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

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

The Roots of Political Reform in China’s Villages

A sham, as some of China’s critics claim? Or a major step forward in meaningful political reform, as many observers, commentators (and President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and House Speaker Gingrich) seem to believe?¹³

     The political situation in China’s 1 million villages has recently been added, if only as a footnote, to the public discourse on U.S. foreign policy toward China. Several American nongovernmental organizations are cooperating with Chinese officials working for grassroots democracy, but few Americans have more than a rudimentary notion of what is happening in China’s villages. Only a handful have witnessed village elections firsthand.

     American perceptions of China are bifurcated. Focus on the current pace of economic growth (averaging some 10 percent a year for almost two decades) and the rapid rise in per capita income and conclude, as The Economist did in 1992, that China has “brought about the biggest improvements in human welfare anywhere at any time.”¹⁴ Believe that the night of June 3–4, 1989, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army moved into Beijing, brutally suppressing the peaceful popular demonstrations that had been going on for weeks, remains the defining moment of the regime, and agree with New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal that doing business with China is a form of “moral atrocity.” Both extremes miss fundamental truths of contemporary China and ignore the vast majority of the Chinese people—the nearly 900 million who live in the countryside.¹⁵

     The effort to bring democracy to China’s villages has taken place so quietly, so tentatively, and so decidedly unevenly that even urban intellectuals in China are surprised to learn that peasants are being allowed to vote. Historically, demands for democracy have been urban based, led by students and intellectuals, many of whose hopes for democratization stop at the city gates.

     “What about Sichuan, with its huge population, all those peasants?” a thirty-something protester asked me in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, as hundreds of other demonstrators gathered round. “How could they have democracy? Excuse, me, but all those peasants . . .” The young man had graduated from Peking University in 1982. “We had a democratic movement there when I was a student,” he said. “It was real democracy. We know what democracy is.” Democracy was fine for urban, educated China, he thought, but the rest of the country, with its vast uneducated rural population, was not ready to govern itself.

     After the People’s Liberation Army swept into Beijing on the night of June 3–4, 1989, bringing weeks of peaceful protests to a bloody, brutal end, the hope for any speedy democratization of China died, too. Martial law cowed the once exuberant demonstrators into a sullen, stony silence, and leaders of the movement either fled, were arrested, or were driven underground. As Eastern Europe crumbled and the Soviet Union collapsed, hope for China was briefly rekindled. A “tide of democratic change” seemed to sweep the world. Chinese dissidents abroad optimistically predicted that the revolutions from below were global in scope and hence contagious. The cries for democracy that once echoed from Tiananmen Square would soon be heard again, they argued. “The university students and people of China are no different from people in the rest of the world,” political analyst and exile Yan Jiaqi, a senior spokesman for the democratic movement abroad, asserted in 1990. “They hold the same convictions about democracy, freedom, the need for rule by law, and human rights.”¹⁶

     But the dissidents’ hope was soon snuffed out. History in China seemed to stand still.

     In fact, political reform in China has been moving tentatively forward—not publicly or by popular demand but quietly and from the top down. Article 111 of the new constitution promulgated in 1982 had stipulated that the “chairman, vice chairman and members of the . . . village committees shall be elected by the local residents.”¹⁷ And in 1987, the National People’s Congress, the county’s nominal legislature, promulgated the Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees (Experimental), further specifying that village leaders be directly elected by the villagers themselves for terms of three years. There is little evidence from the decade of the 1980s that many in the Chinese leadership hierarchy took that mandate seriously and much to suggest that the issue of how to select the village chief and village committee continued to be contentious.¹⁸ Few, if any, democratic elections were actually held. But toward the end of decade, even as the debate continued, a critical core of Chinese officialdom, paradoxically, became convinced that democratic elections were essential to stability in the countryside and to the preservation of party authority.

Fengyang County and the Collapse of People’s Communes

The story of village elections begins in 1978, two years after the death of party chairman Mao Zedong and the collapse of revolutionary radicalism but before the country’s new economic course had become clear.

     One part of that story begins in Anhui province—in Anhui’s Fengyang county, to be precise. Anhui is an inland province and has always been one of China’s poorest. For Americans of a certain age, Anhui may be the best known of China’s provinces. Pearl Buck’s 1931 Pulitzer Prize–winning best-seller, The Good Earth, about a rural family in famine, is set in Anhui.¹⁹ Anhui is known for its famines. The gap between the coastal cities of China and the countryside of the interior has always been vast, and even today, after twenty years of reform, the chasm is still immense. To leave Anhui’s provincial capital of Hefei and drive to its rural hinterlands (as I did in January 1995) is to enter another century, where the touch of modernity can be seen in bicycles and dim electric light bulbs but not much more. The homes are made of mud, and many of the roofs are thatch, and donkeys, pigs, and chickens live together with the people. Inside the car, we listen to a tape of A Beijinger in New York, and the driver uses his cellular phone to call both his wife and his mistress in Hefei. Outside, pigs, chickens, donkeys, and people scatter at our approach. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away,” as the Chinese saying goes, and we seem to be in the middle of nowhere.

     For centuries, Fengyang has been one of the poorest counties in Anhui and thus has a history of tragedy. Some of that tragedy is recent, tracing to Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. Launched in 1958, the Great Leap Forward was heralded as the way for China to catch up with and overtake Great Britain in fifteen years, and the entire population was mobilized in frenzied effort. The peasant cooperatives that had been established only a few years before were amalgamated into gigantic people’s communes where food was free, families no longer cooked at home, and everyone was fed in communal dining halls. Men were pulled from productive labor in the fields to stoke the backyard steel furnaces, which were touted as the route to modernization but produced nothing but worthless iron blobs, often melted from farmers’ cooking utensils, doorknobs, and farm implements. Farmland was assaulted with new techniques, such as deep sowing and close planting, that were then carried to extremes. As local cadres made preposterous claims of ever-increasing output, production in fact was declining. In 1959, famine hit.

     Fengyang suffered egregiously. In 1959 and 1960 alone, according to figures published in 1989 by a team of Chinese social scientists, 17.7 percent of Fengyang’s population died.²⁰ In some villages, as many as half the people died. Many children were orphaned and many were abandoned, but local cadres ordered neighbors and friends not to take them in, fearing that if children without families found homes, more people would abandon their offspring.²¹

     Sixty-three instances of cannibalism were reported in Fengyang in 1960, including the case of a couple who strangled their eight-year old son in order to eat him and that of a woman who sold two jin of human flesh as pork.²² Jasper Becker, in ^{Hungry Ghosts,} notes the persistence of cannibalism throughout Chinese history, beginning some 2,000 years ago when, in the midst of famine, the founding emperor of the Han dynasty issued an edict permitting people to sell or eat their children if necessary.²³

     In 1960, the output of staple grain in Fengyang was 63.5 percent lower than in 1957, the result not of natural disaster, as the party has so often claimed, but of gross mismanagement of the newly formed people’s communes.²⁴ In some parts of the country, the state granaries were full even as peasants went hungry.

     Local cadres received much of the blame for what went wrong (for no better reason than that higher-level officials, with far greater actual responsibility, were writing the reports).²⁵ The report on Fengyang describes instances of local officials’ gorging themselves on meat, fish, and alcohol while the peasants around them starved, of peasants in communal dining halls consuming all available rice in order to avoid having to turn it over to cadres and the state, and of brutal beatings during cadre searches for hidden grain.²⁶

     Anhui was the most devastated of China’s provinces during the Great Leap Forward. A higher percentage of its population died than any other. Nationwide, the Great Leap Forward produced the worst disaster in the history of humankind. Somewhere between 27 million and 43 million people died above and beyond the norm.²⁷ Some observers contend that the figure is even higher.²⁸

     What is more, the disaster occurred without the knowledge of the outside world. Some specialists knew that the situation was bad, and a few, including officials at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong, knew that it was horrible. But it was only twenty years later, in 1980, when China began cooperating with foreign demographers to conduct a new and scientific census, that statistical evidence confirming the famine began coming inescapably to light.²⁹

     One of the great mysteries of rural China during the Maoist era is why the peasants, who provided the major support for the communist revolution, did not rebel, or even fight back, when the revolution first betrayed and then began devouring them. The answer from Fengyang in famine seems obvious. Starving people do not rebel. To the extent they move at all, it is to search for food.

     Although Chinese peasants have been accused of excessive compliance with authoritarian rule and have often been persuaded, as during the Great Leap Forward, to act against their own best interests, they also have a tradition of violent rebellion. Fengyang county offers a lesson that China’s central leadership cannot ignore. One of the greatest rebellions in Chinese history began there. Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant cum Buddhist monk who led the rebellion that overthrew the Yuan dynasty and established the Ming was born in Fengyang county. Ruins of the imperial palace that Zhu Yuanzhang built when he became the first Ming emperor still stand on a lonely plain near where he was born and where his mother died of starvation. The communist revolution also began in the Chinese countryside. Mao Zedong, a peasant rebel himself, enjoyed being compared with Zhu Yuanzhang.

     In 1978, twenty years after the formation of communes and the famine that resulted, Fengyang faced a terrible drought, said to be the worst in a hundred years. Experience had taught the peasants not to rely on the commune or village cadres to save them from another famine. They demanded that collective land be turned over to them to farm, as families. With the acquiescence first of the local party committee and then of the province, land was ceded to peasant households. The collective continued to own the land, but those who sowed it reaped the benefits, and the state did not demand grain as tax. The policy—known as baochan daohu, or contracting production to individual households—worked. Famine was avoided, and the commune in Fengyang county was dead.

     Thus it was that Fengyang county served as a catalyst for the rural reforms that ended the Maoist era and began the transformation that continues today. Within a few years, the commune had disappeared everywhere in China. The impetus to its dissolution, as Kate Zhou persuasively argues, came not from reformist leaders at the center or in the provinces but from the peasants themselves. The movement was “spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless, non-ideological, and apolitical,” says Zhou,³⁰ who spent several of the Cultural Revolution years in the countryside. Only when the benefits of decollectivization, in the form of dramatically increased agricultural output, were obvious to such reform-minded provincial-level leaders as Wan Li in Anhui and Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan did they legitimize the movement. Only when the movement had spread through most of the country was it accepted by the center and Deng Xiaoping.³¹ Within six years, grain output had increased by a third; peasant incomes tripled in eight. As one peasant saying declared, “Our direction was guided by our stomachs.”

     As agricultural production soared and government controls were loosened, village life became richer and more diverse. Rural markets, long officially scorned as remnants of capitalism, reopened and old traditions revived. Funerals and weddings, traditionally elaborate but forced into austerity by the puritan side of Chinese socialism, came back. A visitor to the Chinese countryside in the early 1980s might chance upon a noisy wedding caravan transporting the bride’s dowry to her bridegroom’s home or pass a funeral procession, mourners dressed in white, and note the new burial mounds, covered with paper wreaths, in family-farmed fields.

     With agriculture thriving and stomachs full, issues of local governance were not yet pressing. The people’s communes had been both economic and administrative units. With their demise, the name of the geographic area once encompassed by the commune reverted to what it had been before collectivization and before the communists came to power—the xiang, or township, which also became the lowest level of government administration.³² The old production brigades, previously administered by the commune and generally coterminous with the natural village, were also dissolved. Villages became autonomous, self-governing units, subject to state policies but without the funding for health care, welfare, schools, and public security that had once been provided through the commune. The production teams, once the lowest-level unit within the commune, came to be known as “small groups,” not dissimilar to the precommunist bao.

     Small-scale rural industries often remained collectively owned, usually by either townships or villages, and thus are frequently referred to as town and village enterprises, or TVEs. The extent to which these enterprises continued to be run for the good of the collective, however, came to vary. In many, the manager came to behave nearly as owner, reaping profits accordingly. In other places, profits have been controlled by economic management committees.³³ In some places, profits from collective industry have been used to run schools and provide basic welfare for the destitute. Without insurance, however, most rural families had to pay for their own health care, with a consequent decline in the quality of rural health. Schools began charging tuition, unheard of under the commune, and in poorer areas the quality of schooling declined, together with enrollment, as the poorest children could no longer afford to go to school.

     Even as the communes were dissolved, old officials often stayed on. Former commune leaders simply changed titles to become heads of townships, and former brigade leaders assumed the position of village chiefs. Some old brigade leaders questioned the reality of their power without economic resources, but the debate about how to administer China’s 1 million natural villages took place behind closed doors, out of public earshot.

Unintended Consequences: Rural Reform and the Chaos of Everyday Life

As the decade of the 1980s progressed, the burst of agricultural production peaked and then began leveling off. Some of the unintended consequences of rural reform became evident. Not all the consequences were good. Perhaps the most widely discomforting by-product of the economic transformation was an underlying sense of luan, or chaos—a feeling that too much was happening too quickly, that things might be spinning out of control. Chinese have almost as many ways to describe luan as Eskimos have to talk about snow, and fear of luan is pervasive, both within officialdom and among the population at large.

     With the demise of the collective, as peasants began producing for themselves, free markets, so long suppressed, began springing up like the proverbial Chinese mushrooms after a spring rain. Markets appeared first in the countryside, but in the early 1980s, peasants began appearing cautiously in city suburbs selling their fruits and vegetables from the backs of bicycle- or horse-drawn carts. When no one stopped them, and their goods were quickly bought up, they began moving closer to the center of the city, setting up more permanent facilities from which to sell their wares. As the rationing system broke down, they began to crowd the cities, and the scope of their activities expanded. Long moribund service industries were suddenly enlivened. Peasants opened family-style restaurants, beauty salons, furniture stores, tailors, and hostels. When the building industry began booming, they manned the construction sites. When new factories were established or old ones expanded, they staffed the assembly lines.

     By 1992, some 100 million rural people had left the countryside for cities and county towns.³⁴ It was, and continues to be, the most massive rural to urban migration in history. It has also been the source of considerable luan, challenging the capacity of city administrators, social services, housing, and sanitation facilities to cope. Relations between urban residents and rural interlopers became strained, and those strains were often played out in the newly revived marketplace, as city dwellers who looked down upon peasants sought to take advantage of the country bumpkins, and the country bumpkins worked just as hard to cheat the city slickers. The markets, thus, were also a source of luan.

     Reports began appearing of social disorder—of thefts, even murders, on trains, of highway banditry, of kidnappings of women and children, of apartments robbed and taxi drivers mugged.

     Village leadership was also in a state of luan, though the effect of decollectivization on village leadership varied widely between two extremes. At one extreme, some places faced a vacuum of leadership as former cadres left their posts to seek their fortunes in new, or newly expanded, enterprises and no new leaders (or grossly ineffectual ones) replaced them. Such villages sometimes stagnated, pervaded by a sense of aimlessness and anomie. At the other extreme, many villagers continued to be exploited by corrupt and opportunistic leaders. Some villages were dominated by “local emperors,” a perennial problem in rural China.

     In many parts of China, local leaders came to profit from the rearrangements of village life. Though leaders no longer exerted direct control over the daily working lives of the villagers, their extensive guanxi, or connections, brought them opportunities for moneymaking denied to ordinary villagers. Some became managers of the still collectively owned town or village enterprises, running the small industries as though they were privately owned and profiting accordingly. Some became corrupt.

     As the market began to take hold, decision making also shifted naturally to lower levels. Although decentralization and decollectivization brought vast new freedoms to China’s farmers, licenses still had to be obtained and permissions secured, for money that often went to line the pockets of cadres. The continuing decentralization of political power—from the center to the provinces and from the provinces to the localities—meant not a decrease in citizens’ contact with the state but a multiplication of points of power and hence, for citizens trying to get something done, more authorities to deal with in the course of everyday life—more officials to be feted, more gifts to be given, more guanxi to nurture. Gift giving, particularly to people who can smooth the travails of daily life, has long been part of the Chinese tradition, and the line between etiquette and bribery is a fine one. But today, even routine stamps of approval regularly require bribes—from a carton of cigarettes, to an extravagant banquet with karaoke, to generous kickbacks. The size of the “gift” depends on the nature of the service and the giver’s ability to pay.

     Of the many new burdens placed on China’s peasants, none were so weighty as the taxes and fees to which many became subject. Some, to be sure, were used to run schools, build roads, and provide for the common good. But because so many taxes are locally generated and imposed, unscrupulous local leaders could devise a myriad of means to extract money from the peasants and call that extraction a tax or a fee. A 1993 report in the Far Eastern Economic Review cites instances in Anhui province where poor people were beaten and jailed for failing to pay “taxes” on their old radios and televisions.³⁵

     Many of these problems are not new. Socialist China has always faced difficulties guaranteeing the honesty and competence of local leaders. Following the famine of the Great Leap Forward, hundreds of thousands of educated urbanites were sent to the countryside, in a movement known as the Socialist Education Campaign, to investigate cadre corruption in the villages. “The Socialist Education Campaign made me see how terrible the unlimited power of the grassroots cadres could be,” Song Erli told me in 1982, when the communes were being disbanded.36 As a university student in 1962, twenty years before, Song had been sent to the countryside as part of a team investigating cadre abuse. “The leaders in the countryside had a lot of power, and nearly every one of them had been corrupted by that power, and the majority of them had been corrupted very easily, very early. One of the reasons they are getting rid of the commune system now is that corruption has never been put right; it is impossible to wipe out corruption when cadres have so much power. The cadres became the local emperors of their small teams.”³⁷

     But the dissolution of the communes did not eliminate corruption. Power and exploitation continued to go hand in hand. Moreover, there was no regularized procedure for removing unpopular, dishonest, or dictatorial cadres.

The Debate over Village Political Reform

The problem of corrupt and dictatorial local emperors and the perception of a countryside on the verge of luan were central issues in the higher-level debates over the administration of China’s villages. As Daniel Kelliher, critiquing the official rationale for village elections, points out, “Fear of chaos, rather than idealism, has driven the debate.”³⁸ But fear of chaos was a double-edged sword. Opponents of village self-government could argue that democracy would lead to the loss of political control and hence to luan. Advocates could argue that only democracy could prevent the advent of chaos and thus preserve the party’s legitimacy.

     Many in China associate democracy with luan. Demands for democratization there, dating as far back as the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and as recently as the spring of 1989, have usually been voiced in the streets, by protesting demonstrators. Both the demonstrations and their suppression have plunged the country into turmoil. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution was touted as a great democracy, but every level of society was split into competing factions, each claiming to wear the legitimate mantle of Mao. With no institutionalized means of solving conflicting claims, disputes escalated into violence. The label democracy stuck to the Cultural Revolution, together with its association with violence. For some, the luan of competing factions (or parties), the baggage of democracy, is thus to be avoided.

     In the debate over village administration that took place in the 1980s, opponents of elections feared that democracy would bring an immediate end to the party’s political control and argued that if the party lost control over the selection of village leaders, the task of enforcing state policies—such as family planning and grain procurement—would be much more difficult for township-level officials.³⁹ The village, after all, is the vital linchpin in any government policy, the place where policy actually gets carried out.

     The upheavals in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union following the collapse of communism only bolstered the antidemocracy argument. Many in China believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union led to luan, the result of the end of party rule and the introduction of democracy.

     Chaos could be avoided, the opponents of village democracy argued, if village officials were appointed by higher levels of the party bureaucracy. Alternatively, village committees could serve as the lowest level of government, appointed by government leaders from the townships or counties. In either case, party control would remain intact.

     But the argument that the failure to introduce democracy could lead to chaos was also persuasive. Conservative party elder Peng Zhen—an early victim of the Cultural Revolution, former head of the National People’s Congress and architect of the party’s 1982 constitution—was the first of the senior leaders to predict a political breakdown without the introduction of democracy. In pushing for passage of the Organic Law in 1987, Peng pointed to the deterioration of relations between villagers and local leaders and noted the rise of “local emperors”—“cadres who flattered officials at higher levels but ‘used excessive force against villagers and even illegally jailed them.’ ”⁴⁰ Academic collaborators Lianjiang Li and Kevin O’Brien have documented Peng’s argument that if such trends were not checked, villagers would “sooner or later attack our rural cadres with their shoulder poles.”⁴¹ Villagers, in short, might revolt. The only solution, Peng argued, was the promotion of village self-government so that rural inhabitants themselves could select and oversee village cadres. Peng Zhen was successful in pushing through the Organic Law on an experimental basis, but the controversy simmered.

     When tanks and guns silenced demands for political reform in June 1989, the prospects for village self-governance seemed dim indeed. In 1990, the election provisions of the Organic Law came under renewed attack. This time, the case for village democracy was championed by another conservative party elder, Bo Yibo, who put his enthusiastic imprimatur on an investigation of village-level organization conducted by officials at the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The report predicted a serious political crisis in the Chinese countryside if relations between villagers and basic-level cadres did not improve and argued that the only way to prevent such a crisis was the institution of village self-government and the direct election of village leaders.⁴²

     Wang Zhenyao was one of the authors of that report. “Lots of city people were opposed to my report on rural elections,” he says. “They think that peasants cannot have democracy. City intellectuals and students are too idealistic and abstract” when they talk about democracy, he says. They talk about democracy without really knowing what it is. “For peasants, things are very concrete. They are very practical. Their daily life is a constant struggle. Peasants may not have any abstract concept of democracy, but they still want it. They want to elect the leaders who have control over their lives. It is not true that peasants are not ready for democracy. It is just that they have a much more concrete perception of it.”⁴³

     Party elder Bo Yibo agreed with Wang Zhenyao, calling his report “superb” (jihao).⁴⁴ With Bo’s official blessing, politburo standing committee member Song Ping declared the debate over village elections at an end and ordered the implementation of the Organic Law.⁴⁵

     Top-level supporters of village elections see basic-level democracy not as a threat to communist party rule but as a way of reviving it. No one even hints at introduction of

     a multiparty system. Rather, party elders can argue that the experiment in grassroots democracy is consistent with the party’s “mass line,” whereby legitimacy was presumed to derive from well-intentioned cadres who work closely with and in service to the people. Indeed, democratic experiments had been attempted in the communist-controlled base areas during the long struggle to obtain power. But the mass line eroded once the party came to rule. Even lip service to the concept disappeared when Deng Xiaoping proclaimed that getting rich was glorious and local cadres became the first to make their fortunes. For party conservatives, democratization was a way of reviving a failed revolutionary tradition.

     But there was a more subtle subtext to the argument over village elections. Some of the younger and better-educated reformers have looked abroad for alternative models of local governance. To the warning that democracy had brought chaos to Russia, some would answer that the Soviet Union had little experience in grassroots democracy, and the disorder there was a consequence of too little preparation for democratic rule. Taiwan is where many have looked for a positive model for political development.

     After the Chinese military began lobbing missiles in the direction of Taiwan in the spring of 1996 as the island was about to conduct its first democratic presidential election, the lively intellectual exchanges between Taiwan and mainland scholars ground to a halt. Until then, Taiwan scholars had been giving voice to alternatives that mainland reformers could not yet publicly express. At an international conference held in Beijing in July 1995, sponsored by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and attended by both national- and local-level civil affairs officials, scholars from Taiwan offered practical advice. They pointed out that grassroots elections began in Taiwan decades before those at the provincial and national levels. The evolution of a multiparty system there was gradual. Just as the Guomindang had to institute local elections in order to preserve its legitimacy, so, to preserve its legitimacy, the Communist Party would have to do the same. Further, just as the Guomindang had to institute internal party reform in order to stay in power, so the Communist Party would have to reform itself. In Taiwan, the legitimacy of the Guomindang depended finally, not only on internal party reform, but also on allowing competing political parties and the gradual expansion upward of competitive, multiparty elections. The introduction of competitive elections, the scholars noted, introduced the possibility that the Guomindang could be voted out of office. By instituting procedures that allow for a peaceful, if temporary, transfer of power, the Guomindang, thus far, has saved itself. Gift giving, vote buying, and creative constituency building were part of the game.⁴⁶

     The Taiwan representatives were certain that party reform and the introduction of competing parties were inevitable on the mainland, too. Under a Taiwan model, the Communist Party would remain the governing party for the foreseeable future, while reformist and conservative factions within the party would openly vie for popular support. Democratic elections would gradually be pushed upward, from villages and townships to the county and then to the provincial level. The National People’s Congress would evolve into a more powerful, more genuinely legislative body. The rule of law would gradually replace the capriciousness of rule by individuals.⁴⁷

     The arguments of the Taiwan compatriots elicited a spirited response. But open discussions about the possibility of competing political parties and higher-level competitive elections are still too sensitive in China. For now, “We act, not talk,” says one party reformer. “We do not discuss the long-term goal. We talk about election procedures.” He argues instead that democratic elections will produce a new, better-educated, more reformist and responsive, less ideologically motivated party.

     Responsibility for overseeing the nationwide implementation of village elections has been assigned to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The task is enormous. The 900 million people in China’s rural areas live in nearly 1 million villages. Only five people at the Ministry of Civil Affairs have been assigned to work on what has come to be referred to officially as village self-governance.⁴⁸ However committed, even evangelical, some at the ministry may be, their power to ensure that village elections adhere to democratic principles is limited. Westerners often mistakenly assume a simple command-obedience relationship between the center and the provinces in China. The relationship is more complex. The Ministry of Civil Affairs provides “strong administrative guidance”⁴⁹ to provincial and local governments and is charged with laying down guidelines, with organizing training for local-level officials, and with appraising the organization of village elections. But each province is responsible for formulating its own regulations for implementing the Organic Law. Not only is the national election law sufficiently vague to allow wide interpretation in implementation, but provincial regulations are sometimes in marked contrast to both the spirit and specifics of the Organic Law. Even provincial- and local-level laws and regulations are not necessarily treated as mandatory. Officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, spread thin in any case, rely largely on persuasion to ensure that their suggestions are followed. The training of officials, often by people who either oppose or do not fully support election procedures, allows for the introduction of further deviation from national-level law.

     Beginning in 1990, after Bo Yibo had praised his investigation, primary responsibility for nationwide implementation of village elections came to rest with Wang Zhenyao, then serving on the staff of the ministry’s Department of Basic-Level Governance. Wang was well suited to his new task. The promotion of village democracy was his life’s mission.

Wang Zhenyao: Official Champion of Grassroots Political Reform

Wang Zhenyao is representative of many of the younger, educated reformists now occupying key positions in the middle ranks of the Chinese government. A member of the Communist Party since his youth, Wang is a 1981 graduate of Tianjin’s Nankai University, one of China’s finest liberal arts universities. (Zhou Enlai was a student there from 1913 to 1917.) Wang was chairman of the Nankai student body in 1980–81, when his university, like others throughout the country, was swept up in a democratic movement.

     What makes Wang different from many other members of this Cultural Revolution generation are his rural roots. Most educated reformers his age are city born and bred. Wang Zhenyao’s parents are peasants.

     Wang Zhenyao was born on March 6, 1954, to one of the poorest families in one of the poorest villages in inland Henan province, a place called Bailiantang.⁵⁰ Both his parents were illiterate. As a child, Wang lived with his family in a two-room hut with mud walls, a straw-thatched roof, and a dirt floor. The village had no electricity and no running water.

     Wang’s first concrete memories begin in 1958, when he was four years old and Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward. Henan, under the leadership of Wu Zhifu, was at the fanatic forefront of the movement. The first of the country’s communes was established there, and Mao Zedong, with whom rests final responsibility for the tragedy that followed, visited the province several times during the early, exuberant stages.⁵¹ Jasper Becker, whose Hungry Ghosts offers the most comprehensive documentation of the famine that followed, credits the people of Henan with a tendency to millenarianism, thus explaining why the claims of the Henan leadership for advances made during the Great Leap Forward were on the far side of utopian. Wu Zhifu, Becker points out, “promised to make Henan the first province to achieve full literacy, complete irrigation and full Communization.” The province was at the forefront of the disastrous policies of deep plowing and close planting, and its irrigation projects were the most ambitious in China.⁵² Peasants like Wang Zhenyao’s father were often forced to work around the clock. As a result, the leadership falsely claimed, agricultural output had shot up from some 330 pounds per mu (0.04 acres) to 3,300 and sometimes even 11,000 pounds.

     It is the famine Wang remembers most— the hunger and his swollen belly, his mother foraging for cabbage roots and leaves, scraping the bark off trees, cooking it in a soup for her son. Many people in his village died—especially the elderly, the children, and the men being forced to labor such long hours with nothing to fill their stomachs.

     The famine lasted three years, until 1962. Estimates of the provincial death toll range between 2 and 8 million people. Ironically, the provincial granaries were often full even as people starved. In Henan’s Xinyang prefecture, where the death toll was highest, the famine ended when the central government ordered the People’s Liberation Army to occupy the prefecture and distribute the grain.

     Remarkably, Wang Zhenyao was able to go to school, despite the famine, and was consistently at the head of his class. He stayed in school even with the Cultural Revolution in full swing, graduating from high school in 1971 first in his class. He stayed in the village, first teaching primary school and then middle school. His father, an open and forthright man, was an object of attack during the Cultural Revolution, and the sins of the father were visited on the son. The village leaders refused to allow Wang to join the Youth League and prohibited him from taking the exam that could qualify him for a government position outside the village. “This left a deep impression on me,” he says.

     Wang escaped from the confines of his village only when army recruiters took him into the army.

     There again he excelled.

     In the summer of 1977, when college entrance exams were offered for the first time since the Cultural Revolution began some eleven years before, Wang Zhenyao was a platoon leader in Nanning city, Guangxi province. He took the exam from there. He passed, entering Nankai University that fall.

     The university introduced Wang Zhenyao to a whole new world of ideas. The restraints of the Cultural Revolution were loosening, and young people were optimistic, excited, full of hope for the future. The Cultural Revolution’s slogans of class struggle were being replaced by new calls to “liberate thought” and “seek truth from facts.” The faculty at Nankai, still traumatized by the persecution they had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, did not often stray from political orthodoxy. But the library was full of Western translations, and Wang, like many of his schoolmates, soon was reading about ancient Greece, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. He read Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence in Chinese. He learned about the evolution of democracy in the West, beginning with local elections in ancient Greece. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was his favorite. Wang loved The Social Contract’s opening sentence—“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”—and he appreciated Rousseau’s focus on the common good rather than individual rights. He thought the notion of common good was consistent with China’s collectivist thought.

     He came to think that he and his generation could have an influence on the course of Chinese history. “Even after ten years of social turmoil,” says Wang, “we still had ideals. I thought that my generation should take responsibility for our country, that we had to develop courage and the persistence to keep going.

     “Nineteen seventy-nine was a very important time,” he continues. “Everything was open. There were so many new opportunities. Those were my first golden years. I was becoming a new man.” He met the foreign students who were beginning to come to the university. Until then, he had seen foreigners in the movies but never in the flesh. The first time foreign students visited his dormitory was a university “happening.” Dozens of Chinese students crowded around the one Canadian and one Japanese student for what became an ongoing exchange of views and the beginning of friendships that persist even today. The meeting was held in Wang’s room.

     Again, Wang Zhenyao studied hard and excelled in school. He had been recruited into the Communist Party after joining the military and was selected to lead his history class. He organized discussion groups on rural reform, world history, Chinese history, the political reforms going on in Yugoslavia. He came to believe that China needed both modernization and democracy and began looking at how socialist countries like Yugoslavia were introducing political reform. When a senior scholar argued that the main danger facing China was capitalism, Wang Zhenyao wrote a retort. The main danger, he argued, was feudalism. The class of 1977 was rebellious, and when student activities began exceeding the limits of what school authorities could accept, the students threatened to strike. Wang Zhenyao was selected head of the student body.

     Wang was still in the army when he began graduate studies in political science at Wuhan’s Huazhong Normal University in 1983. He studied with Zhang Hou’an, in whom he found a kindred political spirit, and his research focused on political reform in socialist countries. Again, he was selected to lead his class, and again he organized discussion groups, inviting leading Chinese thinkers to speak. Liu Binyan, the county’s leading and most respected journalist, now in exile in the United States, was one of the people who visited Huazhong at Wang Zhenyao’s request.

     Wang’s master’s thesis focused on the possibilities for political reform in China. Some people in the office of Hu Yaobang (who lost his position as general secretary of the Communist Party in early 1987 and whose death in April 1989 set off the student demonstrations in Beijing) read and liked Wang’s thesis. Wang was able to leave the military after graduating from Huazhong. In 1987, he was brought into the Rural Research Center under the Chinese State Council. Wang began doing surveys of rural areas. The communes had been disbanded by then, and problems in local-level leadership were beginning to appear. Wang’s reports noted that the problem of corruption and power had not been solved with the dissolution of communes. The arbitrary exercise of power by local officials was creating dissatisfaction throughout the Chinese countryside. If local emperors were allowed to reign unchecked, the possibility for widespread unrest was real, Wang warned. Wang thought that village administration should be made more democratic.

     People at the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs were reading Wang’s proposals. In January 1989, when the ministry became responsible for implementing political reform in China’s villages and established a new section on rural basic-level governance, they invited Wang Zhenyao to head the new division. The new section was charged with overseeing nationwide implementation of village self-governance, including the democratic election of village committees. Wang’s rural roots, his educational background, and his commitment to political reform made him an ideal candidate for the post.

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

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