LOCAL ELECTIONS IN THE PRC

JAMES A. ROBINSON

In Bei Taiping Zhuang and other villages throughout China, local
residents practice a certain democratic “form”

Few Westerners, perhaps, would talk of China and the concepts of free and fair elections in the same breath. For all the economic reforms undertaken since 1978, the pace of political reform in China has been slow and uneven. Most in the West probably would regard the periodic crackdowns on popular dissent, including attempts to stifle the Falun Gong and its followers, as evidence of the hold the Chinese leadership continues to maintain over the lives and thoughts of 1.3 billion Chinese people.

This view, however, ignores changes occurring at local levels, where village elections have been taking place since the 1980s. In January 2000, as a Carter Center observer (see box), I had the opportunity to observe how “democracy with Chinese characteristics” is unfolding in the Chinese countryside. After years of observing democratic elections elsewhere in Asia (see Cosmos 1999, Volume 9, page 43), I saw my first villager committee election with Chinese characteristics in Bei Taiping Zhuang. This is a middle-income village of 2,381 rural residents in Hebei, a northern province that wraps around the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin. The village’s per capita annual income was $390 about the time of the election, derived primarily from agricultural production (grains) and petty trade.

In China, millions of peasants in some 730,000 villages countrywide are scheduled to go to the polls every three years to elect their local committees. Some provinces have had several rounds of voting (for Bei Taiping Zhuang, this was its fifth) since elections began on a trial basis in 1987. According to Zhan Chengfu, the Ministry of Civil Affairs coordinator of basic rural governance, all but a handful of villages presumably have voted at least once.

These elections are held to select the leaders (usually three to seven people) who will administer collective property in the village, support economic development projects, and raise funds for roads, schools, and other community projects, as well as help mediate disputes and organize social services, including family planning, at the local level. These responsibilities have taken on greater urgency following economic reforms of the past two decades, which have meant higher taxes and rising costs for agricultural inputs for rural residents, and less support from the national level for health care, education, and other services. The village committees also work closely with the next tier of governance, the townships, which have jurisdiction over tax collection, grain quotas, and other matters decided by centrally instituted policies. The townships, with some autonomy of their own, are in turn subject to policy directions from county, provincial, and central governments.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PROCESS...

Counting the “haixuan” nominations in Hebei Province.

While valid and reliable aggregate statistics are scarce (e.g., even the total number of villages is a matter of dispute among ministries), the use of open nominations and secret ballots in China seems to be increasing. The increase follows early elections held on a trial basis following the passage of a provisional law on local elections in 1987. In November 1998, the Organic Law on Villager Committees was finalized and approved by the National People’s Congress. In addition to the Carter Center, a number of private organizations in the United States, the United Nations Development Program, and the governments of Canada and several European nations have provided technical and financial assistance to China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. This support has included training sessions for election officials, as well as efforts to boost public understanding of electoral processes.

Based on reports from these sources, as well as other case materials from journalists and political scientists, it now is possible to appraise the extent to which village elections are democratic, either by familiar Western criteria of democracy or by standards of democracy with Chinese characteristics. Among the signs of democratic practices taking root is that any adult aged 18 can stand for office and vote in the selection of village chairs, vice chairs, and the committee members. Migrant workers, a group whose numbers are rising rapidly, so far are excluded. Each voter has the same voting share as all others, casting one vote for chair and one for vice chair and as many votes as there are committee seats to be filled.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs has undertaken a massive effort to train election workers with an emphasis on assuring secret ballots. In early elections, mobile ballot boxes roamed villages collecting voters’ choices, but these are falling into disuse in favor of fixed polling places and a centralized place to tally the votes. Proxy voting is not mentioned specifically in the 1998 law, but appears to be falling into disfavor. Some provinces have added their own regulations limiting surrogate voting to two, or allowing proxy votes only by close relatives.

The nomination process, too, has become more open and transparent. At the local level, open primaries are now used throughout the country. This haixuan, or “sea election,” method of nomination entitles every voter to nominate a candidate for office. Those candidates nominated most frequently vie in the election, which usually takes place a few days later. Special efforts are made to assist illiterate voters, commonly found in small villages. In Bei Taiping Zhuang, teachers were brought in from other villages to help people unable to read the ballot, thus increasing the likelihood that voters’ preferences were kept confidential.

Female candidates, increasingly, are finding a place on village committees. The 1998 law reads “Female members should take a proper portion in the village committee.” In practice, in some villages this means one woman is nominated, and that candidate frequently wins a seat. Overall, however, recent Ministry of Civil Affairs statistics report that only 15.6 percent of village committee members nationwide are women.

...AND THE REALITY AT THE POLLS

Village poll workers sort the ballots.

These democratic practices, though, are contradicted by other features of recent elections. One expectation of democratic procedures is interaction between rulers and ruled, between governors and the people who elect them. In Bei Taiping Zhuang, the silence and degree of passivity among the voters was quite striking. Voters massed together in a courtyard of a school while quietly receiving instructions about election procedures from the chair of the village election committee. They dutifully followed instructions to line up with ID cards, receive ballots, and move to a voting room to mark their preferred candidates’ names, but nobody appeared to be discussing the elections or candidates as they waited. Even in one village where I heard campaign speeches, of one to five minutes in length, the audience displayed little reaction, barely applauding one speaker and ignoring the rest. These assemblies showed little of a town meeting spirit.

Perhaps the very cold weather was partly to blame; perhaps the voters were simply eager to get the voting over and go home. And it is possible, of course, that voters had conferred among themselves in the fields or in local enterprises during the five days between nominations and election, but their heavy work burdens and the absence of a village center suggest that popular attention to politics may be minimal. To be sure, one could observe couples in the same voting booth marking ballots, perhaps indicating some family discussion of politics. And voter turnout was between 80 and 85 percent in the nominating election, which I observed, but declined in the final vote a few days later, which I was unable to attend owing to the icy roads. The high turnout may well have been promoted by incentives of an extra day’s vacation for government employees and 15 yuan ($1.83) for the self-employed.

The role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in local elections, too, warrants a close look. The haixuan process was introduced to replace Party-controlled filtering committees, which could exclude potentially popular but unacceptable-to-the-Party nominees from the ballot. The CCP now seems to exert its influence in elections in another way, using the popular vote as a way to identify and recruit new Party members. In a number of villages, the office of chair and the office of local CCP secretary now are filled by the same person. Local politicians tout this as a cost-saving measure to benefit the poor peasants (with the village and the CCP responsible for splitting the chair’s salary). While a strong CCP presence on the village committee would, in theory, promote greater cooperation between Party and village committee, this development would not necessarily ensure that village officials remain responsive to those who elected them.

A crowd gathers as the nominations are posted.

Other flaws in China’s local elections, from the standpoint of those accustomed to a democratic system of government, derive from their simple, even primeval, characteristics. Certainly voting in the PRC looks primitive compared with the high-tech polling features seen in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Still, even paper ballots can be complicated. Write-in candidates are almost always permitted, and the Hebei ballots we saw provided for write-ins. In the Hebei elections, perhaps a peculiarity in that province alone, voters also need to mark either yes or no for a candidate, meaning that someone voting carelessly would likely vote yes too many times, invalidating his or her ballot. To win, a candidate must have 50 percent plus one of the votes cast. Nevertheless, paper ballots need not be an impediment to honest elections, as some European and American countries demonstrated long before the computer age, by overcoming attempts at ballot stuffing and voter manipulation.

A LONG ROAD

Bumps and detours in the roads to democracy are inevitable. But China’s leaders have vowed that “democracy” in China will not mean the country adopts a multi-party system modeled on the United States and other Western nations. And even well-administered elections, desirable as continuing improvements are, will not democratize China significantly unless the scope of village self-governance expands along with increased citizen participation in higher levels of political control. At the township level and above, nomination procedures remain controlled largely by the CCP. This means that township officials, who recruit police chiefs, magistrates, tax officials, and other important government figures, are not elected via open and competitive processes. Instead, villagers and residents elect the Townships People’s Congress deputies, and the congress, in turn, picks the major government officials. In one notable exception, Buyun township in Sichuan Province elected its chief in December 1998, but central government officials subsequentially passed the word that such elections are not to be replicated.

However, in government research bureaus and non-governmental venues, local people are busy preparing alternative, more direct, approaches to township democracy. These scholars, typically from the best universities and well acquainted with foreign scholarship on electoral processes, anticipate the emergence of a “fourth generation” of national leaders in 2002 and soon afterward. From these rising stars, social scientists in think tanks and academic institutions hope to see more democratic initiatives than those taken by the third generation, headed by Jiang Zemin.

Ultimately, CCP leaders will decide whether it is in their interests to endorse democratic breakthroughs. Considerable latitude has been tolerated in commerce and other social reforms since the opening to reform 20 years ago, but far less in politics. Whether and when China’s leaders will chance to open the political door is unpredictable, but expectations for continued electoral reform are circulating. One well-placed authority in Beijing was asked whether he anticipated open township elections in the near future. He replied, optimistically, “of course.” When probed for how soon, “within five years,” he responded confidently. Another well-informed, former participant from the days of the second- generation leadership thinks higher-level elections will arrive “not soon.” But when pressed to predict how soon, he averred, “about five years!”

If the electoral developments at the local level are any indication, trial balloons will continue to test the range and scope of the 1998 Organic Law and the central leadership’s willingness to embrace greater public participation in all levels of government. Not to be overlooked is the fact that China’s rural population, the peasant backbone of Mao Zedong’s successful revolution over a half-century ago, remains very much at the attention of the Chinese leadership. The fear of rural unrest, which has included popular uprisings against higher taxes, fees, and prices, as well as mob attacks on tax collectors and corrupt local officials, in the extreme, suggests that China’s leadership will tread slowly. On the one hand, continued developments in the local electoral process might ease tensions by giving rural residents opportunities to debate issues and vote for candidates who share their views. On the other hand, given the leadership’s perspectives on the political process in China, five years seems an optimistic timeframe for greater electoral reform at the higher levels of government.

James A. Robinson (CC ’64), a policy scientist, is president emeritus and professor at the University of West Florida. He was a member of a Carter Center delegation observing village elections in Hebei Province, China. The views expressed here are his own, and do not necessarily reflect or represent those of the Carter Center.

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