TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Muddling toward Democracy: Rural Sichuan Province, November 1995

Most analyses of government and politics in China start at the top and concentrate on the Central Government. A more realistic picture can be obtained, however, if one starts at the bottom and examines how government and politics operate at the level where they touch the vast masses of China’s rural population. What is the impact today, for example, of [government] rule on a farmer, a village, and a rural district in Szechwan?

— A. Doak Barnett, 1948, reporting on a trip to rural Sichuan¹¹

     The communist leadership has always been fond of meetings, and this could have been any peasant meeting since the communist revolution of 1949. Even the familiar dark blue and gray cotton jackets and trousers, worn by the older peasants especially, were reminiscent of earlier eras. Villagers had gathered like this during the period of land reform in the early 1950s, when wealthy landlords were overthrown and their land and houses distributed to the poor tenant farmers. They had met during the Great Leap Forward that started in 1958, when collectively held land was amalgamated into gigantic communes and the energies of hundreds of millions of peasants were poured into useless backyard steel furnaces. They had come together again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, when official authority was assaulted and the whole country seemed to implode. During the Cultural Revolution, such gatherings were often used to purge unwanted officials. That movement, like others before it, was brutal, leaving countless innocent victims and tearing at the fabric of Chinese society.

     But this meeting was different. Some of the younger women were wearing colorful skirts and blouses, and a few of their male peers wore loose-fitting Western-style suits. Several officials—distinguished always by their pale, smooth skin and the cut of their hair and their clothes—were wearing white shirts and ties. With the death of Mao in 1976, the destructive political campaigns had finally come to an end. In a dramatic departure from the Maoist tradition, these peasants were gathered to vote, in a direct and democratic election, for their village chief and village committee.

     The incumbent chief, plump and round in a Western suit, his smooth, unwrinkled skin showing little sign of the sun, had first been elected three years earlier. Now he was running again. He had served as the village doctor for twenty years before assuming office in 1992 and attributed his victory then to the fact that everyone knew and trusted him. His younger, drabber challenger lacked the self-assurance of the sitting chief, promising in his campaign speech only to “try to make things better” without explaining how.

     Things had already become much better under the administration of the incumbent. Even without meeting the contenders or listening to their campaign speeches, I would have bet on him. The road leading from the two-lane highway to the village had been newly paved, and our driver told us that the village chief had been responsible for bringing the project to fruition. In other villages, probing ineptly for the peasants’ conception of human rights, I had sometimes asked whether there was anything they felt was absolutely their right and something they deserved to have. The answer often came quickly and without hesitation: “Yes, roads.” A village chief who could take credit for paving a road, thus linking the peasants to their market, was likely to be reelected.

     The 300,000 yuan to build the road (more than $36,000 at the 1997 exchange rate) had come not from taxes but from the fruits of the village fishponds and a collectively owned factory. The collective coffers had been nearly depleted because of the project. Only 30,000 yuan remained. But average yearly income had increased from 600 yuan (approximately $75) in 1992 to 1,050 yuan ($130) in 1995. The doctor was doing much better than the average villager. His income was some 50,000 yuan ($6,250) a year—from his medical practice and his private fishpond, he said.

     When the authorities’ instructions had been delivered and the brief campaign speeches were over, the voting began. Taped music, ranging incongruously from the Internationale to Canto pop, blared from loudspeakers strategically placed around the school yard. The audience had been sitting according to plan in “small groups,” roughly equivalent to the old production team during the days of the people’s commune. In fact, the notion of a small group as an organizational unit can be traced back to well before 1949, to the baojia system. As described in C. K. Yang’s classic study of the Chinese village, the baojia system “was based on the family as the primary unit of collective responsibility for the proper and law-abiding conduct of all its members. Ten families formed a bao, and ten bao formed a jia. . . . Several jia formed a xiang, sometimes called an administrative village.”¹²

     In front of each small group were a blackboard and three tables taken from the classrooms—the kind a teacher stands behind when lecturing. Election officials sat at one table, checking off voters as they were given their ballots, dipping each person’s thumb in the pasty red ink that is used for official stamps, and then pressing the reddened thumb against the appropriate name on the voter registration roll. The second table served as a secret ballot booth. Slim bamboo poles had been attached to each corner of the table, and festive red paper had been hung on three sides, affording the voter privacy. On the third table sat a cardboard ballot box, also covered in red paper. (Red is the color of joy and thus of weddings in China.)

     As people began lining up to get their ballots, the voting was orderly. But queuing is not a Chinese custom (as anyone who has ever waited for a Chinese bus can attest) and soon people were crowded around the officials, pushing and shoving with laughing good humor, trying to grab their ballots. Privacy is not a Chinese concept, either (the word has been introduced into their language from outside), and as the ballots were given out faster than people could vote, two and three people began crowding into the ballot booth at a time as others hovered outside. People, women especially, began consulting on who was the better candidate and how to fill out the ballots. Some took their ballots to more private spots away from the crowd, and a few insisted on being left alone in the voting booth, but the process was often a consultative affair.

     When the voting was complete, the ballots were counted by small group, and the results were tallied on each blackboard and then added together at the end. Some of the small groups were voting in bloc. Everyone stayed to watch the tallies. The villagers were being compensated for their time off from work.

     The incumbent won by a landslide.

TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

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