a. Myth and Reality: The Chinese Village Elections

Ying SHANG

Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 2

There have been three arguments supporting the development of the Chinese village elections. First, village elections may help to reduce the increasing tension between local cadres and peasants; second, democratic elections at the grass-roots level will lead to democratization at higher levels of government, thus propelling political reform; third, successes in rural democratization can improve China's international image as a one-party state. This essay tries to disprove these three hypotheses, and explore the role of village elections in the context of the Chinese political reform.

Reduce the Cadre-Peasant Tension?

Will village elections reduce the tension in cadre-peasant relationship? Using case analysis, this essay shows that the current political regime lacks the power and institutional arrangements to solve conflicts within the system. Instead of reducing tension, village elections anchored in current political arrangements provide an opportunity for the already increasing tension to intensify and explode. Here we only look at three cases.

Case 1:

On April 25, 1998, three days before the village committee election was held in Nanpai village (Guangdong province), Hong Zhou, the incumbent village chairman and party secretary urged his followers to start buying votes. Each voter who agreed to sign his/her name on an already filled ballot for Hong Zhou could receive a payment between RMB100 (about US$12.5) and RMB250 (about US$30). Those who sold the ballots could get RMB50 (about US$6) per ballot sale commission. Nanpai village has 3,300 registered voters, while 2,000 ballots had been sold by the Election Day, with a total payment of RMB 300,000 (about US$37,500). The election was later declared invalid by the township government after villagers' appeal. The event is still under investigation; no resolution has been made so far. (Southern Village, June 22, 1999)

Case 2:

On the morning of May 1, 1998, Wang Guojun, a candidate for the village chairman at Dayingpan Village of Liaoning province, set off for the electoral campaign meeting with two other villagers, Li Yinkui and Dong Naigang. On their way, six unknown strong men suddenly ran out with choppers and started hacking on the first two persons. Wang Guojun got scores of cuts and fell down. Li Yinkui kept running after being injured, received three gunshots in legs, and later died of over-bleeding.

According to police investigation, the incumbent village chairman, Zhang Wangpeng, plotted the murder. He was later sentenced to four years in prison for robbery, but was again elected village chairman several years after he was released. (Southern Village, July 7, 1998)

Case 3:

Zhang Yubin decided to campaign for the village chairman election in 1996, and he refused the nomination proposed by the incumbent village administration, which attempted to retain all the incumbents in the new village committee. He also refused to accept nomination through illegal procedures. Two days later, the township government repealed his candidacy, with the excuse that he had been detained by the police for ten days the year before. However, it was not a proper excuse.

After failing to get any support from the township government, Zhang decided to appeal to court. With the help of two lawyers, he accused the Xingyun township administration and the party branch of violation of the Village Organic Law (VOL). Eighteen days after the decision to deprive Zhang's candidacy, the township leaders came to hold the village committee election. There were no election meetings but moving boxes; no secret ballots but supervised votes. Although Zhang received fifty more votes than the incumbent chairman, the election was announced invalid because none of the candidate got more than half of the total votes. Therefore, the incumbent village committee continued working for one more year.

After the election, Zhang and some other villagers started a year-long appeal to various governmental organizations, such as the Municipal People's Congress, the Municipal Bureau of Civil Affairs, and the provincial government. In the last appeal, Zhang went to Beijing with the money he earned from selling 500mm blood. While still maintaining a gleam of hope after these frustrated appeals, Zhang and five other villagers were arrested by the township police with the charge of being a gang of hooligans in 1997, and were sentenced to four years in prison. Thirteen days after the court ruling, his mother committed suicide out of deep grief and indignation.

After another one-and-half-year appeal, Zhang was found innocent and set free. After three years, his accusation against the township government was eventually accepted. (South Village, March 25, 27, 30 and April 1, 3, 1999)

These are three typical cases that happened in Chinese grass-roots elections. They not only reveal the problems in village elections, but also raise questions on China's transition toward democracy. How could a village chairman get such a large sum of money to buy votes? How could another elected village chairman use murder as a method to beat down his rivals? Why is it so hard to have a fair and just election even after the villagers appealed to the central government? Since the first Village Organic Law was passed in 1987, Chinese peasants have received the right to select cadres independently for the first time in their lives. However, when they started to exercise this precious power, they realized that the cost was much higher than they had expected. How did these happen?

In most of the cases, we find a tension between the villagers and local cadres. On the one hand, villagers tried to use their newly granted power to replace the unreliable cadres; on the other hand, incumbents strove for re-election and violated the law without any fear. This tension had its origin in the prevailing corruption of local cadres, arguably a side effect of the economic reform since 1978. Economically the reform allowed free markets, and politically it decentralized the power structure of the state. Although some argue that both changes are necessary conditions for a successful economic reform, they also provide chances for the local cadres to enrich themselves at the expense of peasantry (Oi, 1992: 99-126). For instance, long-term land leasing is one of the most important village income sources, especially for those villages located close to the cities. The villagers of Nanpai told the reporter that Hong Zhou had sold ninety percent of the village's land during his term as the village chairman, without the approval from the village people. Mr. Zhou also kept the village finance from being checked, and nobody knew where the money went.

Peasants have been resisting the malfeasance ever since the early 1980s, and both the incidence and severity of the conflicts have been increasing. According to a top-level government report, the Chinese countryside witnessed some 1.7 million cases of resistance in 1993, of which 6,230 were 'disturbances' (naoshi) that resulted in severe damages to persons or property. Among the so-called disturbances, 830 involved more than one township and more than 500 participants; 78 involved more than one county and over 1,000 participants; and 21 were long-lasting events that enlisted more than 5,000 participants. In the course of these confrontations, a total of 8,200 township and county officials were injured or killed, 560 county-level offices were ransacked, and 385 public security personnel lost their lives. The following year showed an escalation. In just the first four months of 1994, rural areas saw 720,000 protests of which more than 2,300 were serious 'disturbances' that caused injury or death to nearly 5,000 township and county government employees.

Village elections are aimed at serving as an institutional channel through which the tension between the villagers and the cadres could be checked and settled peacefully at the local level. However, the actual result of this institutional operation as illustrated in the above cases and many others is an escalation of conflicts that calls for interference by governments at higher levels. Such interference still does not guarantee that the disputes can be resolved.

The dual positions of the township and county governments in relation to the village committees are one important cause of insufficient law enforcement. On the one hand, the village committee is an autonomous institution elected by the villagers, and the township and county governments are directly responsible for the correct implementation of the VOL. According to the VOL, villagers should report procedural violations to the People's Congress and governmental institutions at the township or county level. These organizations are responsible for investigation and prosecution. Yet the township and county governments also rely on the village cadres to carry out township and county policies on various economic and social affairs such as taxation, collective agricultural projects, family planning and the most sensitive land transactions. The dual positions potentially impede township-county officials from strictly enforcing the law when the electoral procedure is violated. For example, the township and county governments are usually reluctant in supporting the impeachment against the village cadres. The township and county leaders fear that if they succumb to mass requests too often and do not support the local cadres in times of difficulty, their authority among the local cadres would decline, and the local cadres as agents of township-county polices would be harder to control. Personal interests of the township and county officials are sometimes also involved, thus making law enforcement even more difficult.

The fundamental reason behind the inadequate enforcement of the VOL is the lack of an independent law enforcement system. The judicial system is designated for law enforcement within the government. Since in China the police, court, prosecutor, as well as the party disciplinary committee are all under the same administrative and party leadership, it is no surprise that none of these agencies could play an independent role.

The direct consequence of the lack of independent law enforcement is the declining authority of law. The villagers lose their confidence in the VOL, either giving up any hope of political participation through the electoral institution, or trying to look for other violent but more effective ways outside the formal procedure. Local officials do not feel threatened by the VOL. Therefore malfeasance continues.

Further Democratization?

The second hypothesis is that grass-roots democracy will eventually be extended to higher levels, and rural political changes signifies the beginning of larger political reforms in the country. This essay holds a rather cautious view, claiming that the stability of the rural democracy is only conditional. Moreover, a sustainable and effective rural democratic regime is the consequence of the wholesale reforms in various critical dimensions, rather than a starting point of a chain reaction.

The optimistic view on the future of the Chinese village elections is based on the following grounds. First, the Chinese grass-roots election is similar to the western democratic election in terms of congruence between the villagers and cadres on major issues. Second, the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) has been one major driving force behind China's political reform, and to start with, the MCA took a right strategy to tilt the balance between the reformers and the conservatives in favor of the former. Once the reform is under way, peasants are gradually mobilized by the reforms to participate in village elections, and their participation in turn helps to advance the reform process. Third, the electoral procedure does influence the quality of elected cadres. According to an MCA report based on a survey of nine model counties within three provinces, the average age of elected cadres dropped, the education level rose, and the villager nomination rate, the most sensitive indicator, reached 97.26%. (The Project Evaluation for the Data Collection System & Data Analysis of the Village Committee Elections in Nine Counties within Three provinces, 1999:16)

The above arguments have problems. First, largely shared viewpoints on major issues between the villagers and cadres may not necessarily be a result of the electoral procedure, but a result of the sharing of the same but limited information among the villagers and cadres. Seen in this light, elections may not be an effective institution through which official malfeasance can be constrained.

Second, the MCA might be the main policy-making agency supporting the village elections at the central level, but its influence becomes limited when it comes to the implementation stage at the local level. The MCA has been actively propagating the necessity and effectiveness of grass-root elections, but it has seldom touched upon the problems with the implementation stage. Propaganda might be a good strategy to win the support from central government leaders, but it will not prevent manipulation of the elections by local cadres. Moreover, the local branches of the MCA are under the direct leadership of the local governments, who supervise both the budget and personnel arrangement of the local MCA organizations. Such a control effectively limits the independence of the local branches of the MCA from local governments and curtails their ability to enforce the VOL at the local level. Therefore, it is almost foolhardy to expect that the MCA and its local branches will play a decisive role in furthering the Chinese rural elections.

Third, the changes in the average age and education level are only minor goals set by the VOL, and the more important indicators, such as the amount of official malfeasance and the difficulty of preventing official manipulations, were not examined in the MCA report. A more interesting observation made by the MCA is that 90.54% of the incumbents were re-elected, although only 57.56% of the candidates were elected by more than two thirds of the votes. (The MCA report, 1999:21, 24)

To achieve effectiveness and stability in the Chinese rural elections, the establishment of an independent law enforcement system is crucial. The judicial system should be separated from the local administration for it to become an impartial forum for violated villagers. Though the electoral procedure is designed to minimize abuses and manipulations, the design itself does not provide any enforcement mechanism to maintain its stability and efficiency. The enforcement of Chinese laws used to be based on controls from superior levels of government and individual cadres' self-discipline. With the decentralization of power and the decline of the official ideology, the old constraints have been depleted. Grass-root democratic institutions in today's China, if relying on the old political structure, cannot constrain abuses and manipulations; instead, they may provide opportunities for more official malfeasance. Democracy at a higher level would be even more difficult, for the higher level officials wield more power and resources to protect their personal interests. The electoral procedure by itself is too vulnerable to make durable changes. It has to be supported by institutions that guarantee an effective law enforcement.

It is true that electoral procedures do cause such changes as reducing the amount of villager appeals, increasing the transparency of village budgets, and at times, even leading to successful impeachment against corrupt local cadres. These changes, however, are still based on higher level officials' individual discipline, not on a durable institutional guarantee. The self-discipline of the township and county officials may have been critical to the success of the Chinese rural elections so far, but where is the guarantee for their self-discipline to be durable in the long term?

Improve China's World Image?

Let us now turn to the last hypothesis. The most active institution in promoting the Chinese village elections, both domestically and internationally, is the MCA. The MCA has been trying to publicize the rapid development of Chinese village elections in various international occasions, establishing working relationship with NGOs promoting world democracy, and inviting foreign correspondents and scholars to sit in the village electoral meetings. These efforts not only have resulted in the acceptance of village elections as a state policy, but also have received wide international support and recognition. Yet it is not realistic to think that the international support for this particular project will lead to a significant improvement of China's world image. First, reports fromthe MCA strongly emphasized the accomplishment of the project, but seldom touched upon the serious problems existing in the process. Political reforms in rural areas, as observed above, have contributed to the malfeasance of local authorities. These seldom-addressed problems, observers worry, may constitute a sand base of a grand infrastructure. No matter how promising the blueprint is, building on the sand means the danger of collapse. Second, as long as China remains a one-party state, the often biased western media will not regard China as a democratic country simply because there are some village elections.

Conclusion

The analysis of the above cases illustrates some of the major problems currently existing in the Chinese village elections, which may impede further development of the grass-root democratization. And the fundamental reason for these problems, this essay argues, is the lack of an independent law enforcement system.

Democratization will not be self-sustainable without appropriate institutional support. In the absence of an appropriate institutional infrastructure, democratization had led to dictatorship in Germany after World War I, Mafia control in Russia after 1989, and even ethnic cleansing in Brundi. The evolution of the Chinese grass-root democratization may or may not follow the trajectories of these countries. The most critical condition for successful democratization is the existence of an independent law enforcement system, which can serve as the fundamental guarantee for the authority, effectiveness and stability of the electoral democracy. Moreover, the establishment of an independent law enforcement system is not the goal of the rural political changes in China, but rather a task for institutional reforms. Therefore, the future of the Chinese village elections is largely determined by China's political reforms at higher levels.

(This essay is a synopsis of a larger research paper. The author is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Harvard University.)