good law is hampering democratic
elections and the villagers' self-governance at the grassroots
level. Look at how long it took to amend the law. The organic
law of villager committees does need articles and clauses to
define what is vote buying and to clearly identify, if you
violate the law, what kind of punishment is going to be
assessed. Otherwise, this will always be what many Chinese
legal scholars call a soft law. It's not going to work.
Fifth, the Ministry of Civil Affairs--this is where many
scholars say the true reform-oriented officials are--tries very
hard to deepen the reform, but on the other side they have to
deal with public relations. The story I tell you is that the
media reporting of village elections have tended to be very
negative in recent years, unlike in 1997 and 1998 when the law
was finally amended, everyone was talking about village
elections being a silent revolution that's going to change
China in a very fundamental way.
Finally, village elections are no longer a top priority of
the government, particularly at the time of the economic
downturn. Policies were made not to improve the quality of the
elections but to see how to deliver public goods efficiently
and effectively. They are about making services available to
the urban and rural--particularly the rural--dwellers. They
have to make people feel happy,
because if the pursuit of happiness is getting taken care of,
the legitimacy of the Party will remain intact. These are the
tentative conclusions we can draw about the current status of
village elections in China.
Now, where to go from here? Melanie already mentioned, I
think we're going to see, if there's going to be real,
truthful, meaningful electoral democracy in China, we'll have
to look at People's Congress deputies' elections at the
township and county levels. Melanie already talked about how
important the people's deputies can be so I won't elaborate on
that.
What I will do is give a sense of scale. In terms of
counties, where voters directly elect the county people's
congress deputies there are 2,860. That's how many counties
there are in China. In terms of townships, the number is
41,000. How many deputies are elected? About 3 to 4 million.
Now, if these elections are real, if the elected deputies at
this level can elect government leaders, then things will
change in a very fundamental way. So if we're waiting for--the
never-coming, long overdue electoral democracy, this is going
to be it.
To see if there is real will and an action plan, the year
we are going to watch is 2011-2012, because every five years is
a new election cycle. So that's what we're going to see.
In terms of what can we do? Not much. Really, there's not
much we can do. The U.S. Government should not tell the Chinese
how to run elections, but there are things we can do. We
acknowledge that China does have elections and we want to
observe these elections. American leaders can give speeches.
Before President Bush went to China in 2005, he delivered a
Kyoto speech on November 18. He said the essence of democracy
is universal. The paths, the roads to democracy are different,
procedures of democracy are different. President Bush made that
very clear. The Japanese, British, American, French all have
different democracies. We should acknowledge that China is
going to have a democracy maybe without a multi-party system,
maybe without a lot of things that we are familiar with. So we
need to ask about, we need to encourage, we need to acknowledge
that there are elections.
As I mentioned earlier, the government should not tell the
Chinese how to run elections, but the government should insist
that NGOs--although this is also a sensitive issue--be given
access in China. We've been working in China--together with the
International Republican Institute--working in China on
grassroots election--but we should tell them that these NGOs
have been working in other developing countries, they do have
technical expertise. They are not intervening; they are simply
providing technical assistance.
We also need to try to tell the Chinese that the same kind
of
expertise can be offered in other areas other than elections.
Rather than to simply say we want to offer support in the
election area, we can offer support on e-government, we can
offer support on access to information, we can offer support on
building a vibrant civil society. I think that might be a
better, and more productive approach. Thanks.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Liu.
Dr. Bruce Dickson.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Liu appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF BRUCE DICKSON, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Dickson. I would like to begin by thanking the
Commission for inviting me here, and thank all of you for
showing up on the beginning of a holiday weekend to hear our
comments.
From the start of the reform era in China over 30 years
ago, it has generally been an assumption, mostly by foreign
observers of China, that eventually political reform will have
to be in parallel with economic development in China. This is
sometimes based on the notions of modernization theory, that
economic development leads to democracy.
In some cases, it is based on what has become known as the
Washington consensus, that for economic development to be
sustained and for a true capitalist economy to emerge it has to
be combined with a minimal state and a democratic political
system. But the Chinese example after these 30 years points to
some of the flaws in these assumptions. What has become known
as the Beijing consensus indicates that not only is
authoritarian governance compatible with economic growth, in
some cases it may be preferable. I am not proposing the truth
of this statement myself, but it is a notion that can be heard
coming from China now, and some foreign observers use China as
an example of the benefits of authoritarian rule for rapid
growth.
From the Chinese perspective, the Chinese Communist Party
leaders are hoping that economic development in the country
will not weaken its rule, just the opposite: they hope that
rising living standards and ongoing economic modernization will
create popular support in the country that will prolong its
rule indefinitely.
One of the most consistent findings in research on
contemporary China is that, much to our surprise when we look
at China and see it riven with corruption, inequality, other
types of governance failures, nevertheless there is a
remarkably high level of support for the government in ways
that are not often appreciated. The Communist Party has proven
to be far more adaptable, far more durable and even more
popular than the conventional wisdom would expect.
The notion that privatization will eventually lead to
democratization of the country often assumes that the Communist
Party is a passive actor in this process, but in fact it has
been the main instigator of privatization which has led to the
rapid development in the country. Its close embrace of the
private sector has encouraged its development, and in many ways
its success, over the years and decades of reform.
The rhetorical commitment to the private sector has
increased in both the Party and the state constitutions in the
country. The CCP has offered an elaborate ideological
justification for promoting private entrepreneurship, and even
integrating capitalists into the political system. Jiang
Zemin's notion of the ``Three Represents'' was largely designed
to legitimize this practice of incorporating capitalists into
what remains of the Communist system in the country.
The Communist Party has encouraged its own members to go
into business, not just former Party and government officials
but also rank-and-file members, to ``take the lead in getting
rich''--a prominent slogan in the 1980s--and to actively be a
part of the private sector. It has also co-opted successful
entrepreneurs into the Party. Those who are both Communist
Party members and private entrepreneurs are often referred to
as ``red capitalists'' to indicate this connection with the
Party.
Whereas only about 6 percent of the population of the
country belong to the Party, almost 40 percent of private
entrepreneurs are also Party members. Most of them were in the
Party before going into business, but about a third or so of
them were co-opted afterward. This shows the growing
integration at the individual level of entrepreneurs into the
Party and Party members into the private sector.
There is also a growing number of institutional links
between the Party and the private sector. Many of the business
associations in the country are officially sanctioned, or at
least closely supervised by, the Party. There is also an
attempt to build Party organizations within private firms and
this process has picked up since the time the ``Three
Represents'' slogan was adopted into the Constitution. Building
Party cells in private firms is not just a way of putting eyes
and ears of the Party into the private sector. In many ways,
these Party cells operate more as logistical support for the
firms themselves. They support the business aspects of the
enterprise more than the ideological training that usually you
would expect Party cells to do.
The assumption that privatization will lead to
democratization of the country also assumes that capitalists
are inherently pro-democratic. This is largely based upon the
European experience. Barrington Moore's phrase ``no bourgeois,
no democracy'' still seems to be influential in lots of
people's thinking, but the experience of late-developing
countries in Asia and elsewhere indicates that capitalists are
rarely at the front edge of political change, and democracy in
particular. There is often much more cooperation between the
state and business in developing countries than had been the
case for the western European countries.
In China's case in particular, many of the private
entrepreneurs in the country have very close, shared ties with
Party and government leaders. In some cases, this involves
family ties: many sons and daughters of high-level officials
have gone into business in the country, and often very
successfully so. Other entrepreneurs have shared social and
school ties or professional links with officials that create a
common link with the state, and they share an interest in
promoting rapid growth. The Communist Party has pursued rapid
growth as one of its claims to legitimacy, and obviously the
private sector supports that initiative.
So in China, as in other developing countries, the state
and business are very closely intertwined. The shared
identities and common interests create support for the status
quo. Entrepreneurs in China have been the main beneficiaries of
the Party's economic reform policies and have little incentive
to prefer democracy as an alternative regime in the country.
Whether in terms of their willingness to be integrated into
the existing political system institutions--the local people's
congresses that Melanie Manion has talked about--or even
village elections--as Liu Yawei has talked about--many
entrepreneurs are actively involved in the political
institutions that exist and have not tried to form alternative
parties or alternative organizations to try and challenge the
status quo in the country.
What could cause that to change? So far, China's
capitalists have not shown much indication at all of promoting
for political change. But several factors might point them in a
different direction. One would be a decline in the pro-business
policies that the Communist Party is currently pursuing. With
the economic downturn there's been a concern about what types
of policies will be promoted. As Cheng Li mentioned earlier,
there has been a populist strand of thinking among the very top
leadership. Policies that are designed to redistribute wealth,
to increase equality in the country, as opposed to pursuing
rapid growth, may also cause capitalists to re-think their
commitment to the status quo.
Oddly enough, the emergence of a true market economy would
also loosen this link between entrepreneurs and the state. If
they were less dependent on the state for access to capital, to
bank loans, to exports, and so on, they would have less need to
support the system as it is.
If there was a dramatic increase in corruption, that would
also lead them to re-think their support for the regime. The
concern for corruption is one of the factors that lead people
to have less support for the status quo than would otherwise be
the case.
Just let me end with two policy implications from this,
neither of which are particularly novel, but I think still
important. First of all, economic growth alone does not produce
democracy, and therefore promoting prosperity in China will not
guarantee political change there.
Second of all, capitalists in China and elsewhere are not
necessarily democrats. Promoting privatization, therefore, will
not guarantee democratization of the country. The same people
who benefit from privatization seem to have no particular
interest in and do not see any real benefit of a democratic
alternative.
Last, even though my comments did not directly touch on
this, a final implication for looking at China's future, in
light of the experience of Russia and other post-Communist
countries, is that the alternative to Communist rule in China
is not necessarily a democratic regime.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Dickson appears in the
appendix.]
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you, Dr. Dickson.
Now we're turning to the Q&A portion of this proceeding.
First, we're going to turn to Anna Brettell, who's our
senior researcher, and was instrumental in putting this panel
together, to ask the first question. Please, Anna.
Ms. Brettell. My question relates to transparency during
inner-party, village, and people's congress elections. It is my
understanding that there are few, if any, domestic or
international groups that go out and conduct election
monitoring, that might help to highlight and resolve some of
the problems that we see in those elections.
Transparency is especially important in the inner-party
elections, because there is still one-party rule in China and
the Party organizations still reach down into society at all
levels, so it's really in the interest of all Chinese citizens
to know what's happening with elections. I am wondering, how
transparent are inner-party elections, and why isn't there more
monitoring--election monitoring by individuals and groups that
go out to the villages, townships, and counties around the
country to help monitor elections?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Anna, do you want this directed at one
person right now?
Ms. Brettell. No.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Great. Just brief responses, if you
will, so we can go right back to the audience. Thank you.
Mr. Li. Shall I?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Yes, please.
Mr. Li. Well, first of all, as I said in my formal
statement, there's a lack of transparency. But there are
several things that I should also clarify. Procedures are
actually already there in inner-party democracy. Several
things: One is term limits. No leader should stay in power for
more than two terms. Each term is five years. Second, the age
requirement for retirement. In a way, it is really biased
against the elder leaders, but at least it creates a kind of
sense of fairness. For example, in the Central Committee, with
a total of 371 people, no one was born before 1940. Everyone
who was born in 1939 or earlier retired. There's no exception.
There is also fairness in terms of regional
representation--each province has two full-member seats. The
exceptions are Xinjiang or Tibet, they can have three seats. It
is the Chinese-style affirmative action.
Also, there are regular elections in which there are more
candidates than seats [cha'e xuanju] and about 7.5 percent or
12 percent on the ballot will be eliminated. Also, you do see
the list of the alternates of the Central Committee, and their
names are ranked according to how many votes they receive.
Those in the bottom receiving the lowest number of votes are
usually princelings, children of high-ranking officials or top
leaders' bodyguards. Jiang Zemin's bodyguard, for example, got
the lowest vote in a recent election.
This is actually quite transparent. If you look at the
Chinese Xinhua news Web site, you can find these rankings of
alternates by votes in the past two decades. But of course, we
still don't know how the deal was cut. Largely it's the
previous standing committee or Politburo that decided the next
one.
But the interesting thing is, for the Party congress in
2007, and also the state council election in the National
People's Congress last year, both top leadership lists were
actually leaked out three or four weeks before they were
announced. It turned out that these lists were completely
correct. It's not because some in the media were really
brilliant in predicting the appointments of these new leaders,
or some scholars predicted the election of these leaders. It's
just because the real lists were leaked out.
In that regard, it's still largely a political manipulation
and lack of transparency. But at the same time, the procedures
and rules were clear and deals were constantly cut, as a result
of increasing transparency in a relative sense. Of course, if
it really becomes transparent, China will become a democracy.
It, of course, has not reached this stage yet, but you do see
some sorts of important information available, some are not.
That's the dynamic we're into right now.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Dr. Manion?
Ms. Manion. Yes. So you've touched mainly on the elections
within the congress, sort of, I guess, the congress insider
elections. Let me focus on the elections which involve the
ordinary Chinese people. I want to say three things. One, is
the elections themselves, the problems of transparency in the
congress elections, mainly proxy voting and roving ballot
boxes. These are especially common in the rural areas. There
are rural areas where that is the most common mode of voting
and that really opens the possibility for abuses. The Chinese
know this. Roving ballot boxes--it's very difficult to get rid
of these just to enable people to vote. Proxy voting. They're
starting to try to have more regulation of this.
The second issue is not in the elections themselves, but
it's in that winnowing out process, which is absolutely pivotal
because this is where we're talking about who's on the ballot.
That is a most untransparent process and that has been hugely
criticized by Chinese scholars who tend to favor primary
elections.
As I've said, primary elections is something that some
localities have experimented with because they are much more
transparent, it's choosing who's going to be on the ballot
through a primary election, and that is something that's
permitted in the most recent version of the electoral law. It's
not yet widely practiced, however.
Let me say one final thing about this winnowing out
process. In fact, it is not transparent. I mentioned the
electoral quotas, and I used the example of women. We're
talking about congresses as a movement from sort of this mirror
of society to substantive representation. At the same time, the
Chinese still have not abandoned a notion that congresses
should still mirror society, that
different groups in society should be reflected in the
congresses.
So that very untransparent process is also used by election
committees to try to stack the decks in favor of particular
social groups on the ballot because they can't control who wins
anymore, but they do have control over the ballot. So one of
the interesting things is, it doesn't always mean government
officials are on the ballot.
It can mean trying to find more women on the ballot. People
in democratic parties are trying to find the ideal candidate,
an intellectual woman, a well-educated woman who's in one of
the eight satellite parties, you know, the democratic parties.
Well, you're going to get on the ballot. So this is a very
untransparent process, sometimes, to achieve these aims of
having congresses that mirror society, whether or not they
represent society's interests.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Would you like to----
Mr. Liu. Yes. I just want to make it very quick. Village
elections are a lot more transparent than any other elections.
The intra-party elections are the least transparent.
Furthermore, Chinese are not terribly concerned about secrecy
of the ballot. They are very transparent about--for example, we
want 15 percent of women to serve at the county level of the
people's congress, but how you get there is not transparent. So
where we want them to be secret, they're not secret. Where you
want them to be transparent, they're not. The more competitive
the elections, the more transparent it is.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Dr. Dickson? No? Okay.
So we're going to turn to the audience now.
This gentleman here.
Mr. Martin. I'm Michael Martin from the Congressional
Research Service. In a couple of presentations you referred to
a notion of Chinese-style democracy. If I may, in many ways,
all of you who went on to then make presentations assumed that
Western-style democracy is----
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Excuse me. Can the folks in the back hear
this?
Voices. No.
Mr. Martin. Okay.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thanks.
Mr. Martin. All right. Well, but then in many ways your
presentations went on to assume a Western-style democracy, that
is to say, that you had to have secret ballots and election
process, and that democracy comes from a process of elections.
However, you just talked about a different version, which is a
democratic system, is one where everybody is represented in
whatever official body, different segments of society are
represented in an official body, that then makes power--makes
decisions.
One could also argue that in Chinese tradition there's a
notion of democracy or governance that comes from having
representatives who are good governors, who effectively do what
the people want no matter how they're selected. Then in
addition, one other example of sort of a Chinese-style element
of democracy was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They
experimented with the election of factory managers.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. I know there's a question in here.
Mr. Martin. Okay.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Mr. Martin. I'm getting to it.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. No worries.
Mr. Martin. Anyway, I'm wondering if you can talk a little
bit about what you would see Chinese-style democracy or the
Chinese leadership are seeing as Chinese-style democracy rather
than comparing China to the degree to which they reflect our
style of democracy.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay.
Mr. Martin. Do you see that they continue to see the
legitimacy of their government based on good governance or on
the process by which they're being selected?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Just one person for this question.
Dr. Dickson, do you want to take it? Okay, Dr. Li. Yes, please.
Mr. Li. Well, again, I think that democracy, I believe,
reflects a universal value. Of course, there are different
variations among democracies. But the question for China at the
moment is how to make the transition. What is the road map for
China's democratic transformation? Again, very few Chinese will
argue that China should have shock therapy and immediately
adopt a multi-party system.
Second, from the Chinese leadership perspective, democratic
reforms should have some procedures and priorities. They want
to start with inner-party democracy first, and then general
democracy, start with the rule of law first and then elections,
start with low-level elections and gradually move up from
village, to town, to county, to province, et cetera. This is
their plan; whether it can work or not, we don't know. But that
is what they emphasize as the Chinese style of democracy.
Again, ultimately, it's a universal value. Wen Jiabao used
this definition of democracy, and it's a definition we also
use: election, independence of the judiciary, and supervision
with checks and balances, including media freedom. But again,
it's the process. It's the transition period that is the most
difficult part.
Twenty years ago we talked about Chinese-style market
reform or socialism with Chinese characteristics. It's a name
to refer to privatization. But now we found the Chinese economy
quite similar to a market economy, but it also still maintains
some kind of Chinese-ness. I do believe that China is already
largely a market economy.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Yes, sir. please. Just stand and state your name, and
project so the folks in the back can hear you.
Audience Participant. Professor Dickson [off microphone]
not necessarily lead to democracy, and this symbiotic
relationship between the Chinese Party state and entrepreneurs
is a very good
example. I wonder when and whether the Party will--a less pro-
business policy--possibility in this--see that this
relationship becomes more entrenched--for instance, is it not
at all possible to see entrepreneurs beginning to be admitted
into the Central Committee, or even the Politburo?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Professor Dickson?
Mr. Dickson. Because of what Cheng Li has referred to
before as the bipartisanship within the Party, by the
combination of both the elitist and populist factions, it would
be very difficult for the Party to abandon its pro-growth
policies, pro-market policies because you've got a very
strongly entrenched group that's in favor of it. In fact, even
with the populists in charge during this current generation of
leadership, growth has gotten faster than it was when the
elitists were in charge. So, both groups are committed to rapid
growth, but the question is, how do you deal with some of the
negative consequences that come from it?
Although private entrepreneurs are not represented in the
Central Committee, much less the Politburo, there are some
capitalists who are already in the Central Committee but
they're largely heads of state-owned enterprises or what used
to be state-owned enterprises but now have been reformed in
different ways, but not by any definition private. So far, no
private entrepreneur has made it even into the alternate list
of the Central Committee, which indicates some resistance to
having private entrepreneurs be represented at the very top of
the political system. As long as you don't find people even on
the alternate list, you'll never see them on the Politburo. I
think when you see a truly private entrepreneur in the
Politburo or appointed to a ministerial level position in the
government, that would be an indication that this system has
fundamentally changed.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Dr. Li wants to add a quick point.
Mr. Li. Well, first, I disagree with your assumption about
when China will adopt a less market-oriented stance--but in my
view it's already happened during the past five or six years
since Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao came into power. They have
adjusted Jiang Zemin's more market-friendly policy, so that now
policy should restrain the market. There's less bank lending
and land leasing.
You can see that the stock market buyers in Shanghai are
not very happy with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao's policies.
Particularly in the coastal private sector there was a concern
about their macro-economic control policy. In my view,
actually, in the next few years you will see another shift
back, particularly if Xi Jinping comes to power and especially
after he consolidates his power. Now they want to accelerate
Shanghai's growth. The first quarter of this year, in terms of
the GDP growth, Shanghai was the very bottom, so the private
sector there is already hurt, particularly with the
macroeconomic control policy that started in 2004. It really
hurt the private sector to a great extent.
Now, the second part of your question: when entrepreneurs
will join the Politburo. I think I will rephrase that in a
slightly different way. I think certainly the fifth generation
will succeed Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in a few years. There's
no major entrepreneurs in the fifth generation that will enter
the Politburo. But elite politics in the following generation,
if we may call, the sixth generation, will be a different game.
Whether at that time the Chinese Communists will still be with
us, I don't know.
But one thing is already clear. Look at the children of
these fourth and fifth generations of leaders, none of them
serves in the CCP political system. They are all in business,
whether private sector, joint ventures, or state-owned
enterprises. These are real entrepreneurs. Of course, they had
political interests as well, when they become interested in
political power, it will be a different game. So I think the
answer to your question is, it will take about one and a half
generations.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Mr. Vegas. Well, thank you very much. Actually, I have a
lot of questions.
My name is Joe Vegas and I'm from the American Federation
of Teachers. I'm very interested in education, teachers, local
elections, corruption at the local level, the results of the--
low salaries of rural teachers in particular--and often they're
not--I'm also interested in the education process and what
impact that might have on democratization.
I think that Dr. Manion, you had mentioned that--I'm
curious--differences between urban areas and rural areas--and
differences on various levels of education. What I'm getting at
is, will the improvement in the education system and increase
in information and knowledge possibly create pressure on
younger people for participation, rights, et cetera?
And second, Dr. Dickson, are there any forces of resistance
that are beginning to emerge? I'm thinking about workers, for
example, who are unemployed, farmers who lose their land and
protest movements that are challenging authoritarian rule,
partly as a result of economics--massive transfer of--so sort
of a--particularly since we're on the eve of Tiananmen, all of
your presentations seem to lead one to believe that not much
changed.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay.
Mr. Vegas. --challenge at that time.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Great questions.
Dr. Manion? Then we'll go to Dr. Bruce Dickson.
Ms. Manion. First, let me start at the beginning--start at
the end, rather, with ``not much change is possible.'' Listen
carefully: I think we're all saying there's been a lot of
change. If, by change, you mean grass roots, popular, rowdy--
what the authorities would call rowdy disruptions, no. I mean,
who knows? I was in Beijing on June 4, and believe me, at that
time I though the university students were the most boring,
materialistic people. I was shocked when they engaged in the
sorts of things on the street. So, we're very bad at predicting
those sorts of things, right? But I think we're all talking
about major change, major political change, which has been top
down. Okay.
Now, let me get to your other questions: urban-rural
differences. Very briefly, the particular survey--the best
survey that I know of is political participation in Beijing and
it's that one where I talked about, over time, can you remember
anything your congress representative has done in the past five
years.
This is a survey that is a wonderful, reliable, stratified
probability sample, Beijing, the most politically active
population in China: over time, a decrease in political
interest. So that's an urban population in a highly--a highly
politicized urban population in China, and over time interest
in congresses has decreased.
Education. Generally we do see the same effects of
education on political interest in China as we do elsewhere,
which is the more highly educated, the more interested. Then
the other thing in terms of urban-rural differences, one of the
things that you are starting to see, I mentioned independent
candidates. One of the things that you're starting to see in
the urban areas are home owners committees, so the private home
owners committees becoming more politically active. Indeed,
some members of home owners committees have run for congresses
and won.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Dr. Dickson, please?
Mr. Dickson. Most of the research on popular protests in
the country has shown that protesters are very careful to not
question the policies themselves, but focus more on how they're
implemented. So you don't question whether or not China should
be pursuing a market economy, you instead focus on how local
officials are engaging in corrupt practices to take advantage
of that transition, through land grabs where farmers have their
lands taken away and have been given just a pittance in
compensation, and that land is then redeveloped as an
industrial park or a commercial park of some kind. That is a
very common cause of protest in the country.
Usually what people are demanding is not a roll-back of the
policy, but just that they want fair compensation for their
land, which is a very different type of demand from a call for
national elections to overthrow the Party, that kind of thing.
Protesters are very careful not to engage in truly political or
politicized issues, but focus more on bread-and-butter kinds of
issues.
In a larger sense, there seems to be a notion that it's
correct to move toward a market economy and move away from the
central planning system, even with its variety of social and
welfare benefits that went with it, so when people lose their
jobs they often do not blame the policy, they blame the fact
that their manager was corrupt, that they had bad luck to be
working for this firm that went bankrupt, that they are working
for a sleazy foreign capitalist who closed shop and left
without paying them back wages, but they don't actually blame
the policies themselves. So in that sense there isn't a rising
amount of ferment in the country. Popular resentment is largely
directed at local officials and local corruption and not at the
policies themselves.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Dr. Li, very briefly.
Mr. Li. Just 20 seconds.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Yes.
Mr. Li. Well, if you think of democracy as an event, it
certainly is not happening in China. China did not make a
fundamental breakthrough for democracy. But if you think
democracy is a process, I think it's happening. What I said
earlier is really about political changes, not about
continuity.
You talked about education. That's a very good question
about the younger generations, the future generations. There's
a documentary film called ``Please Vote For Me.'' You can watch
it on YouTube in half an hour, it was directed by a Chinese
director. It's a story about nine-year-old kids in elementary
school in Wuhan and their dirty tricks, political lobby,
personality assassination, money bribery, and all kinds of
practice for election that seem to be happening even in China's
elementary schools. I think probably they will be really very
much like us in the West in the future.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you.
Toy Reid, you have the last question. Please begin.
Mr. Reid. Thank you. Thank you to all the panelists for
very insightful comments.
Since I have the last question, I guess I'll take the
liberty to be a little provocative for the sake of discussion.
I'm sitting here thinking that it's been 21 years, if my math
is correct, since village elections were first introduced in
China. Movement upward has largely stalled. In 2001, the CCP
Central Committee said that direct elections at the township
level were unconstitutional after some had tried to experiment.
Direct elections obviously haven't moved to municipal,
provincial, or national levels. Since then, last year, some
folks in Shenzhen, both in and out of the government, made some
pretty bold proposals about trying to institute a special
political zone where they could carry out democratic reforms,
but the Guangdong Party secretary squelched that idea.
So my question is with the pace of political reform. I
think we all agree that the transition should be gradual, just
given the nature of China and its sheer size and complexity.
But, is it right to accept that political reform can only come
at such an extremely slow pace? To borrow terminology from the
previous administration, could we be guilty of what was called
the ``soft bigotry of low expectations,'' when we implicitly
suggest that the Chinese can't do any better than this, so we
should all just accept the need to be very patient?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Thank you. Anybody want to take
that, ``soft bigotry of low expectations? '' Come on, I know we
have several people who really want to talk on this point.
Thank you.
Ms. Manion. I'm going to be thinking about soft bigotry of
low expectations as I'm talking, so I'll get to that last. But
one thing I do want to say, and this is a particularly
important comparison between village and congress elections and
village councils and congresses.
While at the time or shortly after the village rule
grassroots democratization, there were some pronouncements by
Chinese leaders, and certainly much hope by foreign scholars,
that this would trickle up. In fact, it is a system that is
designed to trickle up only in the sense that it might be an
education of the Chinese people in voting and democratization
in that sense. Institutionally, there's no trickle up there.
Village elections--first of all, they're not policy relevant.
You're electing an executive committee. These are tiny
communities. This is not representative democracy.
So institutionally, the linkage is not there to trickle up.
Village officials are not state officials, okay? They're not on
the payroll. This is actually why I started looking at the
congresses, at this sort of middle level, because then you go
look at the top level. The top level is very policy relevant,
but there's nothing happening, right? The pace is glacial up
there.
So when you look at this middle level of congresses at the
township, county, municipal and province, there is an
institutional trickle up factor in the sense that, while I sort
of dismissed it, I said, well, it's all a game of congress
insiders above the county level, the lower level congresses
elect the higher level congresses, so county elects city, city
elects provincial, provincial elects national. Right within
that institutional structure you have the possibility of a real
trickle up change in delegate composition, and that can be
quite meaningful.
As it stands now, the lower level congresses are the most
interesting and assertive--politically interesting. There's a
lot happening there because there are lower proportions of
government officials, there are lower proportions of Communist
Party members.
Now, there is, institutionally, this possibility of trickle up
just in that electoral process of delegate composition.
And do I think that delegate composition affects what
happens in these congresses? Yes. I mean, you still need
institutional change and we still see the slow pace of
institutional change. But that delegate composition is
something that contains within it the seeds of trickle up. That
was never there. That was never there in the village elections.
Soft bigotry of low expectations. If we have expectations
that are too high, I don't know where that gets us. As a policy
matter, do we push the Chinese to move farther and to move
faster? I don't think that sort of outside pressure has ever
affected the pace of Chinese reform. In the end, I think what
happens in China and the pace of what happens in China really
depends on the Chinese themselves. So we might think about this
as low expectations. I don't know that our expectations are
going to have any effect on the pace of change in China.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. Anybody else?
Mr. Li. May I?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Of course you may.
Mr. Li. Well, I want to say, with a sense of humility, six
or seven years ago when we talked about the Chinese economy,
particularly at a time when China just joined the WTO, we
thought the Chinese economy would collapse. There were some
books about that, which certainly said that Chinese state-owned
enterprises, particularly Chinese banks, state-owned banks,
would collapse. But look at it this year. The world's top 10
banks, 4 of them are Chinese banks, including number 1, number
2, and number 3. Our gigantic banks like Citigroup and Bank of
America could not even make it to the list.
There's strong cynicism in the West when it comes to
China's political change. It sounds like nothing has happened.
It sounds like the middle class or other developments such as
the evolution of the legal system, the rise of lawyers have no
impact whatsoever. It's too early to say that. I agree with you
that China should find its own pace, its own priority, own
procedure. Of course, we still need to be critical of the
Chinese leadership for the human rights problems and the lack
of media freedom, but at the same time we should also have
tremendous respect for the Chinese people and Chinese leaders
for their own way to find the path for a better and more
democratic political future for China.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Okay. That will be our final note. Dr.
Li, Dr. Manion, Dr. Liu, Dr. Dickson, thank you so much for
coming today. Also, a big thank-you to Anna Brettell of our
staff who put this really interesting event together. Please
join us June 4 in this room at 2:15 p.m. for a full Commission
hearing on Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years later.
Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 12:00 p.m. the roundtable was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Cheng Li
may 22, 2009
From Selection to Election?
Experiments in the Recruitment of Chinese Political Elites
Are elections playing an important role in Chinese politics
today? The simple answer is no. Is China gradually moving from
selection to election in the recruitment of political elites?
That is a more difficult question to answer. The Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) is certainly unwilling to give up its
monopoly on political power. Chinese leaders continue to claim,
explicitly rather than implicitly, that the CCP is entitled to
make all of the country's most important personnel
appointments. But since the late 1990s, especially in recent
years, the Chinese authorities have experimented with some
electoral methods in the selection and confirmation of Party
and government officials at various levels of leadership. With
a focus on both intra-Party elections and people's congress
elections, this article offers a preliminary assessment of
elections in China--their significance, limitations, and impact
on the Chinese political process.
It is extremely unusual in China for candidates who are vying for
elected posts to openly engage in campaigning, lobbying, public
debates, personal attacks, and vote buying.\1\ However, that is exactly
what happened recently--not among political elites in Beijing but in a
documentary film covering the election of student leaders at a primary
school in Wuhan. In this newly released, award-winning film, Please
Vote for Me (Qing wei wo toupiao), director Chen Weijun meticulously
documented the entire two-week-long campaign and election process,
featuring a trio of third-graders chosen by their teacher to run for
the position of class monitor.\2\ The film revealed the motivations,
behaviors, and various kinds of ``dirty tactics'' used by schoolkids in
campaigning. The children involved, of course, were heavily influenced
by the adults around them.
The phenomena explored in this documentary film may or may not be
indicative of the future trajectory of Chinese politics. It is also
important to note that these dirty tactics do not necessarily bear any
relevance to the behavioral patterns exhibited by the upcoming
generation of Chinese elites. What this episode does show is that the
idea of elections has gradually and quietly penetrated Chinese society,
even directly affecting the lives of school children.
During the past decade, grassroots elections, or more precisely
village elections, have regularly taken place in China's 680,000
villages.\3\ In addition, elections have occurred more regularly at
high levels of leadership. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has
adopted or consolidated some electoral methods to choose the members of
the Central Committee and other high-ranking leaders. Under the
official guidelines of the CCP Organization Department, major personnel
appointments are now often decided by votes in various committees
rather than solely by the committee's Party chief.\4\ In the past two
years, the term ``decision by vote'' (piaoju), has frequently appeared
in Chinese discourse on political and administrative reforms.
taking the elections in china seriously
A potentially far-reaching development as regards the use of
elections to select political leaders occurred recently in Shenzhen, a
major city in the southern province of Guangdong. The city leaders
announced that they would have a multi-candidate competition for the
posts of mayor and vice mayor. In May 2008, the authorities in Shenzhen
posted on the municipal government website a draft of the ``Guidelines
for Government Reforms in Shenzhen for the Short-Term Future.'' \5\ The
guidelines specified that delegates of the district or municipal
people's congress in Shenzhen would elect heads of districts and
bureaus through multi-candidate elections. As part of the process, all
candidates would offer their statements of purpose and participate in
public debates. According to these guidelines, within three years this
same method will be applied to the election of mayor and vice mayor in
Shenzhen, a city of 10 million people.\6\
The Chinese media have reported widely on the specifics of these
guidelines, often stating that with this ``political breakthrough,''
Shenzhen will likely add to its status as China's first special
economic zone the designation of the country's first special political
zone (zhengzhi tequ).\7\ At this point, Shenzhen has already initiated
the process of conducting elections in accordance with the guidelines.
In May 2008, the city elected the new Party secretary of Futian
District and the head of the Shenzhen Municipal Office of High
Technological Development, with two candidates vying for each post. In
addition, several other heads of bureau-and district-level leadership
in Shenzhen were elected, with two or three candidates competing for
each position. Wang Yang, Politburo member and Party secretary of
Guangdong, has been known for his push for political reforms and
``thought emancipation'' since he arrived in the province as Party
chief in December 2007.\8\ Most recently, Wang called for more
competition on the part of candidates and greater choices for voters in
these elections in Shenzhen.\9\
It should be noted that the Chinese Communist Party is not
interested in giving up its monopoly on political power to experiment
with multiparty democratic competition. Chinese leaders continue to
claim, explicitly rather than implicitly, that the CCP is entitled to
decide on major personnel appointments within the government. The
defining feature of the Chinese political system has been, and
continues to be, its Leninist structure, in which the state operates as
the executor of decisions made by the Party. Although from time to time
some top Chinese leaders have called for greater separation between the
Party and the state and for more political participation from the
public and social groups, the main objective of Chinese authorities has
been, and is, the consolidation and revitalization of the Party
leadership rather than the revision of the Leninist party-state system.
The new catchphrase of the Chinese leadership under Hu Jintao is
``enhance the governing capacity of the ruling party.''
Huang Weiping, director of the Research Institute of Contemporary
Chinese Politics at Shenzhen University, was involved in drafting the
aforementioned guidelines on Shenzhen governmental reform. He recently
offered a comprehensive explanation of the Chinese authorities'
position on the relationship between selection (xuanba) and election
(xuanju). According to Huang, China is not going to replace selection
with election in the choice of its political elites. As he noted,
``selection is a principal system (da zhidu) while election is a
periphery mechanism (xiao zhidu). The latter is supposed to supplement
the former.'' \10\ In his view, public participation in elections could
make up for the deficiency or inadequacy in the purely Leninist
personnel appointment system.
One should not, however, conclude too quickly that elections in
present-day China are nothing but ``political shows'' to improve the
image of the Chinese leadership. The Chinese leadership's growing
awareness of the need for elections is only partly driven by their
concern for political legitimacy in this one-party state. The
implementation of elections, one can argue, is a result of the
transition in the Chinese political system from an all-powerful single
leader, such as Mao or Deng, to a system ofcollective leadership, which
has characterized both the Jiang and Hu eras. A review of
thetransformation of Chinese elite politics under these four top
leaders is quite revealing.
Mao wielded enormous power as a godlike figure. His favorable words
and personal endorsement were often the sole basis for the career
advancement of many senior leaders. Deng Xiaoping, too, was a leader of
monolithic proportions. Largely because of his legendary political
career and his formidable patron-client ties, he was able to maintain
his role as China's paramount leader even when he did not hold any
important leadership position following the Tiananmen incident. On the
other hand, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are technocrats who lack the
charisma and revolutionary credentials of Mao and Deng, but who have
broad administrative experience and are good at coalition-building and
political compromise. Thus, the selection of political elites under
these two men has been based largely on factional balance of power and
deal-cutting.
In general, the nature of collective leadership prevents the
emergence of a new paramount leader and inhibits any single individual
from completely controlling the political system. Consequently, the
rules of the game in Chinese elite politics have changed; elections
have increasingly become a new way for the CCP to attain the ``mandate
of heaven.'' The desire of Hu Jintao and other top Chinese leaders for
the mandate explains why, in June 2007, they conducted a straw poll
among several hundred ministerial and provincial leaders as well as
their superiors in an effort to ``gauge their preferences for
candidates for the next Politburo and its Standing Committee.'' \11\
More specifically, greater attention should be given to intra-Party
elections and the elections of people's congresses. As for intra-Party
elections, one may reasonably assume that the greatest challenge to the
rule of the CCP comes not from outside forces but from forces within
the Party. In the era of collective leadership, factional tensions and
competition will likely make intra-Party elections both increasingly
transparent and dynamic.
The election of deputies of the people's congress at various levels
of government is certainly not new in the People's Republic of China
(PRC). But for a long time the Chinese public has been cynical about
the role of the people's congresses. With a few exceptions, there has
not been any real, open competition for the seats of the congress.\12\
This, however, may start to change in the near future for two reasons.
First, three decades of market reforms have not only brought forth a
wealthy entrepreneurial elite group and an ever-growing Chinese middle
class, but have also created many less fortunate and increasingly
marginalized socioeconomic groups. These less fortunate classes are
growing ever more aware of the importance of being represented in the
decision-making circles, including those of people's congresses.
Second, China confronts many daunting challenges, including economic
disparity, employment pressure, environmental degradation, the lack of
a social safety net, and growing tensions between the central and local
governments. There is no easy solution to any of these problems, and
Chinese leaders have different views and policy preferences for how to
deal with them. In recent years, the people's congress has become one
of the most important venues for policy debates. This trend will
further enhance the public participation in, and demand for, more
genuine and fair elections in the people's congress at various levels.
Any serious effort to move toward competitive elections in China may
release long-restrained social tensions and quickly undermine the CCP's
ability to allocate social and economic resources.
The above observation makes clear that both intra-Party elections
and the elections of the people's congress deserve substantial
scholarly attention. The information about types, procedures, and
results of these elections is valuable for China analysts. Such
information may reveal some important tensions and trends in Chinese
politics. Intra-Party democracy is, of course, not true democracy, but
it may pave the way for a more fundamental change in the Chinese
political system. In the absence of a broad-based and well-organized
political opposition in the PRC, it is unlikely that the country will
develop a multi-party political system in the near future. This fact
actually makes the ongoing experiments such as intra-Party elections
and competitive elections for the people's congress even more
significant.
assessing intra-party elections
According to the terminology employed by the Chinese authorities,
intra-Party democracy refers to five types of elections: direct
elections, indirect elections, multi-candidate elections, single-
candidate elections, and preliminary elections.\13\
A direct election (zhijie xuanju) is an election in
which eligible members vote for their candidates directly.
Indirect election (jianjie xuanju) refers to an
election in which all eligible members first vote for their
representatives or delegates, who will then later vote for
candidates in the Party Congress.
Multi-candidate election, or a ``more candidates
than seats election'' (cha'e xuanju), refers to an election
that has more candidates than the number of seats available.
For example, if the Party authorities plan to form a 12-member
party committee, they may place 15 names on the ballot. The
three people who receive the lowest number of votes will not
become members of the committee.
Single-candidate election (denge xuanju) means that
the number of candidates equals the number of seats. In other
words, there is only one candidate on the ballot for that
position. The candidate will be elected if he or she receives
more than 50 percent of the votes. Some Chinese critics believe
that the single-candidate election is, in fact, a selection or
a confirmation of the appointments made by the Party
authorities rather than a meaningful electoral competition.\14\
Preliminary election (yuxuan) refers to an election
in which eligible members first confirm the candidates on the
ballot before casting their votes.
At certain levels of CCP leadership, only one of these different
sorts of election methods is employed. At other levels, multiple
methods may be used together. For example, direct elections are usually
used in the grassroots party organizations such as village Party
branches. The CCP members vote directly to elect the Party secretary
and committee members of their Party branch. In 2008, about 2,000 town-
level Party committees in the country also conducted direct
elections.\15\ The other four kinds of elections are, in fact, all used
in the National Congress of the CCP.
The National Congress of the CCP, which has convened once every
five years since 1977, is the most important political convention in
the country. There are two kinds of delegates: invited and regular. The
17th Party Congress held in 2007, for example, had a total number of
2,270 delegates, including 57 invited delegates and 2,213 regular
delegates. These 57 invited delegates were mostly Party elders who can
be considered China's equivalent to the ``superdelegates'' of the
United States' major political parties. Like the regular delegates,
they were eligible to vote. The 2,213 regular delegates came from 38
constituencies. These included representatives from China's 31
province-level administrations, a delegation of ethnic Taiwanese, one
from the central departments of the Party, one from the ministries and
commissions of the central government, one from the major state-owned
enterprises, one comprised of representatives from China's large banks
and other financial institutions, and delegations from the People's
Liberation Army (PLA) and People's Armed Police. All 38 constituencies
went through multi-candidate elections in forming their delegations,
with the CCP Organization Department requiring that there be at least
15 percent more candidates on the ballots than the number of delegates
making up the representative body headed to the congress.\16\ This was
5 percent more than was the case at the 16th Party Congress in
2002.\17\
The National Congress of the CCP elects the Central Committee (CC).
In theory, the Central Committee then elects the Politburo, the
Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC), and the general secretary of the
Party. In practice, the members of these peak organs of the Party have
always guided the selection of members to the lower-ranking leadership
bodies, including the Central Committee, which in turn ``approves'' the
slate of candidates for the Politburo and the PBSC. Thus, the notion
that the Central Committee ``elects'' the Politburo is something of a
fiction. The members of these decision-making bodies are generally
selected by either the previous PBSC or some heavyweight political
figures. Outgoing PBSC members often ensure that their proteges will
have seats in the next Politburo or PBSC as part of a deal in exchange
for their own retirement. For example, it was widely reported in the
Hong Kong and overseas media that Zeng Qinghong was willing to vacate
his seat on the 17th PBSC in order to let his three proteges (Xi
Jinping, Zhou Yongkang, and He Guoqiang) obtain membership in this
supreme leadership body.
It would be wrong, however, to assert that there is no intra-party
competition for Central Committee seats. Since the 13th National
Congress of the CCP in 1982, Chinese authorities have adopted cha'e
xuanju for the election to the Central Committee. The 2002 Party
Congress had 5.1 percent more candidates than available full membership
seats and 5.7 percent more candidates for alternate membership
seats.\18\ In the 2007 Party Congress, the delegates voted to elect 204
full members from the total number of 221 candidates (8.3 percent more)
on the ballot. As for alternate members, the delegates voted to elect
167 alternates from the total number of 183 candidates (9.6 percent
more) on the ballot.\19\
Prior to these ``more candidates than seats'' elections, the CCP
Organization Department also holds a preliminary election in each and
every delegation during the Party Congress to confirm these two lists
of candidates--one for full members and the other for alternates. If
some candidates favored by the top leadership or designated Politburo
members received a very low number of votes during the preliminary
election in a given delegation, the top leaders would make an effort to
persuade delegates in the delegation to change their minds before the
formal election. In a way, this preliminary election not only helps
prevent ``big surprises'' in the result of later elections, but also
serves as a Chinese-style lobbying to ensure that those candidates
favored by top leaders ultimately emerge victorious from the multi-
candidate elections.
Despite efforts by the CCP authorities to control the results of
these elections, delegates to the Party Congress sometimes decide to
vote against the ``Party line.'' As a result, some candidates earmarked
by top authorities to take on important positions do not get elected to
the CC. For example, during the 13th Party Congress, Deng Liqun, a
conservative hardliner and 12th Politburo member, lost a bid for
reelection to the 13th CC.\20\ Xiao Yang, former Party secretary of
Chongqing, who was reportedly chosen by Deng Xiaoping and other veteran
leaders to be a Politburo member on the 14th CC, did not even get
enough votes for full membership on the CC. The strongest evidence of
opposition to nepotism in the election of CC members is that a number
of princelings (children of high-ranking officials) on the ballot for
the CC did not get elected despite (or perhaps because of) their
privileged family backgrounds. In the 15th Party Congress, for example,
several princelings, including Chen Yuan, Wang Jun, and Bo Xilai, were
among the 5 percent of candidates who were defeated. This despite the
fact that all of their fathers had served as vice-premiers.
Complete information about who failed to be elected in these ``more
candidates than seats'' elections is not made available to the public,
but it is interesting to see the list of elected alternate members who
received the lowest number of votes in the CC elections. According to
CCP norms, the list of all of the full members of the CC is ordered by
the number of strokes in the Chinese characters of their names, but the
list of the alternate members is arranged in accordance with the number
of votes they received in elections. Table 1 shows the alternate
members who received the lowest number of votes in the Central
Committee elections of the CCP from 1982 to 2008. All of them have very
strong patron-client ties with top leaders.
2th through 17th CCP Central Committees (1982 2007)h1Party Congressh1Total number of alternate
membersh1Alternate member with lowest number of votesh1Patron-Client backgroundh1Position when
electedh1Highest position attainedj
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total
number of Alternate member Patron-Client Position when Highest position
Party Congress alternate with lowest background elected attained
members number of votes
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
17th......................... 167 Jia Ting'an..... Personal Director, Deputy Director,
(2007)....................... assistant to General Office PLA Political
Jiang Zemin. of the Central Department.
Military
Commission.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16th......................... 158 You Xigui....... Bodyguard to Director of the Deputy Director,
(2002)....................... Jiang Zemin. CCP Central General Office
Guard Bureau. of the CCP
Central
Committee.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15th......................... 151 Xi Jinping...... Son of Xi Deputy Party Standing Member
(1997)....................... Zhongxun (Vice- Secretary of of Politburo,
Premier), Fujian Province. Vice President
personal of PRC.
assistant to
Geng Biao
(Minister of
Defense).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
14th......................... 130 Xiao Yang....... Protege of Deng Party Secretary Governor of
(1992)....................... Xiaoping. of Chongqing. Sichuan
Province.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13th......................... 110 Huang Ju........ Chief of Staff Deputy Party Standing Member
(1987)....................... to Jiang Zemin. Secretary of of Politburo,
Shanghai. Executive Vice-
Premier.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12th......................... 138 Wang Dongxing... Bodyguard to Mao Vice President Vice Chairman,
(1982)....................... Zedong. of the Central CCP Central
Party School. Committee.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources and Notes: The CCP Organization Department and the Research Office of the History of the Chinese
Communist Party, comp., Zhongguo gongchandang lijie zhongyang weiyuan dacidian, 1921-2003 [Who's Who of the
Members of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committees, 1921-2003] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe,
2004). For the 17th Central Committee, see www.xinhuanet.com.
Jia Ting'an, the alternate member who received the lowest number of
votes in the 17th Party Congress, was a longtime personal assistant to
Jiang Zemin. In the previous Party congress, the alternate member with
the poorest score was You Xigui, Jiang Zemin's bodyguard. Xi Jinping,
now the leading candidate to succeed Hu Jintao in the next Party
congress, received the lowest number of votes among the 151 alternate
members elected to the 15th Party Congress in 1997. Xi was not only the
product of a high-ranking official family, but also served as personal
assistant to former Minister of Defense Geng Biao. As mentioned
earlier, Xiao Yang, a protege of Deng Xiaoping, did not receive enough
votes for a full membership seat at the 14th Party Congress election.
He was then placed on the ballot for an alternate membership seat.
Although he was eventually elected as an alternate member, Xiao
embarrassingly received the lowest number of votes among those elected.
The alternate member elected to the 13th CC with the lowest number of
votes was Huang Ju, a prominent member of the so-called Shanghai Gang
who later obtained a seat on the PBSC. Huang served as the chief of
staff for Jiang Zemin when Jiang was the Party boss in Shanghai. The
12th Party Congress did not adopt the ``more candidates than seats''
election process. Thus, all candidates on the ballot were elected. In
that election, Wang Dongxing, former bodyguard to Mao and former vice
chairman of the CCP Central Committee, was at the very bottom of the
list of alternate members in number of votes received.
Some other leaders with strong patron-client ties were among the 10
elected alternate members who received the lowest number of votes in
recent Party congresses. They included princelings such as Deng Pufang,
Wang Qishan, Lou Jiwei, and Qiao Zonghuai. Jiang Zemin's proteges Huang
Liman and Xiong Guangkai and Hu Jintao's chief of staff, Ling Jihua,
also scored very poorly in these elections. The results of all these
elections seem to suggest that princeling backgrounds and strong
patron-client ties, which likely helped accelerate political
advancement early in the proteges' careers, may have become a political
liability for them as they rose to the national leadership. Some
princelings, however, later improved their popularity in elections by
demonstrating their leadership capacity and good performance. For
example, Wang Qishan took the post of acting mayor of Beijing in the
peak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003.
His effective leadership during the crisis earned him the reputation as
the ``chief of the fire brigade.'' In the Beijing municipal congress
meeting in 2004, Wang was confirmed mayor of Beijing with 742 ``yes''
votes and only one ``no'' vote from the delegates.\21\
Intra-Party elections are, of course, often subject to political
manipulation by the top leaders. For CCP members and delegates, the
choices in the various kinds of intra-Party elections are still very
limited. The fact that delegates to the Party congress often use their
limited voting power to exercise ``democratic rights'' to block the
election of leaders with strong nepotistic advantages may make the CCP
authorities more cautious about democratic experiments. From the
perspective of the CCP leadership, China's political reforms should be
incremental and manageable in scale. Nevertheless, the Chinese
authorities claim that there will be an ever-increasing number of
candidates in future elections to the CC. Such a method may even apply
to the formation of the Politburo in the near future. According to the
Chinese leadership, these intra-Party elections are important
components of political reforms designed to gradually make China's
party-state system more transparent, competitive, and representative.
rethinking the election of the people's congress
Elections in present-day China are not administratively neutral.
The CCP strictly controls both the election organizations and the
election process. Party chiefs at various levels of the administration
often concurrently serve as chairmen of the election committees. There
are, however, three separate organizational systems in charge of
elections in the country, namely: the CCP organization departments in
various levels of the Party committees, the people's congresses; and
civil affairs departments in various levels of government.\22\ A
comparison of the three shows that the election system of the people's
congress is more institutionalized and more transparent than the CCP
organization and civil affairs departments.
The five levels of the administration of the PRC--township, county,
municipal, provincial, and national--all have their own people's
congresses. Delegates for the people's congress are all supposed to be
elected--via direct election for township-level and indirect election
for the county-level and above.\23\ As for the National People's
Congress (NPC), its delegates are allocated according to the population
of a given province. The province with the smallest population is
guaranteed at least 15 delegates. Special administrative regions such
as Hong Kong and Macau have their quotas of delegates, as does the PLA.
Based on the 1995 census, every 880,000 people in a given rural
administrative unit, and every 220,000 people in an urban area select
one delegate to the NPC. In recent years, some public intellectuals and
local officials, especially delegates from the rural areas, have been
criticizing this bias in favor of urban areas.\24\ In the elections for
the delegates to the 11th NPC, some electoral districts--for example,
the Zichuan District in Shandong's Zibo City--abolished the urban-rural
differentiation. This was called one of the 10 biggest breakthroughs in
the constitutional development of the PRC in 2007.\25\ Since that time,
some other counties and cities have begun to follow the lead of Zichuan
District in their own local elections.\26\
Like the National Congress of the CCP, the National People's
Congress selects new leadership every five years at a meeting usually
held in the spring of the year following the Party congress. The 11th
NPC, which was formed in March 2008, consisted of 2,987 delegates. The
11th NPC also adopted the ``more candidates than seats'' electoral
process in choosing the members of the Standing Committee (a total of
161 seats). There were 7 percent more candidates (a total of 173) on
the ballot than there were seats.\27\ In theory, NPC delegates are not
only supposed to elect the members of their congress's Standing
Committee, but are also entitled to elect the president and vice
president of the PRC, the chairman of the Central Military Commission
(CMC), the chief justice of the Supreme People's Court, and the chief
of the Supreme People's Procuratorate. They are also empowered to
approve the premier as well as the other members of the State Council
and CMC. In reality, however, all these candidates are nominated by the
NPC Presidium (zhuxituan), which simply passes on the list of nominees
designated for appointment by the Central Committee of the CCP to the
NPC. None of these leadership positions is chosen through multi-
candidate elections.
An interesting phenomenon is that the delegates of the NPC are now
often voting against some top leaders in the confirmation process,
voicing their dissent about political nepotism or favoritism by certain
senior leaders or factions. For example, the ``Shanghai Gang,'' the
leaders who advanced their careers from Shanghai largely due to their
patron-client ties with Jiang, usually scored very poorly in these
elections.
Table 2 shows the results of the elections of the top two leaders
of five national institutions elected at the 10th NPC and Chinese
People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) held in 2003. Jiang
Zemin and his proteges are indicated in boldface. Their scores are not
nearly as impressive as those of their counterparts. While Hu Jintao
lost only seven votes (four ``no'' votes and three abstentions) out of
2,944 valid votes at the 10th NPC for the confirmation of his
presidency, Jiang received 98 ``no'' votes and 122 abstentions out of
2,946 valid votes in the confirmation of his chairmanship of the
Central Military Commission. Zeng Qinghong received only 87.5 percent
of ``yes'' votes--out of 2,945 valid votes, there were 177 ``no'' votes
and 190 abstentions. Other longtime proteges of Jiang suffered similar
humiliation, including Executive Vice Premier Huang Ju, who received an
embarrassingly low number of votes in his confirmation as vice-premier
of the State Council, and Jia Qinglin, who won only 88.5 percent of the
votes for his position in the CPPCC election. Among the 29 ministers
elected to the 10th NPC, Governor of the People's Bank Zhou Xiaochuan,
who was known for his strong patron-client ties with Jiang, received
the lowest number of votes.\28\ The overwhelming support for Hu Jintao
and Wen Jiabao as evident in the vote counts at the 10th NPC explains
why they have been able to make remarkable socioeconomic policy
changes, downplaying Jiang's elitist approach in favor of their own
populist agenda.\29\
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes vote Yes vote
Power Institution No. 1 Leader (percent) No. 2 leader (percent)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRC Presidency....................... Hu Jintao............... 99.8 Zeng Qinghong ......... 87.5
State Central Military Commission.... Jiang Zemin ............ 92.5 Hu Jintao.............. 99.7
State Council........................ Wen Jiabao.............. 99.3 Huang Ju .............. 91.8
NPC.................................. Wu Bangguo ............. 98.9 Wang Zhaoguo........... 99.2
CPPCC................................ Jia Qinglin ............ 88.5 Wang Zhongyu........... 98.3
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: The names of Jiang Zemin and his proteges appear in boldface.
Source: Originally viewed at http://www.bbs.xilubbs.com. Also see Cheng Li, ``The `New Deal': Politics and
Policies of the Hu Administration,'' Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 38, nos. 4-5 (December 2003):
329-346.
Table 3 shows the vote counts for the chairman, vice chairmen, and
general secretary who were elected at the 11th NPC in March 2008. Hua
Jianmin and Chen Zhili, two prominent members of the Shanghai Gang,
received the highest numbers of ``no'' and ``abstention'' votes. In
contrast, two vice chairmen with ethnic minority backgrounds, Uyunqimg
(a Mongolian) and Ismail Tiliwaldi (a Uighur), received the highest
numbers of ``yes'' votes. Among these 15 vice chairmen, six were not
members of the CCP. These leaders represent the so-called democratic
parties (minzhu dangpai) in the PRC and they also received relatively
higher numbers of ``yes'' votes.\30\ These ``democratic parties'' are,
of course, all too small to compete with, or challenge, the CCP in any
meaningful way. As of 2007, the membership numbers of these parties
ranged from 2,100 (the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League) to
181,000 (the China Democratic League). Their representation in the NPC
is largely symbolic. Nevertheless, it is important to note that an
increasing number of candidates who are not CCP members have recently
participated in the people's congress elections. In 2003, there were
only about 100 candidates for the position of delegate at people's
congresses who were not designated by the local authorities. In 2007,
the number of such candidates increased to almost 10,000.\31\
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total
NPC Position Name Background CCP votes For Against Abstain
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chairman.............................. Wu Bangguo............... CCP, member of Politburo Yes..................... 2,966 2,948 9 9
Standing Committee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Wang Zhaoguo............. CCP, Politburo member; Yes..................... 2,964 2,947 11 6
chairman, All-China
Federation of Trade
Unions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Lu Yongxiang............. CCP, president of China's Yes..................... 2,964 2,940 11 13
Academy of Sciences.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Uyunqimg................. CCP, former governor of Yes..................... 2,964 2,956 5 3
Neimenggu (Mongolia).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Han Qide................. Chairman, Jiusha Society; No...................... 2,964 2,950 9 5
chairman, China
Association of
Scientists.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Hua Jianmin.............. CCP, former State Yes..................... 2,964 2,901 48 15
Councilor, member of the
Shanghai Gang.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Chen Zhili............... CCP, former State Yes..................... 2,964 2,816 112 36
Councilor, member of the
Shanghai Gang.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Zhou Tienong............. Chairman, Revolutionary No...................... 2,964 2,934 20 10
Committee of the Chinese
Nationalist Party.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Li Jianguo............... CCP, former personal Yes..................... 2,964 2,911 39 14
assistant to Li Ruihuan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Ismail Tiliwaldi......... CCP, former governor of Yes..................... 2,964 2,957 5 2
Xinjiang.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Jiang Shusheng........... Chairman, China No...................... 2,964 2,948 11 5
Democratic League.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Chen Changzhi............ Chairman, China National No...................... 2,964 2,941 13 10
Democratic Construction
Association.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Yan Junqi................ Chairman, China No...................... 2,964 2,945 11 8
Association for
Promoting Democracy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice chairman......................... Sang Weiguo.............. Chairman, Chinese No...................... 2,964 2,935 18 11
Peasants' and Workers'
Democratic Party.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General secretary..................... Li Jianguo............... See above................ Yes..................... 2,965 2,932 25 8
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: www.chinesenewsnet.com, 15 March 2008.
Jiang Zemin's proteges fared as poorly in the election at the 11th
NPC as they did in those at the 10th, again receiving the lowest number
of votes in the confirmation of ministers of the State Council. It was
reported in the Hong Kong and overseas media that, of the total of
2,946 valid votes, Minister of Education Zhou Ji had 384 ``no'' votes
and Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun had 211 ``no'' votes. State
Councilor Ma Kai also received 117 ``no'' votes. Their poor vote counts
might be due partly to the fact that all three were known as Jiang's
proteges, and partly to the fact that the delegates were concerned
about China's educational problems as well as some serious train
accidents that had recently occurred.\32\ Although these vote counts
usually do not block the confirmation of the candidates, they might
jeopardize some political leaders' chance for further promotion. For
example, the strong opposition to Ma Kai's promotion expressed by the
delegates and standing committee members of the NPC was widely believed
to be the reason he later failed to gain a Politburo membership
seat.\33\ Consequently, he was not considered for a vice-premiership.
The growing importance of the people's congress in the confirmation
process has convinced some Chinese officials to try political lobbying.
For example, in 2007, Li Junqu, assistant governor of Hebei Province,
bribed several delegates of the provincial people's congress in order
to be nominated and confirmed for the post of vice governor.\34\
Similarly, Li Tangtang, vice governor of Shaanxi Province, urged eight
friends or colleagues of his to make phone calls and send text messages
to 50 officials, asking them to vote for him. Although Li Tangtang did
not bribe anyone, his lobbying activities were still considered illegal
under CCP regulations. During the past two years, the CCP Organization
Department uncovered 121 similar cases of political lobbying or other
``wrongdoings'' among officials at the county level or above.\35\
final thoughts
Intra-party democracy is, of course, not real democracy. In terms
of electoral competition for selecting state leaders, China still has a
long way to go. Yet, the recent political experiments in both the CCP
leadership and the people's congresses are unlikely be a static
phenomenon. Political lobbying and negative campaigns, which are now
officially prohibited, will probably develop in the future given the
introduction of limited political competition. Elections to the Central
Committee are also likely to become more competitive as time passes.
Over time, Chinese politicians will become more and more familiar with
the new ``rules of the game'' in elite politics. As a result, the
country may soon witness an even more dynamic phase in the evolution of
Chinese politics. At the same time, the people of China may begin to
ask why only the Party elites, and not the public at large, have the
opportunity to enjoy ``democracy.'' They will likely call for more
genuine and fair elections to select local government leaders,
especially the delegates to the people's congresses. To a certain
extent, this process has already begun, and will undoubtedly have a
profound impact on state-society relations in the country.
It is still too early to conclude that China is in the midst of a
historic transition from selection to election in the recruitment of
political elites. The Chinese political system is still predominantly a
Leninist party state in which the CCP monopolizes all the most
important posts in the government. Yet, the formats, procedures, and
results of these limited and partially controlled elections are
enormously valuable to our understanding of Chinese politics today.
They not only reveal the factional tensions and behavioral patterns of
the CCP leaders, but are also indicative of the policy orientation,
public opinions, and political choices of the leaders in this rapidly
changing country.
notes
\1\ The author is indebted to Yinsheng Li for his research
assistance. The author also thanks Sally Carman and Robert O'Brien for
suggesting ways in which to clarify the article.
\2\ This documentary film has been widely viewed on YouTube. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=-Jkaij-51tU.
\3\ See http://www.ccdtr.org/index.php/docs/41.
\4\ The CCP Organization Department, ``Dangzheng lingdao ganbu
xuanba renyong gongzuo tiaoli'' [The regulations of selection and
appointment of the Party and government leaders], 2002. See http:/
news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2003-01/18/content--695422.htm. For the
updated Q & A made by the CCP Organization Department in 2005, see
http://www.mot.gov.cn/zizhan/siju/renlaosi/zhengceguiding/
lingdaoganbu--GL/kaoheyurenmian/200709/t20070920--401063.html.
\5\ Shu Taifeng, ``Shenzhen Zhenggai toushi wenlu'' [Experiments of
political reforms in Shenzhen], Liaowang dongfang zhoukan (Oriental
Outlook Weekly), http://news.sohu.com/20080707/n257998881.shtml.
\6\ Shenzhen's total registered population is about 3 million, but
the real number of residents including migrant workers totals 10
million. Some members of the provincial People's Congress recently
argued that every resident in Shenzhen above the legal age for voting
should be entitled to vote, not just the registered residents. Nanfang
dushi bao (Southern Metropolitan Daily), 13 August 2008; see http:/
news.southcn.com/gdnews/nanyuedadi/content/2008-08/13/content--
4535126.htm.
\7\ See Liu Xiaojing, ``Shenzhen ni tuixing shizhang cha'e xuanju
waimei jianyi sheli zhengzhi tequ'' [Shenzhen plans to select its mayor
though a multi-candidate election: Foreign media suggest that the city
become a special political zone]. Guoji xianqu daobao (International
Herald), 20 June 2008, http://news.sohu.com/20080620/n257623652.shtml.
\8\ See Cheng Li, ``Hu's Southern Expedition: Changing Leadership
in Guangdong,'' China Leadership Monitor 24 (Spring 2008).
\9\ Shu Taifeng, ``Shenzhen Zhenggai toushi wenlu.''
\10\ Quoted in Shu Taifeng, ``Shenzhen Zhenggai toushi wenlu.''
\11\ John L. Thornton, ``Long Time Coming: The Prospects for
Democracy in China.'' Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, no. 1 (January/February
2008).
\12\One exception was the widely noticed election for the delegates
for the Haidian District People's Congress in the early 1980s. See
http://www.66wen.com/03fx/shehuixue/shehuigongzuo/ 20061109/28740.html.
\13\ See http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2007-10/08/content--
6843377--6.htm.
\14\ Cai Xia, ``Dangnei minzhu tansuo yu wenti'' [Inner-Party
democracy: Experiments and problems], http://www.world-china.org
//newsdetail.asp?newsid=2167.
\15\ Ibid.
\16\ See http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2006-11/12/content--
5319132.htm.
\17\ See http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2007-08/03/content--
6470512.htm.
\18\ See http://news.eastday.com/c/shiqida/u1a3177599.html.
\19\ See http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2007-10/21/content--
6918611--4.htm.
\20\ Deng Liqun discussed this episode in his memoir, Shi'erge
Chunqiu: Deng Liqun zishu [12 Years: Deng Liqun's Account]. Hong Kong:
Dafeng chubanshe, 2006.
\21\ Xinjing bao (New Beijing daily), 23 February 2004, p. 1.
\22\ i Fan, ``Jianli gongzheng xuanju zhidu de zhongyao yihuan:
Zhongguo xuanju zuzhi jigou de gaige'' [A key in the establishment of a
fair election system: The reform of China's election organizations].
Beijing yu fenxi (Backgrounds and Analysis), no. 152 (August 2008): 1.
\23\ For details of the People's Congress elections at various
levels, see http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2003-08/22/content--
1039490.htm.
\24\ For example, see Mo Jihong, ``Zhubu jianli geng pingdeng de
renda daibiao xuanju zhidu'' [Gradually establishing a more fair and
competitive election system for deputies of the people's congress].
http://www.world-china.org/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2070.
\25\ See http://news.sohu.com/20080317/n255736788.shtml.
\26\ Ibid.
\27\ In the 10th NPC, there were 5 percent more candidates on the
ballot than the number of seats up for election. See http:/
news.sohu.com/20080317/n255736788.shtml.
\28\ In the total of 2,935 valid votes, Zhou received 163 ``no''
votes and 49 ``abstention'' votes.
\29\ For a more detailed discussion of policy changes from the
Jiang administration to the Hu-Wen administration, see Barry Naughton,
``China's Left Tilt: Pendulum Swing or Midcourse Correction? '' in
Cheng Li, ed., China's Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for
Democracy. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008, pp. 142--
158.
\30\ The Chinese authorities often claim that the PRC has eight
other political parties, which are often collectively referred to as
``democratic parties.'' These are: the Revolutionary Committee of the
Chinese Nationalist Party, the China Democratic League, the China
National Democratic Construction Association, the China Association for
Promoting Democracy, the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic
Party, the China Zhi Gong Dang, the Jiu San Society, and the Taiwan
Democratic Self-Government League.
\31\ See http://www.world-china.org/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2021.
\32\ Shijie ribao (World Journal), 18 March 2008, p. A12.
\33\ This was based on the author's interviews in Beijing in 2007
and 2008.
\34\ See http://www.stnn.cc/ed--china/200712/t20071218--
694717.html.
\35\ See http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-02-05/152012234762.shtml.
______
Prepared Statement of Melanie Manion
may 22, 2009
From the 1950s through the 1980s, American scholars and policy
makers easily and appropriately dismissed the ``people's congresses''
of elected legislative representatives in mainland China as ``rubber
stamps.'' Yet, in recent years, without challenging the communist party
monopoly, the Chinese congresses have become significant political
players. They veto government reports, they quiz and dismiss officials,
and they reject candidates selected by the communist party for
leadership. The liveliest congresses are found not at the center of
power in Beijing nor in provincial capitals, but below--in the cities,
counties, and townships.
The new assertiveness of local congresses is not a grassroots
movement. It was set in motion by rules designed and promoted by
authoritarian rulers in Beijing. Understanding what has (and has not)
changed in these local congresses is a window on the ``officially
acceptable'' meaning of representative democracy in mainland China
today.
My argument this morning is that congressional empowerment
exemplifies a difficult, risky, strategic, and partly successful
communist party effort to strengthen authoritarianism by opening up
politics to new players, giving them procedural status in the political
game, and accepting losses in particular instances in order to win the
bigger prize of authoritarian persistence. It is a difficult effort
because a legacy of congressional irrelevance cannot be easily erased
in the minds of ordinary voters and local party and government
officials. It is a risky effort because credibility requires that the
effort go beyond authoritarian ``cheap talk''--but the regime certainly
does not want to encourage runaway democratization in the form of new
democratic parties or too many ``independent candidates.'' It is a
strategic effort in the sense that it is designed not to promote
liberal democracy but to strengthen authoritarian rule with more
responsive political institutions under the guardianship of a single
communist party.
Finally, the effort is only partly successful. Local congress
representatives see themselves as substantive political players with
electoral legitimacy, not the congressional puppets of the Maoist era.
This is especially the case in congresses at lower levels. Popularly
elected congress representatives speak and act the new language of
voting districts, constituents, and constituent interests. They help
constituents with private matters and work to provide local public
goods. They see this as their most important responsibility. They see
their second most important responsibility as electing government
leaders, in this quasi-parliamentary system. In electing government
leaders, local congresses are not the simple stooges of local communist
party committees, as they were in the past. In nominating candidates
for government leadership, communist party committees can no longer
treat the congresses as reliable voting machines. When local communist
party committees fail to take local interests into account in
nominating their candidates for leadership, these party committee
candidates can and do lose. Again, this is especially the case in
congresses at lower levels.
At the same time and despite official voter turnout figures of over
90 percent, reliable survey evidence indicates that very high
proportions of ordinary Chinese know little or nothing about local
congress candidates on election day, say they didn't vote in the most
recent congress election, and can recall nothing their congress
representatives have done in the past term. Most alarmingly for the
Chinese authorities, these proportions have increased, not decreased,
over the past fifteen years. In short, if local congress
representatives now think and act as agents of their constituents, it
is not because ordinary Chinese voters see themselves as principals.
Put another way, if representative democracy is working, most ordinary
Chinese do not yet see it that way.
To understand these different perspectives, it is useful to
understand what has and has not changed in the rules.
Let me first summarize a few important unchanged features of
Chinese representative democracy. First, direct electoral participation
by ordinary Chinese is restricted to the lowest congress levels. Only
township and county congresses are elected in popular elections. Above
the county level, elections only involve congress insiders: each
congress is elected by the congress below it. This reflects an elitist
notion of guardianship that is both Leninist and traditionally Chinese.
Second, congresses are large and unwieldy, they meet infrequently, and
most representatives are amateurs with neither the time nor material
resources for congressional work. The working congresses are the much
smaller standing committees--but not all standing committee members at
all levels work full time for the congresses, and there are no standing
committees at the lowest congress level. Large amateur congresses
reflect a Marxist view that only by continuing to work on the front
line at the grassroots can representatives forge a meaningful
relationship with their constituents. Finally and not least of all, a
single communist party monopolizes political power. Competing political
parties are banned, as are inner-party factions. This is important in
at least two ways. Communists numerically dominate all Chinese
congresses at all levels: they make up about 65 percent of township
congresses and about 70 percent of congresses above this level. As a
matter of organizational discipline, the communist party should be able
to impose its will on all congresses. A second consequence of communist
party monopoly has to do with interest representation. Without
competitive interest aggregation along party (or any other) lines,
``party'' has no meaning as an organizing category for voters. Voters
cannot sort out representatives and assign, through votes in popular
elections, credit or blame for governance outcomes. Put another way,
the communist party monopoly strips representatives of labels that
reflect policy orientations. This places a truly impossible information
burden on voters.
Let me turn now to what has changed. In the interests of time, I
focus on the most fundamental set of rules: congressional electoral
reform, particularly direct popular elections of congresses at lower
levels. In 1979, the first local congress elections of the post-Mao era
introduced three new electoral rules: elections must be contested,
voting must be by secret ballot, and groups of ordinary voters may
nominate candidates. These rules are a radical departure from Maoist-
era practices, and they remain the basic organizing principles of
congress elections today. These and other electoral rules created new
opportunities for ordinary Chinese and new challenges for the
authorities.
For example, voter nomination of candidates mobilizes ordinary
Chinese to bring them into the electoral process at the very
beginning--only to disappoint them, even before election day. Any group
of ten voters may nominate a candidate. This is a low threshold of
support. One result is a large number of voter-nominated candidates--
tens, sometimes even hundreds of candidates for two or three congress
seats. Winners in congress elections must win a majority (not
plurality) of votes. To produce a decisive election, the rules set a
ceiling of no more than twice the number of candidates on the ballot as
congress seats. By default, the process of winnowing out many tens of
candidates to choose a few candidates for the ballot must eliminate a
large number of voter nominees. Most nominees are passive: they do not
take the initiative to seek congressional office. Only small
proportions of voter nominees are ``independent candidates,'' who
orchestrate their nomination by voters and actively seek office to
promote individual or collective goals.
The law permits independent candidates, but there are plenty of
ways for election committees to harass them--and this harassment is
routine in many localities. In addition, the election committees manage
the pivotal winnowing out process, which is much criticized as a
``black box.'' Election committees are also instructed to induce
congresses that satisfy certain electoral quotas--20 percent women, for
example. To reduce electoral uncertainty created by contestation, the
winnowing out process takes these quotas into consideration. Overall,
candidates nominated by the party and party-controlled organizations do
better than voter nominees in this process and they also do better in
the elections. This creates a credibility problem. In the words of two
pre-eminent Chinese congress scholars: ``This situation disappoints
voters, [especially] voters who nominate candidates, and leads to
suspicion about the fairness of the elections.''
From initial nomination of candidates to election day is a mere 15
days. Electoral campaigns are prohibited by law. With little time and
without campaigns or competitive party labels, a high proportion of
Chinese vote blindly. In the late 1990s, some localities allowed
election committees to arrange face-to-face meetings between candidates
and voters and organized de facto primary elections. The system did not
implode with this modest local tinkering. Indeed, the political center
responded: in 2004 the electoral law was revised to include these
features.
Let me conclude. I commented earlier that if representative
democracy is working, most ordinary Chinese do not yet see it that way.
What has and has not changed in the rules that govern congresses and
congress elections goes some way toward explaining this.
Representative democracy in mainland China is not authoritarian
``cheap talk.'' At this point in time, however, it remains essentially
a game of congress insiders. For them, what is most salient about
elections is a new electoral uncertainty: with secret ballots and
electoral contestation, they can lose. As winners, then, they have
electoral legitimacy. Representatives in popularly elected congresses
think and act as agents of their constituents. By contrast, ordinary
Chinese pay attention to local congresses once every five years, when
they are mobilized to vote in elections that are not yet well
structured to generate their interest.
______
Prepared Statement of Yawei Liu
may 22, 2009
old and new assessments
On April 1, 2009, the New China News Agency filed a wire story
featuring a conversation among three prominent Chinese scholars on the
current status of village elections in China. According to these
scholars, a fair evaluation of the 20-year-old practice can be
summarized by the following:
(1) China's rural residents have acquired a much keener sense
of democracy, rule of law and individual rights;
(2) The electoral procedures have become more standardized.
The best indicator of this is the wide use of secret ballot
booths on election day;
(3) These elections have become more competitive and open;
(4) Voter participation has become more rational;
(5) The election outcome is largely positive with those
elected being technically capable, market savvy and qualified
to lead villagers to a more prosperous life;
(6) The decisionmaking and daily administration of village
affairs have become more democratic with the creation of
villager representative assemblies and adoption of village
charters;
(7) The relationship between rural residents and the Party
// state has significantly improved as a result of these
elections.
About seven years ago, on July 8, 2002, I spoke at the Roundtable
organized by CECC on village elections in China and offered the
following assessment on the status of village elections:
(1) Elections have provided a safety valve for hundreds of
millions of Chinese peasants who are angry and confused as
their lives are often subject to constant exploitation and
pressure;
(2) They have introduced legal election procedures into a
culture that has never entertained open and free elections;
(3) They have cultivated a new system of values, 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.
In addition to the above, I also tentatively described three
potential effects of village elections: (1) direct village elections
are a right accorded to the least educated and most conservative group
of Chinese society and other groups might demand the same right; (2)
free and open choice was made possible by free nomination and
secret balloting and the same set of procedures might be used by the
personnel apparatus at higher levels of the Chinese government in
promotion; and (3) village elections offered a neat blueprint for the
vast and populous Chinese nation to slowly move up the electoral ladder
and fulfill what Deng Xiaoping once pledged: China would have free,
direct national elections in 50 years.
If one compares the assessments of village elections by the
scholars and mine that were separated by seven years, there is no
significant difference. In other words, there is not much more to add
in terms of defining the status of village elections in China. While I
outlined the potential impact of village elections on China's overall
political landscape seven years ago, Chinese scholars have refrained
from touching on this subject in 2009. Looking back, how do I assess
what I said then?
In the early 2000s, many citizens in Beijing, Shenzhen and other
cities demanded their full right to vote and to get elected. The demand
came in outbursts and was termed by many as the election storm but it
did not go very far. Neither was it warmly received by the government.
We may attribute this to a few factors:
(1) The growing middle class in China seems to enjoy the way
of life they have achieved through economic reforms. They may
be concerned that any new changes will either cause a backlash
or trigger a challenge to the status quo. When Jackie Chan
mentioned that the Chinese people need to be ``controlled''
(guanqilai) at the recent Bo'ao Forum, he was warmly applauded
by the audience, which was comprised of members of China's
business and political elite.
(2) Direct elections were increasingly linked by the Chinese
power apparatus and academic elite to an evil conspiracy
orchestrated by the West, headed by the United States. These
elites charged that elections are not a tool China needs to
combat corruption and enhance good governance; rather,
elections are a wedge used by Western nations envious of
China's growth to stop China from becoming a strong and
harmonious power.
(3) Without changes in the existing laws and regulations, any
attempt to elevate direct elections to other levels of
government can easily be deemed illegal or unconstitutional.
The real impact of village elections lies in the area of wide
application of their procedures either directly or indirectly at high
levels of the government. It should be emphasized that village election
procedures are usually not adopted wholesale because doing so would
violate existing laws. Rather, it is the idea of a more open nomination
process, a more competitive way of selecting preliminary candidates,
and a more transparent means of choosing the right person among
multiple candidates that has been used at the township, county and even
higher levels of the government and the Party.
These new and innovative experiments in selecting government and
Party officials are bold and popular but there are also inherent
problems. First, they are isolated and there have been no efforts to
turn such successful pilots into a policy that would be widely adopted.
Second, they are designed to expand choice, but all the new procedures
adopted have to fall within the constraints of existing laws. As a
result, the procedures are complex, elaborate and even cumbersome,
making it very difficult and costly to implement. Lastly, many
officials have to take political risks to introduce these measures and
the fear of offending higher level officials runs deep.
When it comes to the final scenario of China becoming a democracy,
vibrant
village elections are still seen as a first step. This was the vision
of Peng Zhen, chairman of the Standing Committee of the NPC under whose
watch the Organic Law of the Villager Committees was adopted on a
provisional basis in 1987. This is the vision of Wen Jiabao, who has
repeatedly told foreign visitors that grassroots elections in China
will eventually move up to the higher echelons of the government. This
was also the hope of many people both inside and outside China. Many
felt the hope had become reality when Suining City officials organized
the direct election of the magistrate in Buyun Township on the last day
of 1998. The hope was somewhat dashed when Buyun did not become China's
political Xiaogang and the fear of a Color Revolution sweeping through
China since 2005 has swept away what seemed to be the logical next step
for a planned democracy to eventually take shape in China.
the declining relevance of china's village elections
At the May 2002 roundtable, I said that village committee elections
became so popular that they caused negative reactions from groups who
saw these elections as a threat to the status quo. ``There is a
systematic and almost conspiratorial effort to label village elections
as a source of evil that is
(1) undermining the Party's leadership in rural areas,
affecting rural stability,
(2) turning the rural economy upside down, and
(3) helping clan and other old forms of power to control and
grow in the countryside.''
These charges against village elections have only increased in
intensity and scale in recent years with more reports of cases of
violence associated with elections, vote buying and four types of
people seizing control of village elections. The four types of people
are ``the rich,'' ``the strong,'' ``the evil'' and ``the patriarch
(clan leader)''
respectively. Many scholars argue that village elections are very
violent and very corrupt, indicating that as a trial of adopting
Western-style democracy, they are a complete fiasco and are not
suitable to the Chinese situation at all.
These accusations are irrational and despicable attacks on the
capability and readiness of the Chinese farmers who are keen in
participating in these elections. They are indicative of a strong
political elite within the Party/state apparatus and their academic
supporters that are bent on preventing the introduction of meaningful
political reform through defining direct elections as something totally
alien to Chinese culture, severely damaging to all developing
countries, and utterly impossible to implement in a country with such a
large and unruly population.
Regardless of how misleading these criticisms are, village
elections are indeed becoming less relevant to the lives of Chinese
farmers. There are several underlying causes. First, the young,
educated and informed farmers are working in the cities. They are
unable to run for village committee seats and to personally participate
in these elections. Second, with the abolition of rural taxes and fees
in recent years, a highly charged election has disappeared. The
authority of the village committee is also being eroded as a result.
Its relationship with the township government has become less
substantial. Third, the Chinese government has opened the door for land
reform, allowing farmers to enter into joint ventures, using their land
rights as shares. It seems a new kind of election is emerging in areas
that are moving fast on land reform, namely the election of board
members of the joint venture. Fourth, there is a shift at the top level
of the Chinese government from institutionalizing village self-
government to finding ways to increase farmers' income. This shift is
even more urgent when the economy enters into a downturn and when
farmers' lack of access to education, healthcare and unemployment
benefits not only decreases domestic consumption but creates fertile
soil for social unrest and mass incidents.
There is a consensus at the top not to introduce direct elections
at higher levels of the government. A large number of scholars have
declared that direct elections are a unique Western intellectual idea
that cannot be transferred to China. The Party is not even yielding its
personnel selection power at the village level to direct election
methods. Efforts at directly selecting township magistrates have been
strictly forbidden since 2001. Within this political context, village
elections will continue in years to come. Last year, 18 provinces held
direct village elections, involving 400 million rural voters. However,
these elections are limited to villages alone. Their impact on rural
governance is limited. They will not and cannot be a driving force for
China's political reform.
will there be electoral democracy with chinese characteristics?
Chinese leaders have openly declared that a multi-party system is
not good, that a system of checks and balances are contrary to the
supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and that Western style
democracy does not fit China's unique circumstances. Chinese scholars
are divided. Those on the left either say China has already enshrined a
unique system of democracy that was able to deliver a brilliant
response to a disastrous earthquake and host an unprecedentedly
successful Olympic Games or that the blind faith in using elections to
combat corruption and
improve governance is a dangerous superstition. Scholars leaning toward
the right are likely to argue that it is counterproductive to denounce
Western-style democracy. The focus should be on making China's
democracy a working and executable model. Many suggest that political
reform won't take place unless there is judicial independence,
transparency and measurable governance in China. Others advocate
freedom of the press and freedom of speech as the prerequisite for
eventual democratization. These scholars tend to neglect the importance
of elections.
A small group of scholars, notably Cai Dingjian of the China
University of Political Science and Law and Jia Xijin of Tsinghua
University, believe that choice and accountability are not possible
without free and fair elections. Jia Xijin recently wrote that China
does not have to introduce direct elections of government leaders but
should cut the number of people's deputies at all levels and make their
elections direct and competitive. According to her recommendation,
China's National People's Congress (NPC) should reduce its number of
``Congressmen'' and ``Congresswomen'' from the current 2,987 to about
750, with a minimum of two coming from each of China's 334 cities.
Election of NPC deputies must be direct. Elected NPC deputies must be
professional and paid representatives with staff support. They will
subsequently take their job seriously and do a good job in electing
state leaders, supreme court justices and top law enforcers, approving
budgets, supervising expenditures and endorsing national level
policies.
Jia Xijin's proposal is bold and feasible but it is probably just a
vision at this time. To get the Party to give up airtight control at
the national level immediately with no conditions is unthinkable if you
look at how difficult it is for the Party to give popularly elected
village committees total control over their own affairs. For a
political entity that has always held power, to be held accountable by
another entity popularly elected requires a learning process. The Party
has to learn how to subject itself to the wishes and whims of the
people's representatives. It is not going to be an easy adjustment.
Furthermore, it will take time for the Party-state leaders, scholars
and China's middle class to believe that having people's
representatives as masters of the Party will not lead to chaos and
instability. This process can proceed without changing any laws and
creating new institutions. This requires the process of making direct
elections of people's representatives at the township/town and county
//district levels as competitive and transparent as village elections.
Every five years, all eligible voters in China, possibly numbering
900 million, are supposed to directly elect representatives for
people's congresses at the town/township and county/district levels.
These elected people's representatives will then elect government
leaders, approve budgets and endorse policy at their respective levels
and also elect people's representatives to higher levels. Unless these
elections are free of manipulation and these elected deputies have real
power, capable people will not run for these positions and voters are
not going to be interested in voting in these elections.
It takes vision, courage and time to make these elections
meaningful. Making these elections open does not mean introducing
Western style democracy. These are elections in which the Communist
Party can field its candidates without blocking other organizations
from society at large from having their candidates compete. Those
elected will elect government leaders. They are not members of the mob;
they are well informed, well-placed and well-connected. In order to
ensure that the Party cannot interfere with these elections and that
those who choose to interfere will be punished, existing laws need to
be amended, new laws drafted and new institutions created.
If China's leaders are unwilling or cannot incorporate the
procedures of village elections to direct elections of local people's
representatives and accept this gradual and indirect electoral
democracy, we will have to consider that China might be able to defy
universally recognized developmental models and create a new political
system that will sustain economic growth, check government abuse,
reduce corruption and inefficiency, protect people's pursuit of
happiness, and create a harmonious state that loves all, hates none and
poses no threat to the outside world. his would be a daring new system,
and an emerging substitute to the Washington Consensus.
______
Prepared Statement of Bruce J. Dickson
may 22, 2009
Who Consents to the ``Beijing Consensus? ''
Crony Communism in China
After three decades of economic reform in China, many observers
expect that political change will be the inevitable consequence of
ongoing economic development. However, China's current combination of a
vibrant economy and Leninist political institutions runs contrary to
the ``Washington consensus,'' which asserts that state intervention is
not conducive to economic development, and that economic freedoms
require political liberties associated with democracy to flourish. This
neo-liberal model has been the cornerstone of international aid and
lending programs for the past two decades. However, China offers an
alternative arrangement that may be appealing to a variety of
developing countries. The ``Beijing consensus'' suggests that rapid
economic development requires active leadership by political elites
committed to growth and that authoritarian rule is necessary to sustain
these pro-growth policies and limit demands for greater equity and
social welfare. The ``Beijing consensus'' therefore is antithetical to
the ``Washington consensus'' and has so far defied the logic that
economic development inevitably leads to political change. Rather than
conform to neo-liberal orthodoxy or predictions of regime change,
China's leaders are committed to promoting economic growth by
integrating wealth and power.
The expectation that economic reform in general and privatization
in particular is leading to democratization in China is based on two
assumptions. First, the CCP is a passive actor, unaware of the social
changes that are accompanying economic modernization and unable to
adapt itself to these new circumstances. Second, China's capitalists
are inherently pro-democratic. Both of these assumptions are faulty,
and the predictions based on them equally shaky.
Rather than a passive actor, the CCP has been the primary agent of
economic and social change, and has been to be far more adaptable than
most observers have anticipated.\1\ In the course of promoting its
policies of economic reform and opening (gaige kaifang), it has
actively embraced the private sector in a variety of ways.\2\
Throughout the reform period, its support for the private sector has
grown significantly. Rhetorically, it has pledged to ``support,
encourage and guide'' the private sector.\3\ This pledge--with
increasingly strong language--has been a part of the Chinese
constitution since 1988. In addition, it amended the state constitution
in 2004 to protect private property, and enacted a property rights law
in 2007 to codify this commitment. Ideologically, the CCP has evolved
from seeing private entrepreneurs as a potential threat to its
existence to embracing them as a key source of support. In 1989, soon
after the violent end of popular demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and
throughout the country, the CCP banned the recruitment of capitalists
into the CCP, viewing them as using ``illegal methods to seek huge
profits and thereby create great social disparity and contribute to
discontent among the public.'' \4\ But during the 1990s and to the
present, the CCP came to see the private sector as the main source of
new economic growth, job creation, and tax revenue. Rather than viewing
private entrepreneurs as class enemies, the CCP embraced them as
partners. In Jiang Zemin's theory of the ``Three Represents,''
entrepreneurs were elevated to the first of the groups the CCP claimed
to represent. With this justification, the CCP has not only encouraged
its members to go into the private sector, it has co-opted private
entrepreneurs into the party. Institutionally, the CCP has created a
variety of links with the private sector, including a dense variety of
business associations (some affiliated with the CCP, others organized
by capitalists themselves). These allow the CCP to monitor the private
sector, and also allow entrepreneurs to interact with and even lobby
the government. A second type of institutional link is the network of
party organizations that have been created in private firms. This is
one of the CCP's traditional means of linking itself to society, and
has been an increasingly common occurrence in the private sector over
the past decade.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Recent scholarship on the adaptability of the CCP includes
Andrew Nathan, ``Authoritarian Resilience,'' Journal of Democracy, vol.
14, no. 1 (January 2003), pp. 6-17; Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard and Zheng
Yongnian, eds., Bringing the Party Back In: How China Is Governed
(Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004); Cheng Li, ``The New
Bipartisanship within the Chinese Communist Party,'' Orbis, vol. 49,
no. 3 (summer 2005), pp. 387-400; and David Shambaugh, China's
Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Berkeley and Washington, DC:
University of California Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008).
\2\ The discussion that follows is based on the more detailed
analysis in Wealth into Power: The Communist Party's Embrace of China's
Private Sector (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Related
coverage of these issues can be found in Kellee Tsai, Capitalism
without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2007), and Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with
Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
\3\ This new policy was announced in the communique of Fifth Plenum
of the 15th Central Committee of the CCP; see Xinhua, October 11, 2000.
\4\ Guowuyuan, ``Guanyu dali jiaqiang chengxiang geti gongshanghu
he siying qiye shuishouzhengguan gongzuo de jueding,'' Guowuyuan
Gongbao no. 16 (September 20,1989), pp. 626-629; quoted in Susan H.
Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of
Institutional Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.
137.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the more remarkable aspects of China's privatization has
been that the rapid expansion of the private sector and the
accompanying political support for it has come without discernible
pressure from the capitalists themselves. The CCP has initiated
economic reforms that have benefited the private sector, but did so as
a means of boosting economic development and standards of living in
general, not to satisfy the specific interests of China's capitalists.
Expectations that privatization will lead to democratization are
also based on the assumption that China's capitalists naturally hold
pro-democratic beliefs and would prefer a more democratic polity than
the current regime. This assumption is derived by the European
experience, where urban capitalists were the primary agents of
democratic change. In Barrington Moore's famous hypothesis, ``no
bourgeois, no democracy'': where the urban bourgeoisie in Europe sought
political rights and representative institutions in order to protest
their economic interests, democracy gradually emerged; but in the
absence of a dominant class of urban property owners, the consequence
was authoritarian regimes, either fascist or communist.\5\ This
observation influenced subsequent thinking: capitalists would tend to
seek democratic institutions to protect their economic interests. But
in late developing countries, there has been far more cooperation
between the state and big business than was the case in the early
developers in Europe.\6\ Capitalists do not always need to demand
democracy to defend their interests; instead, they develop cooperative
relations with the state in order to achieve the same goal. This
cooperation is in part based on shared interests of promoting economic
development. But it is also based in part on shared identities:
political and economic elites often have family ties and come from
similar social and professional backgrounds.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Barrington Moore, Social Origins Of Dictatorship and Democracy:
Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1966).
\6\ Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D.
Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992); Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and
Industrial Transformation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995;
Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999); Eva Bellin, ``Contingent Democrats:
Industrialists, Labor, and Democratization in Late-Developing
Countries,'' World Politics, vol. 52, no. 2 (January 2000), pp. 175-
205.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In China as in other developing countries, the state and business
are closely intertwined. Their shared identities and common interests
create support for the political status quo. China's entrepreneurs have
been the main beneficiaries of the CCP's economic reform policies and
have little incentive to prefer democracy as an alternative regime.
Political change would introduce political uncertainty that could
easily be detrimental to their economic interests. They could lose
their preferential access to officials and consequently find that the
current pro-growth policies would be replaced by more populist policies
that benefit society at large but negatively impact the capitalists'
potential for growth and profits. Rather than be locked in a
confrontational relationship with the state that requires democratic
institutions to resolve, China's capitalists and party and government
officials have developed a stable set of relationships that I refer to
as ``crony communism.'' Like the more familiar and more common ``crony
capitalism,'' crony communism in China is based on the cozy and often
corrupt relationship that exists between business and the state. But
the way this cozy relationship has developed and evolved is distinctive
in China. In the sections below, I will elaborate on the nature of
crony communism in China, explain its dynamics, and assess its
implications.
ccp dominated
The first and most basic element of crony communism is that it is
dominated by the CCP. In a political system in which the CCP enjoys a
monopoly on political organization, this comes as little surprise. But
just as the CCP is the central actor in most aspects of politics in
China, it is also the center of crony communism.
First of all, as noted above, the CCP initiated economic reforms on
its own initiative and without pressure from capitalists. Indeed, at
the beginning of the post-Mao reform era, capitalists were for all
intents and purposes non-existent in China. The CCP's economic reforms
provided a space for the private sector to grow, and over time it
became increasingly important, providing most of the new economic
growth, jobs, and tax revenue. But most key elements of economic
reform--such as the two-track pricing system, the gradual abandonment
of central planning, and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises--
were initiated by the CCP to produce growth and dynamism into the
economy. They were not the consequence of pressure from non-state
interest groups.
The main beneficiaries of economic reform have also been CCP
members, both local officials and ``red capitalists,'' private
entrepreneurs who are also CCP members. Many red capitalists were
already in the CCP before going into business (a group I refer to as
xiahai capitalists, following the Chinese expression for joining the
private sector). They responded to Deng Xiaoping's call to ``take the
lead in getting rich,'' a slogan that implicitly recognized that some
individuals and some regions of the country would prosper before the
rest. The people who were best positioned to get rich first were those
who were well connected to the state, either as local officials, SOE
managers, or rank and file party members. They used those connections
to open their businesses, obtain capital and foreign investment, and
gain access to domestic and foreign markets. In this sense, they were
able to turn their political power into personal wealth. Other
entrepreneurs were co-opted into the part, turning their wealth into
power. Regardless of whether they were in the party before going into
business or were co-opted afterward, red capitalists have distinct
advantages in business: they tend to operate the largest and most
profitable firms (see table 1). Most private entrepreneurs acknowledge
that red capitalists have advantages in business, although as the CCP's
commitment to the private sector as a whole has grown over time, those
advantages may have become less pronounced (see table 2). The
protection of private property, development of the legal system,
especially concerning business law, and the greater integration of
China into the global economy has made capitalists less dependent on
the state. Never the less, the smaller scale of firms owned by non-CCP
members suggests there remain limits on the expansion and operation of
those who are not communist cronies.
Not only do CCP members benefit tremendously from the privatization
of the economy, so do their sons and daughters. Whereas the children of
first and second generation leaders often followed their fathers into
the party, government, and military, children of third and fourth
generation leaders have all gone into business (or in the cases of the
daughters of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, married prominent businessmen).
An internal report (allegedly from the Central Party School) indicated
that 90% of China's ultra-wealthy (those with personal fortunes worth
over 100 million yuan) are the children of high ranking officials.\7\
This is an extreme example, but in a larger sense the concentration of
wealth in the hands of the people who are politically well-connected is
the essence of crony communism. At the same time, public knowledge that
the primary beneficiaries of China's rapid economic growth are
political insiders threatens to delegitimize the ongoing economic
reforms. Not only has rapid growth created growing inequality, but
economic wealth and political power are controlled by the same groups
of privileged elites.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ Reported in Hong Kong's Singdao Daily on October 19, 2006,
available at http://financenews.sina.com/ausdaily/000-000-107-105/202
//2006-10-19/1509124173.shtml .
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
decentralized
A second characteristic of crony communism in China is that it is
decentralized. Much of the collusion between party and government
officials and capitalists occurs at the local level. Unlike the
practice of crony capitalism in Southeast Asia, crony communism in
China is not dominated by a ruling family or central leaders.\8\
Instead, it involves officials at all levels of the political
hierarchy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ Paul D. Hutchcroft, ``Oligarchs and Cronies in the Philippine
State: The Politics of Patrimonial Plunder,'' World Politics, vol. 43,
no. 3 (April 1991), pp. 414-50; David C. Kang, Crony Capitalism:
Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Richard Robison and Vedi
Hediz, Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an
Age of Markets (London: Routledgecurzon, 2004).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The close ties between state and the private sector in China is in
part driven by the imperative of producing economic growth. Growth
rates are one of the ``hard targets'' that local officials have to meet
in order to be promoted.\9\ This gives them an incentive to cooperate
with the private sector, which is the primary source of economic
growth. Local officials control approvals of most projects, whether
selling off state and collectively owned enterprises or transferring
land use rights to developers. This control has given rise to a variety
of corrupt transactions. Many firms have been privatized in sweetheart
deals in which the local officials sell the firms and their assets at a
fraction of their true value, instantly enriching the cronies who buy
the firms and the officials who receive bribes and kickbacks for their
part in the transaction.\10\ In other cases, capitalists provide favors
for the family members of local officials as a tacit part of their
bargain. They may provide jobs to the children and spouses of
officials, pay tuition for private school or even foreign education,
and even buy cars or houses for them. Local officials may also have
business dealings of their own, either directly owning or operating
firms or indirectly involvement in firms owned by family and friends.
The incentive for local officials to support the private sector is
therefore not just due to a desire for professional advancement, it is
also based on immediate material gain.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, ``Selective Policy
Implementation in Rural China,'' Comparative Politics, vol. 31, no. 2
(January 1999), pp. 167-186.
\10\ X.L. Ding, ``The Illicit Asset Stripping of Chinese State
Firms,'' China Journal, no. 43 (January 2000); Yan Sun, Corruption and
Market in Contemporary China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004);
Melanie Manion, Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in
Mainland China and Hong Kong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2005).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The benefits of crony communism are enjoyed by officials at all
levels of the political hierarchy. Most of the allegations of
corruption involve officials at the county level and below. With the
exception of a few high profile corruption cases (such as Chen Liangyu
and Beijing vice mayor Liu Zhihua), the CCP has mostly targeted lower
level officials for punishment. Although most observers believe that
this improperly discounts the corrupt behavior of provincial and
central level officials, it also acknowledges that officials at all
levels are profiting from China's economic development. Put
differently, the benefits of crony communism are quite decentralized.
The authority to approve projects is not controlled by a handful of top
leaders. As a result, officials at all levels have both the incentive
and the means to cooperate with the private sector with both legitimate
and corrupt interactions.
diffuse
A different aspect of crony communism is based on the structure of
China's political economy. Unlike in post-communist Russia, where
wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few politically well-
connected individual who became known as ``oligarchs,'' \11\ China's
privatization has not resulted in a similar concentration of wealth.
Instead, China's private sector is characterized by a predominance of
small and medium scale enterprises. On the one hand, this means that
the beneficiaries of economic reform in general and privatization in
particular have been widespread. On the other hand, it also means that
collective action among capitalists is difficult because their numbers
are so large. Firms do engage in extensive lobbying, but primarily over
business-related issues, such as setting industrial standards, but not
over broader public policy issues.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ Joel S. Hellman, ``Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial
Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,'' World Politics, vol. 50, no. 2
(January 1998), pp. 203-234; David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth
and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).
\12\ Scott Kennedy, The Business of Lobbying In China (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a larger scale, there has been no collective action among
private business to promote political change. In 1989, a few prominent
capitalists (in particular Wan Runnan of Beijing's Stone Group) and
many getihu (individual owners of very small scale enterprises) offered
material support to protestors in Tiananmen Square, but they were the
exception not the rule. Most private entrepreneurs were opposed to the
goals of the demonstrators, fearing they would disrupt political
stability.\13\ After 1989, many of the students who participated in the
protest movement maintained their political ideals but chose to pursue
them more quietly and indirectly, for example, by providing financial
support for academic conferences, research centers, and publications
regarding political reform, rule of law, and constitutional government.
But again, these pro-democratic capitalists have been in the minority:
in a recent survey of private entrepreneurs, only 25 percent engaged in
these kinds of activities.\14\ The main trend has been for China's
capitalists to either support the status quo or remain apolitical. In
the absence of more effective organizations, China's capitalists have
difficulty engaging in collective action outside the scope of their
business activities. The diffuse nature of China's political economy,
in particular the large number of small and medium scale enterprises,
makes collective action additionally difficult, consequently adding
more stability to the crony communist system.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ David L. Wank, Commodifying Communism: Business, Trust, and
Politics in a Chinese City (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
\14\ Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson, ``Allies of the State:
Democratic Support and Regime Support among China's Private
Entrepreneurs,'' China Quarterly (December 2008).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
expansive
Crony communism is also expansive: the number of red capitalists
has continued to grow. In 1993, only about 13 percent of private
entrepreneurs were party members; by 2007, that figure almost tripled,
to 38 percent (see figure 1). This increase occurred for two separate
reasons. First, most of the increase in the number of red capitalists
has been the result of party members who went into the private sector
and the privatization of SOEs. These types of entrepreneurs were
already well integrated into the state before going into private
business. According to my surveys of relatively large scale firms, red
capitalists who were already in the CCP before joining the private
sector (i.e., xiahai entrepreneurs) have become the largest group of
private entrepreneurs (see table 3).
The second source of growth among red capitalists has come through
co-optation. Although the recruitment of private entrepreneurs into the
CCP was banned after the 1989 demonstrations, Jiang Zemin's ``Three
Represents'' speech in 2001 legitimized the practice.\15\ Initially,
the lifting of the ban was expected to lead to surge of new red
capitalists, but that did not happen. In part, this outcome was due to
the reluctance of local officials to enthusiastically implement the new
policy, showing that many in the party continue to resist the inclusion
of capitalists into the communist political system; in part also, the
lackluster response was due to the capitalists themselves. Many felt
that the CCP's support for the private sector had become so pronounced
that they could benefit from that support without having to incur the
costs of time and inconvenience that party membership entails. Never
the less, the number of co-opted red capitalists grew steadily, if
slowly, in the years after Jiang's ``Three Represents'' speech.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\15\ For the debate over the propriety of including capitalists
into the CCP, see Bruce J. Dickson, Red Capitalists in China: The
Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 98-107.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In co-opting capitalists, the CCP uses a ``grasp the large, release
the small'' strategy similar to its approach to reforming SOEs: in
terms of recruiting private entrepreneurs, the CCP focuses on the
largest firms. Co-opted red capitalists on average operate larger firms
than non-party members, but not as large as xiahai capitalists.
Similarly, large firms are more likely to be focus of building new
party organizations and recruiting new members from among workers. In
integrating capitalists into the political system, the CCP clearly
prefers economic elites over small scale operators.
Why do China's capitalists want to join the CCP? In business as in
other careers, there is a glass ceiling for those who are not in party.
This gives economically and politically ambitious entrepreneurs an
incentive to join. According to local officials, the main reason
capitalists seek to join the CCP is that they have political
aspirations. The CCP directly controls nominations for local people's
congresses and appointments to local people's political consultative
conferences, and indirectly it also controls candidacy in village
elections. In other words, access to China's political institutions is
supply driven, not demand driven.\16\ One indicator of this is the
breakdown of capitalists in these local institutions. Over time, a
greater percentage of people's congress members and village candidates
have become xiahai red capitalists, whereas the percentage of co-opted
and non-red capitalists dropped (see table 4). There are two reasons
for this change in distribution. First, the CCP has developed a more
systematic strategy for nominations (especially for people's congress
elections), and favors the most politically reliable capitalists for
these political posts. Second, the benefits of holding village office
are quickly maximized and capitalists express less interest in being
reelected. Capitalists other than xiahai red capitalists may have
decided that official village duties are detrimental to business
operations, or that other types of political activities are more
useful. In both these ways, the CCP's strategy has been to provide
political access to those within the crony communist system and to
prevent non-cronies from using these official institutions to pursue a
political agenda.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ For an alternative argument, namely that capitalists are
motivated to become members of local people's congresses and political
consultative conferences in order to strengthen the rule of law and
protect that property rights, see Hongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng, and
Junsen Zhang, ``Why Do Entrepreneurs Enter Politics? Evidence from
China,'' Economic Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 3 (July 2006), pp. 559-578.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still, a good number of capitalists are not party members and do
not want to join the CCP. Many claim that party membership does not
matter, that with the CCP's support for the private sector, the
benefits of its reform and opening policies are available to all
capitalists. In other cases, they claim that they are not qualified for
party membership, and they are generally correct: most are over 35 and
have less than a high school education, two key criteria for new
recruits. For others, the lack of interest in party membership is due
to political alienation: those who see the CCP as corrupt, monolithic,
and unwilling to grant enough freedom to its members express no
interest in joining it.
In contrast, local officials provide different reasons for why many
capitalists do not want to join the CCP. First of all, they want to
avoid the CCP's scrutiny of their business practices. According to
local officials, red capitalists are more law abiding and more honest
in paying their taxes. Put differently, they may be under more pressure
from the CCP to fulfill their obligations, whereas non-CCP capitalists
are less likely to be monitored or caught. In addition, red capitalists
are also under more pressure to contribute to charity. Capitalists who
do not belong to the CCP, who do not belong to the official business
associations (such as the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce
and the Private Enterprise Association), and who do not have party
organizations in their firms are less likely to make charitable
contributions. Charity work is seen as a key part of party building and
the work of business associations, and they definitely target their own
members.
In short, party membership is seen by some as detrimental because
it imposes new demands on their busy schedules and on their conduct,
and by others as a stepping stone to other forms of political
participation but not something desirable for its own sake. Crony
communism may be an expansive system, but it does not appeal to all
capitalists.
paternalistic
A related aspect of crony communism is that it is paternalistic.
Local officials see party building as not only essential for the
party's relationship with the private sector, but also necessary to
improve the management abilities and business acumen of private firms.
The CCP has given more attention to basic party building in recent
years, not just in the recruitment of capitalists into the party but
also in creating party organizations in private firms and recruiting
workers who are employed there (see table 5). Party organizations in
private enterprises do not simply lead political study among party
members who work there, more importantly they focus on business issues,
such as enhancing quality control and imbuing corporate culture.
Officials generally have a low regard for the business acumen of most
entrepreneurs in their communities, and see it as their responsibility
to make them more efficient and competitive. This viewpoint may be
self-serving, but it is not altogether off the mark. The private sector
in China is relatively new, and most entrepreneurs did not grow up in
the family business or have other relevant experience before going into
business. Additional training and attention to basic issues of business
management would presumably benefit many of them.
Another aspect of the CCP's paternalism is the opening of party
schools to private entrepreneurs. The Central Party School began
offering classes for private entrepreneurs in April 2000, and by 2006
over 10,000 entrepreneurs from around the country had attended.\17\
Local party schools also began holding similar kinds of classes. While
these party school classes included some degree of political education,
for the most part they are similar to programs offered by business
schools and concentrate on marketing, human resources, accounting, and
other practical management issues. In addition, attending the party
school allows entrepreneurs to build connections other officials; this
is also a central appeal to the officials who attend other classes at
party schools.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\17\ South China Morning Post, April 26, 2006.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
symbiotic
The purpose of CCP's party building activities are not just to
monitor and control private sector, thereby preventing a political
challenge, equally importantly they are designed to facilitate
cooperation between CCP and private sector on their shared goal of
promoting economic growth. As a result, another aspect of crony
communism is that it is symbiotic. The cozy relationship between the
party and the private sector is mutually beneficial. Both benefit from
promoting economic development and privatization. For that reason,
private entrepreneurs share similar values with party and government
officials on a variety of policy issues. For example, not only are most
entrepreneurs and officials satisfied with the pace of economic reform,
they have become increasingly satisfied over the years, with nearly 70
percent of both groups believing the pace of reform is ``about right''
(see table 6).
A more telling example of shared viewpoints concerns the tradeoff
between the goals of economic growth and political stability. Promoting
growth has been the top priority of the post-Mao period, but has come
at the expense of political stability. The number of local protests
increased from 32,000 in 1999 to 87,000 in 2005. Many of these protests
were the unintended consequences of rapid growth: farmers whose fields
were taken away in illegal and corrupt land seizures, workers who were
not paid or forced to work in unsafe conditions, laid off and retired
workers who did not get the cash payments and insurance protection they
were promised, urban residents who were forced to move to make room for
new development, and so on. This threat to stability led China's
leaders to more pro-actively address the causes of popular
dissatisfaction, as well as to respond quickly when protests did break
out.\18\ This concern for political order is also reflected in the
views of entrepreneurs and officials. With the exception of county-
level cadres, most entrepreneurs and local officials put more emphasis
on preserving order than on promoting growth. Even among county-level
officials, there was a sharp drop over time in the percent who favored
growth, although still a majority (see table 7). This shared viewpoint
is based on different but complementary interests. For entrepreneurs,
political unrest threatens the stability that is most beneficial to
their operations. For township and village officials, the main
responsibility for maintaining order is theirs. For county officials,
economic growth is their main priority, but their commitment to growth
has more recently been tempered by the rise of popular protests.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\18\ Bruce J. Dickson, ``Beijing's Ambivalent Reformers,'' Current
History, vol. 103, no. 674 (September 2004), pp. 249-255.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
self-perpetuating
These characteristics of crony communism in China make it self-
perpetuating. As the central actor in the political system, the CCP has
a clear incentive in maintaining its political monopoly and protecting
its cronies. Local officials enjoy a large share of the benefits from
the cozy relationship between the state and business, and should be
expected to maintain it. The expansive nature of crony communism gives
the opportunity for others to be included, and lowers the incentive for
them to challenge it. The structure of China's political economy, with
its predominance of small and medium scale enterprises, also reduces
the likelihood of collective action: the large number of small actors
inhibits effective collective action. Above all, the shared interests
of the key actors--the private entrepreneurs and party and government
officials--also create a strong incentive to maintain a relationship
that has proven to be so mutually beneficial.
potential for change
Although I have argued that crony communism is likely to remain
self-perpetuating, what would cause this to change? First of all,
because the capitalists' support for the status quo is largely based on
material interests, a decline in the pro-business policies of the CCP
would prompt a reconsideration of the capitalists' relationship with
the state. This does not seem likely under current circumstances
(especially the international economic crisis that began in 2008), but
new leaders or dramatic change in the political environment within
China could lead to a change of policy that would be detrimental to
business interests.
Second, an increase in the populist policies of the current leaders
might also undermine crony communism. The central leaders under Hu
Jintao and Wen Jiabao have moderated the pro-growth strategy pursued
under Jiang Zemin. They have tried to foster a more balanced pattern of
growth so that inland and western provinces do not feel left out of
China's modernization. They have attempted to reduce regional
inequalities with income subsidies and the elimination of rural taxes.
They have adopted labor laws and environmental policies to ameliorate
some of the externalities of rapid growth. While adopting these
populist measures, they have also maintained the imperative of rapid
growth and reliance on the private sector. If the current balance
between the elitist strategy of development designed to sustain rapid
growth and the populist policies designed to improve equity were to tip
in the favor of populism, and therefore the incentives for growth were
curtailed, the capitalists would be less likely to lend their
unqualified support.
Third, the more a true market economy emerges, the less dependent
capitalists will be on the state for their success; accordingly, the
less likely they would be to support the status quo.\19\ Even now, this
process is slowly underway. Private firms are more able to get loans
from state banks, even though this is still highly restricted. Stronger
legal protection for property rights makes political protection less
salient, and while property rights are still weakly and unevenly
enforced, the trend has been toward more rather than less protection.
The state still tightly controls the ability of Chinese firms to list
on domestic and foreign stock exchanges, although this control has
loosened of late. As firms become more responsible for their own
profitability, and less dependent on favors from the state, the less
incentive they will have to nurture the cozy ties with party and
government officials that are now required for firms to be successful.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\19\ Bellin, ``Contingent Democrats.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fourth, and conversely, a dramatic increase in corruption could
also temper the political support of China's capitalists. Much of the
rampant corruption in the reform era has been fueled by the business
activities of private entrepreneurs, many of whom reportedly set aside
a certain portion of a project's cost for bribes and gifts.\20\ So long
as corruption remains limit and accepted as a routine cost of doing
business, crony communism is likely to endure. But if the demands of
officials become predatory, the political support among capitalists is
likely to diminish. Indeed, the experience of other countries suggests
that growing dissatisfaction with corrupt officials can cause
capitalists to shift their political support away from the incumbent
regime.\21\ Such a development is not inconceivable in China.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\20\ Sun, Corruption and Market in Contemporary China.
\21\ Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of
Democratic Transitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, crony communism could become the victim of its own
success. There are a variety of consequences of privatization that
could trigger more intense public resentment. The relationship between
the state and business is inherently corrupt, and while this level of
corruption is seemingly acceptable to most capitalists, it is a cause
of tremendous dissatisfaction among the public at large. The rapid
growth of China's economy has also been accompanied by growing
inequality. To the extent that the public comes to perceive that
China's nouveau riche have attained their prosperity through political
ties and not through entrepreneurship and hard work, they will become
less willing to accept the unequal distribution of wealth. The growing
number of protests against corruption, land grabs, and other aspects of
economic development has to date remained very localized and specific,
but the potential for more systemic challenges is not out of the
question. This would signal the decay of public support for the
propriety of the ongoing policies of economic reform and openness,
posing an exogenous threat to crony communism.
conclusion
The CCP has defied predictions that economic reform will lead
ultimately to political change. Its economic reforms have unfolded
without overt pressure from the people who have benefited the most: the
private entrepreneurs. The strong pro-growth and pro-business policies
pursued by the CCP over the past three decades of reform have led to
the integration of wealth and power in a manner best described as crony
communism. This is a key part of the success of the so-called ``Beijing
consensus''--not just that the state is committed to growth, but that
it has willing partners in the private sector. Rather than be a threat
to the CCP, private entrepreneurs have become a key source of political
support. Moreover, by providing the jobs, growth and tax revenue that
the state needs, they are also indirectly a source of the CCP's popular
support and legitimacy. Although the CCP no longer pursues the Marxist
goals of a communist utopia and the withering away of the state, it
still is a distinctly Leninist party, aggressively enforcing its
monopoly on political organization and selectively incorporating new
elites into it. Despite the anomaly of capitalists in a communist
party, the growing integration of economic and political elites will
continue.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Annual sales (million RMB):
All entrepreneurs................................. 3.5 12.5
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.............................. 5.3 18.6
Co-opted entrepreneurs............................ 3.4 13.6
Want to join CCP.................................. 3.1 7.2
Do not want to join CCP........................... 2.6 8.5
Number of workers:
All entrepreneurs................................. 41.8 74.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.............................. 75.4 95.5
Co-opted entrepreneurs............................ 38.6 91.4
Want to join CCP.................................. 27.5 55.5
Do not want to join CCP........................... 28.9 54.5
Fixed Assets (million RMB):
All entrepreneurs................................. 2.3 7.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.............................. 4.3 10.3
Co-opted entrepreneurs............................ 2.1 6.7
Want to join CCP.................................. 1.7 4.5
Do not want to join CCP........................... 1.6 5.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
(Percent Who Agree)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.................................. 37.3 57.1
Co-opted entrepreneurs................................ 51.5 56.6
Want to join CCP...................................... 59.0 58.2
Do not want to join CCP............................... 32.9 26.7
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
(Percentages)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai Red Capitalists 25.1 34.1
Co-opted Red Capitalists.............................. 13.1 15.9
Want to join CCP...................................... 28.2 24.9
Don't Want to Join CCP................................ 33.5 25.1
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
(Percentages)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Local People's Congress:
All Entrepreneurs................................. 11.3 10.5
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.................................. 19.1 18.0
Co-opted entrepreneurs............................ 24.6 15.5
Want to join CCP.................................. 5.1 3.0
Don't want to join CCP............................ 5.6 4.5
Village Chief or Representative Council:
All Entrepreneurs................................. 16.1 13.7
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.............................. 22.8 20.2
Co-opted entrepreneurs............................ 40.6 21.4
Want to join CCP.................................. 10.7 10.3
Don't want to join CCP............................ 6.2 3.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Firms with party organizations (percent):
All Entrepreneurs......................... 18.4 28.9
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs...................... 33.1 46.3
Co-opted entrepreneurs.................... 38.5 44.1
Want to join CCP.......................... 10.0 15.7
Do not want to join CCP................... 7.5 10.2
Firms whose workers have joined CCP in recent
years (percent):
All Entrepreneurs......................... 24.7 39.5
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs...................... 36.3 55.7
Co-opted entrepreneurs.................... 37.5 57.0
Want to join CCP.......................... 20.7 32.1
Do not want to join CCP................... 15.3 14.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
(Percentages)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Entrepreneurs Cadres
-----------------------------------
1999 2005 1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pace of economic reform is:
Too fast........................ 9.7 12.5 8.9 9.4
About right..................... 58.9 70.3 60.6 68.2
Too slow........................ 31.4 17.2 30.5 22.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.
(Percentages for those who prefer growth over stability as top goal)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1999 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
All Entrepreneurs..................................... 41.7 44.6
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xiahai entrepreneurs.................................. 39.1 42.9
Co-opted entrepreneurs................................ 29.9 47.3
Want to join CCP...................................... 42.1 42.1
Don't want to join CCP................................ 47.9 47.5
All Cadres............................................ 60.6 49.1
------------------------------------------------------------------------
County cadres......................................... 76.2 59.3
Township/village cadres............................... 39.6 41.6
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Original survey data.