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

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

The Varieties of Village Self-Governance

Active implementation of village elections specified by the 1987 Organic Law did not really begin until 1990, with wide variations from province to province and village to village. Generally, village self-government can be said to have three primary components: the village assembly, the village representative assembly, and the village committee.

     The Village Assembly and Village Representative Assembly. By law, the village assembly, similar in principle to the New England town meeting, is the supreme decision-making body, deciding all major village affairs. Village assemblies are composed either of all adult villagers or of one representative from each household. But they have rarely been convened. Chinese villages generally range in size from 1,000 to 3,000 people, and the logistics of calling so many people together for discussion and decision making have generally proved unworkable. Instead, many villages have organized village representative assemblies, and in 1990 the Ministry of Civil Affairs began promoting village representative assemblies nationwide. By 1994, according to ministry reports, about half of all villages had formed village representative assemblies.⁵³ Members of the representative assemblies are often heads or deputy heads of the village small groups, reminiscent again not only of the production teams but also of the old baojia system. Many representative assemblies also include village committee members and delegates from the local Women’s Federation, the Youth League, and the militia and representatives of the elderly. The elected village chief generally presides over the meetings, though this varies widely from village to village.

     Official reports say that members of these assemblies are elected by “all the people from a village.” But no Westerners (or none that I know of) have witnessed these elections. Susan Lawrence, the former Beijing bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report, is the only China specialist to write about the village representative assembly.⁵⁴ Impressionist evidence, from both my own observations and official Chinese reports,⁵⁵ suggests that election procedures are often very informal, drawing on tradition rather than law. In Lishu county, Jilin province, the representatives seemed to be the villages’ senior, most respected males, many of whom had been heads of production teams under the commune system. In Fujian, representatives were much younger, often in their thirties, consciously representing their constituencies.

     Village representative assemblies have both more power and, often, greater moral authority than village committees. They have the right to decide important village affairs, to participate in the management of village affairs, to oversee and vote on major expenditures, to supervise village heads—and to veto decisions made by village committees.⁵⁶ They are presumed to be deeply imbedded in village life and in intimate contact with the popular will and to have the good of the villagers at heart.

     Because foreign observation has been limited to elections of the village committee, most have overlooked the importance of the village representative assembly. Future evaluations of democratic government at the village level will need to focus on the representative assemblies as well. To equate the election of village committees with democracy is a mistake. The properly functioning village representative assembly serves, in essence, as a legislature, making decisions governing the villagers’ everyday lives. The village committee is responsible for executing its decisions.

     In March 1997, I had the opportunity to observe a meeting of the representative assembly in Xixi village, Fujian province, deep in the Jinggang mountains.

     The meeting was convened to decide whether to spend limited village funds to establish a new periodic market or to replace a footbridge connecting one section of the village to its farmland. Assembly members were young, in their thirties and forties, and the debate was stilted and almost scripted at first. But as assembly members relaxed in the presence of foreigners, the discussion became more informal. Advocates of the footbridge argued both that the decaying beams on the existing bridge were life-threateningly dangerous and that the bridge was essential for peasants to reach their fields. Advocates of the market argued that the current market was dangerous, too. Because it was set up along either side of the two-lane highway that cut through the village, trucks rumbled by at high speed, threatening shoppers and vendors alike.

     The discussion was too abstract for the visitors to grasp. We asked to visit the two sites. As we walked to the bridge accompanied by assembly delegates, the interests governing the debate quickly became clear. Assembly members representing small groups whose farms could be reached only by the footbridge were naturally championing the construction of a new bridge. Small groups whose fields were on the other side of the highway and accessible without the footbridge tended to favor a new market. The current market was indeed willy-nilly, with small, haphazardly placed produce stalls lining both sides of the road. But the bridge was in serious disrepair, and it was both a footbridge and an aqueduct, bringing water to irrigate the fields.

     The representative assembly decided by a show of hands—25 to 14 with one abstention —in favor of the bridge. The village chief voted in favor of the market. The new market would be set up later, when the village coffers had been replenished.

     The Village Committee. The role of the village committee is dual and sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, the village committee is charged with implementing decisions made by the representative assembly. On the other, it is responsible for publicizing government policies and persuading villagers to follow those policies, even (and sometimes particularly) when government policies are not entirely popular. By law, the village committee is responsible for mediating civil disputes, helping to maintain social order, and reporting popular opinion and proposals to the government.⁵⁷ Beyond that, specific functions of the village committee vary from place to place. The Ministry of Civil Affairs encourages village representative assemblies to draw up village pledges or village self-government charters further detailing the rights and obligations of, and rules and regulations for, villagers, the village committee, and the village representative assembly.

     Even the official research arm of the Ministry of Civil Affairs recognizes that the committee’s twofold function of implementing higher-level policy and responding to village-based initiatives can be contradictory. “The village heads lack authoritativeness with the farmers,” says a 1994 official report.⁵⁸ “This is partly due to the fact that the village organization is more of an administrative body in reality. And village heads often act on behalf of the government, and cannot give too much consideration to the interests of the local community and farmers. Therefore, village heads are not always identified as one of the farmers themselves.”⁵⁹

     The village committee is the only organization required by law to be democratically elected. The ministry has set forth four principles essential to democracy: that the chairman, vice chairman, and members of village committees be directly elected by the villagers themselves; that the number of candidates exceed the number of positions; that voting be conducted by secret ballot; and that the winning candidate receive more than half the votes.⁶⁰

     Elections take place every three years, but the timing is not standardized, either nationwide, within provinces, or within counties and townships. Even within a single county, village elections may be spread over several months. Because implementation has proceeded slowly and piecemeal, some provinces, such as Fujian, have already held five rounds of elections, whereas other provinces have held only one or two—yet another reason for the remarkable diversity from province to province and county to county.

     Credible estimates of how many village elections in China have been carried out in accordance with the ministry’s principles are impossible to make. Short of a massive, well-financed survey, the Chinese countryside is too large and diverse for any realistic assessment, even by the ministry. Reports from local areas are not always realistic, and norms for what constitutes “democracy” vary greatly. Local officials are not ordinarily comfortable reporting failures, and opposition to village elections is strongest among the county and township officials responsible for reporting. When one county official in Sichuan was asked when elections would be extended upward to the county level and whether he would be willing to stand for election, he responded that many different flowers make up a garden but the garden is no less beautiful for the differences. The county official was a flower who preferred not to run for election and was not so sure that village elections made much of a contribution to the garden, either.

     The editor of a Chinese magazine focusing on township affairs, interviewed by Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, estimates that no more than 10 percent of village elections have been conducted according to democratic standards.⁶¹ According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, elections have technically been held in 90 percent of China’s villages, but the ministry has designated only fifty-nine counties as models—localities where elections have been sufficiently well organized, democratic, and fair that their procedures are considered worthy of study and emulation by others.⁶²

     Nor is it easy to specify what variables influence the success of China’s village elections. For many Chinese, the most important question is whether the introduction of village democracy in fact staves off rural unrest. Some Westerners, by contrast, have attempted to test the proposition, taken by some as an article of faith, that economic (particularly capitalist) development leads inevitably to democratization. What has been proven thus far in the villages of China is only that the relationship cannot be demonstrated, or, as Jean Oi notes, that “the relationship between economic development and political change remains a puzzle.”⁶³ Susan Lawrence, writing about village representative assemblies in Hebei province, argues that chronic mismanagement was the motivating force in Hebei’s experiments with new forms of local governance.⁶⁴ The representative assemblies were welcomed as an alternative to substandard leadership and unmanageable, impoverished villages. Kevin O’Brien suggests that the most democratically organized villages “appear disproportionately in wealthier demonstration villages and in those with large collective enterprises.”⁶⁵ Amy Gadsden, who joined the International Republican Institute in 1995 and has observed several rounds of elections, notes that one reason democratic elections have been applauded by villagers is the perception that elections can increase local prosperity. Villagers therefore tend to elect entrepreneurs who promise to help make them rich. She also notes paradoxically that village elections have met the greatest resistance in China’s richest and poorest provinces.⁶⁶

     Rural development in China has not yet progressed to the point where the relationship between political and economic development is evident. For the time being, we must look at different variables to explain the diversity of village political life. If the degree of democratization is taken as the single variable, village leadership runs along a broad continuum. At the least democratic end of the spectrum are villages where elections have failed and leadership has broken down and those that continue to be governed by the type of self-interested and dictatorial local emperors whom Peng Zhen saw as such a threat to the party’s legitimacy. On the most democratic end are villages with popular and innovative new leaders elected by majority vote and working in tandem with representative assemblies.

     When the level of a village’s economic development is factored in, the spectrum becomes a matrix.⁶⁷ Some of China’s poorest and richest villages are also among the least democratic. While examples of relatively prosperous democratic villages abound, however, examples of poor democratic villages are few. The source of a village’s prosperity—whether from community enterprises or private entrepreneurship—may also affect the nature of grassroots democracy. Where collective enterprises allow for the dispensation of patronage, democracy may become corrupt. An infusion of “help” from higher-level authorities can either greatly promote the evolution of democracy or constrict the range of choice, as when popular village leaders are prohibited from running for election by township or county officials.

     Taking a concrete look at villages at different points along the spectrum, or in different boxes within the grid, makes it possible to understand something of the complexity of village leadership in China today and to say something about why some villages have been so successful in implementing elections and others have so much further to go. Why do some villages succumb to the rule of local emperors? Why have democratic elections in Fujian province and Lishu county, Jilin, been so successful? And why has Bend in the River village failed in its efforts to elect anyone at all?

Bend in the River Village: No Development, No Democracy

The Cultural Revolution was in full swing and Tong Yanqi was only fourteen years old when she was sent as an “educated youth” from Beijing to Bend in the River village, several hundred miles southwest of her home. She stayed ten years. In the fall of 1995, returning for the first time since having left seventeen years before, Yanqi graciously allowed me to come along. Now a professor at the University of Utah, Yanqi had no idea what we would find. Bend in the River village had always been poor.

     Indeed, the county town not far from Bend in the River had yet to share in the economic boom of the southern coast. The buildings were only one and two stories high, and they were not new. The taxis at the train station were tiny three-wheeled tractors, not much bigger than a motorcycle and open at the back. Few other motorized vehicles were to be seen.

     Yanqi could tell from the road, long before we arrived, that Bend in the River village had not greatly developed since she left. Bend in the River is only a few kilometers from the county town, and the rutted, bumpy dirt road begins just where the town ends and the farmland begins.

     Yanqi was right. The village had yet to see any real development. There were no collective enterprises, and no one in the village could properly be called an entrepreneur. The great majority of the villagers were much better off than they had been before, however, though Yanqi was curious to discover that people who had been poor under the collective were still poor and those who had been rich had only become richer. A few of the old mud-walled houses remained, but most people had built new brick homes. Everything about the new houses was more modern than before. Most had televisions, and in the wealthier families the televisions were color. Everyone agreed that they had more to eat today, and the point was proved repeatedly in the lavish meals we were served and the quantities of meat, jiaozi (dumplings), and alcohol consumed.

     The higher incomes were the consequence of the decollectivization of land and the freedom to engage in small-scale moneymaking activities. Farming was more diversified than before, and people were cultivating cash crops and raising pigs and chickens. Many families had at least one member who worked in industry in the nearby county town, where their wages were higher than what they could make on a farm. There were no telephones or cars in the village, and running water—a spigot in every courtyard—had been introduced only in the past year or so, when pollution from nearby cement and fertilizer factories had poisoned village well water, rendering it undrinkable. People attributed the increase of cancer in the village to pollution, which was cause for considerable concern.

     The old brigade headquarters and the adjacent village square were the only spots in the village that had not physically changed. The headquarters had once been the center of village activity. The collective’s frequent meetings were held at the headquarters, and the village’s first black-and-white television had been placed there. Villagers had gathered around it at night to watch and to talk.

     The village square, a large plot of uncultivated land adjacent to the headquarters where the threshing used to be done at harvest time, had also been a gathering place. Together, the brigade headquarters and the village square had been the focal point of the village community, symbols of collective life. With decollectivization, the meetings stopped, and threshing became a family endeavor. The brigade headquarters was no longer used. It was just as it had been when Tong Yanqi was there, with the same tables and chairs in the meeting rooms, except that everything had fallen into disrepair. The place that had once been the center of village life was deserted and lonely. The whole village, in its public spaces, had an unkempt, almost desolate, look, and the village blackboard, once used for public announcements and messages, was blank.

     People missed the collective life. They even missed the meetings, which had been a chance for neighbors to meet and socialize, to feel part of the same community. They remembered how hard they had worked during the period of “learning from Dazhai,” which was how they referred to the Cultural Revolution. Dazhai was the nationwide model brigade then, and Bend in the River had become a model in learning from Dazhai, which meant that the villagers were busy year-round with one form of collective activity or another. No one really wanted to return to the backbreaking work. But people spoke of a feeling of emptiness (kongxu), a decline of community spirit, a certain lack of meaning to life, like being “a sheet of loose sand.”

     Some people were turning to religion to fill the gap. At the edge of the village, just where the fields began, the villagers had recently constructed a new temple—a small brick structure with a ferocious-looking Buddhist god inside. The god was responsible for providing good weather and protecting the crops—a task he had not fulfilled very well that year. The main crop in the village was cabbage, and we were there at harvest time. But heavy rains in the weeks leading up to the harvest had destroyed the crop. The average income in the village would drop this year from an average of about 1,300–1,500 yuan to about 800 yuan—less than $100 at the 1997 exchange rate.

     We went to another temple some distance outside the county town—the Stone Drum Temple. Worshiping at places like Stone Drum Temple is officially considered superstitious and therefore discouraged, but several of the officials who accompanied us also prayed there, with no apparent embarrassment.

     Christianity is also gaining new adherents. A church is under construction in the county town, and services are held regularly in a building near the train station. Some villagers are beginning to attend, and others express interest in going. The attraction is less specific religious doctrine than the promise of religion as comfort.

     The family was still the most important social unit in the village, and the most troublesome. Intravillage marriages, based on love and entered into freely, are not the norm, and when they occur often run into trouble. In most cases, women marry out of the village, and the men find their wives in other places. These marriages are often arranged and are not based on love. The best the couple can hope for is to he de qi lai—get along well together. Couples were routinely permitted to have two children, but some had three or four. Families were supposed to pay fines for having more than two, but no one knew how much the fine was or whether it was actually collected. Village leadership was too weak for a concerted effort at enforcement of the family planning policies.

     Crime was an increasing problem in the area. On one recent day, forty motorcycles had been stolen from the county town, and the buying and selling of babies and kidnapping and selling of women was a problem. A few days before our visit, three policemen had moved in to arrest a man accused of selling women. Knowing of his impending arrest, the alleged criminal had strapped dynamite around his waist. As the police surrounded him, he lit it, blowing himself and the police to bits.

     The villagers had several explanations for Bend in the River’s failure to develop. The main reason was that the village has always been poor. Everyone agrees that the introduction of community enterprises is the route to real prosperity, but the village has never been able to save enough money to invest in collective enterprise.

     Another explanation was that all the smart and talented people had left or taken work outside the village. Our host, Mr. Wang, had been party secretary during Yanqi’s time, and he remained one of the most respected men in the village. But he had been one of the first to leave when the opportunity arose. The county as a whole had a very low level of education. Until recently, of a countywide population of 400,000, only 90 people had graduated from high school. With one exception, everyone from Bend in the River with a high school education had left, usually to serve as county-level officials, and the one high school graduate who stayed steadfastly refused to assume a position of leadership. The best and the brightest with middle school educations were not willing to stay either and were clever enough to find jobs in other parts of the province or to join the ranks of the rural migrants flocking to the cities.

     Village leadership was a problem. Bend in the River’s party secretary was a nice but pathetically incompetent man, and he commanded scant respect. Party membership in the village was declining, as it was in many parts of China. Official reports several months after our visit said that party branches in a third of the country’s 1 million villages had decayed, and a major drive to recruit new members and revive the party committees was under way.⁶⁸ The secretary in Bend in the River was attempting to recruit new members, but most of the villagers he had approached had just laughed him away.

     Many villagers agreed that only a strong, dynamic, forward-looking leader can bring the village out of its doldrums and begin a process of economic development. Few held out much hope for an early solution to the leadership problem, and no one suggested that village democracy might be the answer. The only person to discuss democracy at length was an intellectual from the county town who had been sent to the village during the Cultural Revolution. He thought that the freedom associated with democracy would bring more chaos than China could manage. Democratic reform was not in the consciousness of these villagers.

     Bend in the River had held elections for village chief not long before our visit, but they were unsuccessful. “Contradictions” tracing back for decades—lingering wounds from the antirightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution, as well as perceived inequities in the redistribution of land during decollectivization—prevented any of the several candidates from receiving a majority vote. The villagers lost interest in the election. The party head was serving temporarily as village chief, too.

     Hospitable and gracious though the villagers were, Bend in the River nonetheless seemed pervaded by a sense of aimlessness, of waiting, as though something should be happening but is not.⁶⁹ Indeed, the contrast between the anomie of Bend in the River, where halfhearted efforts to democratize have failed, and Guanjiang village, Fujian, where elections have succeeded (see pages 33–39), suggests that one unintended consequence of village elections is the restoration of the sense of community that disappeared with the collapse of the communes. Economic development might lift Bend in the River out of its doldrums, and villagers’ faith in democracy might be kindled if they could be persuaded that democracy would bring economic development. But without a bold and innovative leader, the introduction of democracy into the village will have to come from outside and higher up.

Daqiu Village: Development with Dictatorship

If Bend in the River is an example of a village that is both undeveloped and still undemocratic, Daqiu village, not far from the city of Tianjin, is China’s most famous and dramatic grassroots challenge to the hypothesis that economic development leads somehow inevitably to democratic reform. Until the ignominious downfall of its once nationally recognized leader, Daqiu had been very developed, very rich, and very undemocratic.

     Since the mid-1980s, Daqiu had been touted in both the Chinese and the international press as one of the wealthiest villages in China and the number-one model for other villages to emulate. Its leader, Yu Zuomin, became one of ten nationwide models of peasant-turned-entrepreneur. Yu Zuomin had joined the Communist Party in 1958 and had been a village cadre for decades. With the beginning of economic reform in the late 1970s, Yu was credited both with having led his village to prosperity and with retaining the selfless devotion to public welfare that is the communist ideal. Even as villagers moved from their mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts to newly built brick homes, Yu stayed in his dilapidated house.⁷⁰

     Over time, however, Yu Zuomin became arrogant, corrupted by power, and began putting himself above the law. He became a classic example of a local emperor—the type of local leader Peng Zhen and others have credited with undermining the legitimacy of the Communist Party.⁷¹ As leader of Daqiu village, not only did Yu become a multimillionaire, he transformed the village and made its inhabitants rich, too. But Chinese journalist friends who visited Daqiu village when it was a nationwide model confess that even then the place reeked with corruption. The visit was too carefully orchestrated, and the reporters were prevented from casual, spontaneous meetings with the villagers. The place was “not normal,” my friends told me. It was too rich. Too many people were driving Mercedes. No one got that rich without being corrupt—and without higher-level connections.

     Yu’s downfall began in 1990 when two of his close associates accused another village entrepreneur of seducing the daughter of Yu’s cousin and then beat the father of the accused man to death. Two years later, several people under Yu Zuomin’s command began interrogating senior personnel from one of the village’s enterprises on suspicion of corruption. During the course of the investigation, a number of staff members were detained, and some were brutally clubbed and whipped. According to official accounts,⁷² one of the staff members, Wei Fuhe, was stripped and beaten with clubs and whips for seven hours. Wei Fuhe died.

     When the Tianjin Public Security Department learned of a possible murder in Daqiu village, they sent police to investigate. Yu Zuomin ordered the policemen detained. When Tianjin sent another team of investigators, backed by four hundred policemen, Yu Zuomin armed the villagers with steel bars and mobilized them to blockade the village.

     Yu Zuomin was finally arrested, however, and in 1993 a court in nearby Tianjin sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment for “harboring criminals, obstructing public security personnel in performing their duties, bribery, unlawfully detaining people and unlawfully putting people under control.”⁷³

     The full story of Yu Zuomin and Daqiu village has yet to be told. Reports of Yu’s perfidy come from the official press, and my attempts to visit the village failed. Foreigners are no longer permitted to go there. But the case of Yu Zuomin surely challenges the assertion of any simple causative relationship between economic development and democratization. Daqiu village was one of the richest, most developed in China. The official account of Yu Zuomin’s sentence reports a total production output for the village of 2.3 billion yuan and mentions such enterprises as an oxygen plant, a breeding farm, and automobile and furniture factories. But Yu Zuomin was a corrupt dictator.

     Just as no one knows with certainty how many village leaders are democratically elected in China, so no one knows how many local emperors continue to rule. Although Yu Zuomin is surely extreme—for his brutality, the wealth he amassed for the village, and his earlier role as a nationwide model for peasant-entrepreneur—the phenomenon of the local emperor is still common in the Chinese countryside. Surely one explanation for why Yu’s downfall was so long in coming may be the dictator’s success in making sure that everyone shared in the village’s prosperity. Local emperors may be accepted, even welcomed, as long as everyone shares in the spoils.

     Indeed, local emperors may even be democratically elected—as Wang Weidong was in Sichuan province.

Wugang Village: Democracy and Patronage in a Company Town

Sichuan’s Wugang village is not as rich as Daqiu, but it is very rich indeed.⁷⁴ Income from collective enterprises was 40,000 yuan a year when Wang Weidong⁷⁵ was first appointed village chief in 1982. By 1995, income from collectively owned enterprises had reached 8 million yuan, and the democratically elected Wang Weidong was running for reelection. Wang Weidong’s leadership was not the only factor contributing to Wugang’s prosperity. The village’s location helped. Wugang is on the outskirts of Wutongqiao, a prosperous county town that has been gradually spreading outward to encompass the village. As Wutongqiao has prospered, so has Wugang village, and today the village is visually indistinguishable from the town.

     Since 1983, Wang Weidong has been both village chief and party secretary, and his positions give him a say in the distribution of the village’s collective profits. In a pattern reminiscent of many countries, including the United States, in the early stages of democratic development, Wang has used those profits in a generous disbursement of patronage. Each year, some of the collective profits go into a special bank account to be distributed to villagers as bonuses at Chinese New Year. In 1995, the payout was 1,100 yuan a person. Wugang even has a pension plan—unheard of in most of rural China. In Wugang, everyone over sixty years old receives retirement pay of 70 yuan a month—up from 40 yuan a few years before. The village had invested 500,000 yuan to build a kindergarten, for which families were charged 70 yuan per semester per child, thus, according to the chief, contributing to the success of the one-child-per-family policy. Cadres and demobilized soldiers were given free health insurance, which paid 80 percent of their health costs. Wang Weidong has also set up training courses for farmers who want to work in industry. So many villagers have left farming that much of the land has been recollectivized. Only 20 percent of the villagers still work in the fields.

     Wang was reluctant to discuss his own income. He was so busy being party secretary and village chief that he has no time for work, he said. “My only desire is to make the village better.” At first he said he made only 3,000 yuan a year plus an unspecified amount from renting out his land. When pressed, he admitted to making 4,000 yuan a month. It was his wife who made 3,000 yuan a year.

     On election day in December 1995, the chief exuded self-confidence, and he was certain of the villagers’ loyalty. “Elections are a test and also some pressure,” he said. “They force us to do a good job. We have to be able to do good things for the villagers or we’ll be replaced.”

     Wang Weidong’s challenger was a twenty-eight-year-old middle school graduate and candidate for party membership who was one of the few farmers left in the village. “I don’t have any particular plan if I am elected,” he said. “Other people raised my name for the election.” He had done no campaigning and had not tried to convince anyone to vote for him. He was still too young, he said, “and the current village head is very good.” He could not honestly say that there was anything he could do better than the incumbent. He had no collective profits to share. He knew he had little hope of winning, but he had confidence in the democratic process and in the villagers’ decision.

     Not all the villagers gathered in the school yard to vote shared the challenger’s confidence in the process. For some, the notion that village and party chief Wang Weidong could ever be voted out of office was so preposterous that the suggestion was greeted with gales of laughter. But the voters knew they were better off since Wang had come to power and were grateful that he had taken such good care of them. Some villagers did not particularly like the current chief, but they would vote for him anyway.

     The election itself had the air of an amateur drama. The party and government, upper and lower administrative levels, were working together so closely to orchestrate the event that the division of responsibility disappeared. For the villagers gathered in the school yard, the election was a festive occasion, and they were being paid for their time. The wealthier, more economically successful villagers had stayed at home. They had business to attend to, several told me when I visited their homes, and they had sent someone to cast their vote by proxy. When the election was over and the tallies in, Wang Weidong was the overwhelming victor. The challenger got only a smattering of votes.

     The selection of nominees is a vital, but often overlooked, part of the democratic process and continues in many places to be controlled by party committees or higher-level administrative organs. In Wugang, the conclusion that “other people” persuaded the challenger to run in order to ensure a two-candidate slate and present the semblance of a genuinely competitive election is difficult to avoid. By agreeing to run, the challenger demonstrated his loyalty to the party. His reward, presumably, was promotion from candidate to full member. But without a more open nomination process, genuine competition is hampered, and the introduction of new, innovative village leadership may be stifled. The election in Wugang was more form than essence.

     The case of Wugang village also suggests what can happen when thriving collective enterprises permit the political use of patronage. Patronage has been (and still is in some places) a powerful force in American electoral politics, too, and some would consider it an advance over no democracy at all. The question is whether elections in places such as Wugang will become more genuinely competitive before disillusionment with democracy sets in. Noncompetitive elections are nothing new in China. Plenty of pro forma voting continues to take place at all levels of the political hierarchy. Or will the villagers simply conclude that money, after all, buys power?

Lishu County: The Nationwide Model

Democracy in Lishu county, Jilin, is further advanced than in Sichuan, offering an instructive contrast. Although Jilin villages are moderately well off (in 1995, per capita income was 1,168 yuan a year),⁷⁶ collective enterprise does not dominate, and patronage is therefore more difficult to dispense. Winning candidates are often the village’s most prosperous entrepreneurs, who have promised to share their know-how (but not their money) with the village as a whole.

     Moreover, Lishu was the first to recognize the importance of the nomination process and to take steps to introduce democratic procedures into candidate selection. Through an open primary known as the haixuan, or sea election, villagers in Lishu are given blank ballots containing only the positions available on the village committee, but no names. Voters then write in their choice of candidates. The result is generally many more names than positions available—an average of seventy-six people per village in 1994–95. The number of candidates is then winnowed to two each for the position of village chief and deputy and, generally, one more candidate for village committee than the number of positions on the committee. Thus, a three-person committee would have four candidates and a four-person committee would have five. In November 1995, Lishu’s experiment with open primaries, and its innovative introduction of secret ballots, led to its selection as the nationwide model for village elections.⁷⁷

     Jilin province, together with Liaoning and Heilongjiang, is in China’s far northeast (the area sometimes referred to in the West as Manchuria), one of the few places in settled China where the population does not press too closely on the land. Much of China’s state-run heavy industry is located here, and China’s state-run enterprises have run into difficult times. The hardest hit factories are shutting or slowing down production, sending all or a portion of their workers home at a fraction of their wages—usually around 300 yuan a month in the larger cities and 200 yuan a month in smaller ones—barely enough to buy food. Xiagang is the term used to describe this situation, which roughly translates as “furlough” and is short of being laid off but not quite employment, either. With the number of furloughed workers on the rise, some cities are witnessing the rise of mafia-like organizations known in Chinese as hei shehui, or “black societies.”

     The black society is necessary, a young friend from the northeast told me, because “the government and police are not doing their jobs. So many state enterprises have gone bankrupt that lots of people are just at home, or on the streets. They don’t have much money —maybe 200 yuan a month at the most. So crime is up, too. But if someone gets robbed of 200 kuai, it’s his last 200 kuai. He goes to the police, and the police won’t even bother to help. It’s not enough money for them to be interested. But the black society has so many connections throughout society that they can find out who did it and administer their own form of justice.” The black society also extracts protection money from many shopkeepers, promising them big payoffs if they encounter any trouble.⁷⁸

     The official Chinese press confirms the rise of these mafias, particularly in Heilongjiang province, describing gangs as “running rampant,” extorting money, organizing protection rackets, robbing cars and trains, and monopolizing the local pork market. According to one report, a mafia set up a self-styled underground public security bureau that “indiscriminately executed innocent people, posing a very serious threat to public order.” When the gang boss Han Jie was killed, allegedly during a shoot-out with a rival gang, his followers organized a 150-vehicle, four-hour-long procession through the Heilongjiang city of Jiamusi, taunting local officials and honking their horns in front of local government buildings, according to the official press.⁷⁹

     But the countryside of China’s northeast is more tranquil. Vast fields often stretch as far as the eye can see, interrupted only occasionally by scattered, far-flung villages. The rich black earth—hei tudi—is ideal for growing wheat and corn, and the local cuisine is unique and hearty—thick wheat noodles, fatty pork, spicy sauerkraut, chunky bean curd, and potato and corn dishes of great variety. The refined white rice of the south is rarely served here. Many of China’s large state farms are located in the northeast, and some believe that sometime in the next century, this vast expanse of fertile land will become a major source of China’s food.

     Lishu county, 120 kilometers from Jilin’s capital of Changchun, first held village elections in 1988. In the winter of 1994–95, elections were being held for the third time. Winters in the northeast are searingly cold, and in early January the fields were bare and frozen, exposing the fertile black soil. The elections in Lishu were held in the winter, we were told, because farming comes to a halt during the coldest months. Peasants could take time to vote without interrupting their work.

     But the villages in Lishu had no meeting halls large enough for candidates to speak to the entire village, and the weather was too cold to assemble everyone outdoors. Official campaign speeches were thus addressed to a meeting of the village representative assembly, generally convened in a school or at the village headquarters. Most of the representatives were heads of small groups and the village’s most senior, respected males—old men with wrinkled, weather-beaten faces and huge gnarled hands dressed in thick cotton-padded jackets and trousers. The representatives were charged with spreading the candidates’ views to the villagers.

     Even after three rounds of elections, the notion of campaigning was still new to Lishu county and an occasional source of embarrassment. Some candidates admitted to campaigning informally door-to-door or within their small groups, but vying for votes was considered unseemly at best, and open competition for election was viewed as something of an affront to harmony and perhaps an outright invitation to luan. Harmonious relations with neighbors was an important value. Standing before the representative assembly, the room filled with smoke, a few younger candidates seemed reluctant to assert that they wanted to be elected and humbly declared instead that they were willing to accept the judgment of the masses.

     But Lishu did have real competition, often between the older generation, who had run the collectives, and a younger, more entrepreneurial group that was promising to share economic know-how with the wider community, and there were real differences between the candidates. In Gao Jiazi village, fifty-nine-year-old Yan Qinxue, a former brigade leader who had been forced by temporary ill health to resign his position as village chief, was attempting a comeback. He was the only candidate to note that a third of the farmers in Gao Jiazi had yet to benefit materially from economic reform, and he promised to work to reduce the percentage of disadvantaged families. His forty-two-year-old entrepreneur rival, Zheng Xiaoping, promised better prices for raw materials and closer ties with higher-level organs. When the speeches were over and the chairman called for questions, the room remained silent. “We all know the candidates and what they stand for,” the assembly member sitting next to me explained. There was no need to ask questions. In truth, candidates were so well known to the villagers that speeches were probably superfluous. Their families had lived together for generations, even centuries.⁸⁰

     The final elections in Lishu were organized by small group, and the polling stations were usually in the homes of the small-group leaders. The layout of the typical Lishu house was ideal for the function. Homes are large and brick, all constructed in the same basic design. Piles of cornstalks dry against the courtyard walls, which enclose the families’ vegetable plots and prevent their cows, horses, chickens, and pigs from running wild. The house is entered through the kitchen, where two brick cooking stoves face each other on either side of the door. The storage room is straight ahead, and there are two other rooms, one on either side of the kitchen. The stoves, fueled by dried cornstalks, are the family’s only source of heat. Pipes run across the floor in opposite directions from each stove, through the walls to each room and under a raised brick platform, the kang. The family sleeps and often eats on the kang and entertains there during the winter. In the coldest months, hospitality toward guests is demonstrated by the invitation to shang kang, or “get on the kang.” The poorest homes have little furniture, but most rooms have a table and chairs, a cabinet, family memorabilia, a television set, and sometimes a sofa.

     As villagers arrived at the polling station, they assembled in one of the large kang rooms, women congregating on one side, men on the other, the room filling quickly with smoke. The kang was reserved for honored guests—higher-level officials and foreigners. As voters’ names were called one by one, each went alone into the other kang room to sit at a table and fill out the secret ballot. In 1994, Lishu party secretary Fei Yuncheng had participated in a training session jointly sponsored by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the Ford Foundation, during which IRI China specialist Lorraine Spiess and the Ford Foundation’s Phyllis Chang built a secret ballot booth and directed the participating Chinese officials through a mock election. Fei had been impressed with the concept of a secret ballot and had adapted the notion to Lishu’s specific conditions. Occasionally, a small child or an old granny could be found sleeping on the kang where villagers were voting, but everyone agreed that the secrecy of the ballot was not thereby violated.

     Villagers in Lishu county were barely aware of abstract concepts like democracy and human rights, and the notion of competing political parties did not exist. Foreign observers of China’s grassroots elections sometimes assume that party membership is a central issue in local campaigns, that the contest is one between party and nonparty candidates, and that a nonparty designation represents an incipient challenge to one-party rule. In Lishu county, to the contrary, the Communist Party was accepted unquestioningly as the governing party of China, and if anyone imagined an alternative political arrangement, he never spoke about it openly. What was important in these elections, villagers said, were the qualities of the candidates. Their concerns were local, practical, and economic; and they had a strong and certain sense of their own self-interest. They wanted stones placed under their dirt roads so they could still be navigated in the rain. They wanted lower prices for plastic sheeting so they could build greenhouses to grow crops in the winter. They wanted better ties with the county seat so they could get more licenses to market their produce there. They wanted better schools and educational opportunities for their children. And they wanted their leaders to be people who could make those things happen.

     Overwhelmingly, the candidates being elected were the villages’ leading entrepreneurs—men who had been exceptionally successful economically and who promised to use their economic experience for the benefit of the entire village. In Gao Jiazi village, Zheng Xiaoping, the young entrepreneur challenging the former brigade leader, won resoundingly.

     Both members and nonmembers of the party were running for office, and party members had an advantage. Much of what affects villagers’ lives is determined by party officials in the township and county, and villagers naturally want their leader to have good guanxi, or “connections,” with higher-level leaders. Party members are more likely to have established those connections. In Lishu’s 1991–92 elections, 75 percent of the village committee members also belonged to the party. Nationwide statistics for party membership of village committees are not available. In some areas for which there are statistics, the percentage of nonmembers of the party being elected seems to have grown—from about 20 percent in 1993 to 40 percent in 1995.⁸¹ Once elected, about half of the nonparty officials are then recruited into the party, thereby infusing it with talented, popular, younger, and probably more honest people, co-opting the best and the brightest of the rural populace.

     Even in a model county like Lishu, some of the elections did not live up to the standards the county had set for itself. As our car drew up to one village, curious villagers, ruddy-faced from the wind and bundled against the cold, were lining the dirt path, waiting, completed ballots in hand. The ballots had been distributed earlier and filled out at home. Our arrival was the signal for the “election” to begin. The villagers simply lined up at the small-group leader’s house and deposited their ballots in a red cardboard box.

     In other villages, proxy votes were a problem. Between 10 and 15 percent of China’s rural population have left their native villages to work in cities and county towns. Their official residency remains in their native place, however, and officials in many parts of China have grappled with the question of how to include the migrants in village elections. Lishu county’s election procedures allowed three proxy votes per family for members who were away. In 1995, however, the use of the proxy far exceeded its original intent. Individuals were given proxy ballots upon request, regardless of whether they had family members working outside the village. One woman was given six. The concept of one person, one vote is foreign to Chinese tradition, where the family rather than the individual has been the basic unit of identity. The dominance of the senior male member of the family is so well established in rural China that few women or younger men would even think of casting an independent vote.

     Implementation of the haixuan, or open primary, also sometimes falls short of the ideal. Although the haixuan allows villagers to nominate their favorite candidates, the process of determining whose names will be on the final ballot differs from place to place. Villagewide primaries, with the entire electorate participating, seem not to be the norm. More often, the village representative assembly decides the final list. In some cases, higher-level authorities continue to exercise veto power over popular choices, and nothing prevents the arbitrary exercise of that power.

     The case of Ma Zhanlin is an example.

     •        •        •

     Ma Zhanlin’s family was further testimony to his success. His well-dressed, bright-eyed son had served in the military—still a major route for upward mobility in the countryside—and his gregarious, outgoing daughter was studying English as a university student in Changchun. A picture of Ma and his pigtailed wife taken at their Cultural Revolution –style wedding revealed a strikingly handsome couple. Time had only added character to the faces, leaving their intelligent good looks intact.

     Ma was also an undisputed village leader. He had been elected village chief in 1992, and at the time of his election was simultaneously head of the village party branch. But in the winter of 1993–94, township authorities had removed Ma Zhanlin from office and appointed a younger, less experienced man, in his stead. Awkward and inarticulate, with a pudgy, inexpressive face, Ma’s unlikely successor could not have been more different.

     Everyone had a slightly different story about why Ma was removed. The new village chief said that Ma’s son had lied about his age when he joined the army, claiming to be older than he really was. Demobilized and back home, the son had behaved as though the false age were true and had married before reaching the legal age of twenty-four.

     The villagers were very upset by this violation of the family planning policy, the township official keeping a close watch on the young successor explained. Some had written to township headquarters complaining. “The family planning policy is very strict,” the official continued. “It is the most basic policy of the party in the rural areas. So for a party secretary and village chief to violate the policy is a terrible breach of rules.” The seriousness with which the family planning policy was being implemented was evident in the township office. The names of all the married couples of childbearing age were listed on a huge chart, covering an entire wall, together with the date of marriage, the date of birth of each child, and the date of each woman’s last menstrual period. Township officials could not allow such a flagrant violator of the birth control policy to serve as village chief. That Ma’s son and daughter-in-law still had no child seemed not to diminish the crime. The marriage was the crime.

     During a visit to his home, Ma Zhanlin readily admitted violating the party’s family planning policy. With his wife, his daughter, and the offending son and his wife gathered around, the deposed chief explained why his son married early. In consulting a fortune teller’s almanac, Ma’s wife had discovered that a marriage in 1994, the year in which their son was legally permitted to take a wife, would be dangerous for both the bridegroom and his father. In fact, a marriage that year was so inauspicious that father, son, or both might die if the wedding took place. Ma Zhanlin claimed not to believe such superstitions and knew that a man in his position ought to set an example in family planning. But his wife, like many rural folk, could not make plans without consulting almanacs and fortune tellers. Trying to minimize the breach of family planning policy, the couple arranged for their son to get married two days before the start of the inauspicious year. The young couple would wait for a more propitious time to have children. The breach of the family planning regulations was thus not in having a child but in marrying too soon.

     The search for a balance between folk tradition and party policy was a dilemma Ma’s fellow villagers could easily have understood. But party officials in the township had removed him as both party and village chief.

     In January 1995, when Dongdaba village was conducting another round of elections, Ma Zhanlin was permitted to run for membership on the village committee but not for village chief. His replacement was running as the incumbent chief, though he was not particularly enthusiastic about continuing to serve in Ma’s post. His campaign speech was weak, as he promised only to rely on the suggestions of the masses. “If they want to elect me, fine,” he said, as the ever-present township authorities hovered nearby. “If they don’t, that’s fine, too. I’ll go back to farming, to what I was doing before.” He was clearly the township level’s choice, prepared to do their bidding.

     The villagers were hardly angry with Ma Zhanlin. On election day, I walked with Ma from his home to the village office where the votes were being tabulated and sat next to him during the count. The incumbent chief, Ma’s replacement, won handily, though not resoundingly, thereby giving the township leaders face. But Ma Zhanlin’s votes for membership on the village committee far exceeded those of any other candidate. Virtually the entire electorate had voted for him. Would Ma Zhanlin also have been the runaway favorite had he been allowed to run for village chief? Such a conclusion was hard to avoid.

     What was really behind the removal of Ma Zhanlin? Was it a case of “red-eye disease” —the pervasive envy of the fortunate rich? Ma was not only rich, but his children were successful, too. Had Ma used his guanxi and influence to get his son recruited into the army? Had he been too defiant as village chief, offending township-level authorities, usurping some of their control? Or was Ma really being removed for a violation of the family planning policy? Had villagers really petitioned the township government and complained that Ma’s son had married too soon? And what had happened during the haixuan? Had villagers really not written in Ma’s name?

     The quiet struggle between Dongdaba and the township was likely to continue. It was easy to believe that once the township officials went home, Ma Zhanlin would be leading the village again, no matter who held the official position as village chief.⁸²

     Lishu’s occasional failure to live up to its own ideals suggests that democracy there is not yet the natural state of affairs. Democratic norms have yet to take root. The case of Ma Zhanlin demonstrates that the nomination process is a crucial, but sometimes overlooked, element of the democratic process. The letter of the law can sometimes be followed without the spirit, testimony to the power of township and county authorities who are reluctant to grant full autonomy to the villages in their jurisdiction.

     But the elections in Lishu county are among the best organized in the country, an accomplishment that can be attributed in no small measure to the extraordinary leadership of both Zeng Fanxu, the nonparty official in Jilin’s Department of Civil Affairs responsible for overseeing provincial elections, and Fei Yuncheng, the party secretary of Lishu county. Both men are emphatically committed to making local democracy work. Lishu’s designation as the national model is the result of the cumulative improvements they have introduced with each successive round of elections.

     Both Zeng Fanxu and Fei Yuncheng encourage constructive criticism and have welcomed cooperation with foreign election specialists. Both have now visited the United States. Fei Yuncheng has taken to heart suggestions that elections could be held during the warmer, though busier, farming season so candidates can speak to all the villagers in outdoor meetings; the next round of elections were scheduled for June. Both officials understand outsiders’ concerns that the proxy tends to give the senior male the right to decide the entire family’s vote, thus discriminating against the admittedly small minority of women and younger males who might want to vote independently. Different ways of involving rural migrants in the electoral process are being explored.

     Lishu’s success is also a result of the structure of the village economy, which is prosperous but not wealthy and in which entrepreneurship is more important than collective enterprises. Absent the patronage to distribute from collective enterprise, the qualities of the candidate rather than the power of the purse seem to govern the vote.

     The structure of the rural economy in Gutian county, Fujian, is not greatly different from that of Lishu, and Fujian has had both strong provincial leadership and long experience in the election process. But Fujian has held elections more recently than Lishu and continues to build on both its own and others’ experience. As measured by the ministry’s four principles of democracy—that the chairman, vice chairman, and members of village committees be directly elected by the villagers themselves; that the number of candidates exceed the number of positions; that voting be conducted by secret ballot; and that the winning candidate receive more than half the votes—the province is at the forefront of electoral success.

Fujian Province: Democratization with Development

Village committees were still appointed by higher-level authorities in 1984, when Zhang Xiaogan left the military to head the office of basic-level government in the Fujian Civil Affairs Department. Since then, major responsibility for introducing village elections has rested with him. The province’s accomplishments justifiably make him proud. A committed incrementalist, Zhang has used each new round of elections to build on the lessons of the last. When elections were first introduced less than a year after he took office, a single family member could vote on behalf of the entire household. In 1987, villagers voted for members of the village committee, but the village chief and deputy chief were then elected by the committee as a whole. The notion of a secret ballot was introduced in 1990, but little was done to guarantee it, and elections continued to take place in large open meetings similar to those in Sichuan. Villagers first voted directly for village chief and deputy chief in 1994, the same year the principle of one person, one vote was implemented, and the number of candidates was required to exceed the number of positions available. In 1997, new measures were taken to guarantee the secrecy of the ballot, and a certain level of institutionalization set in.⁸³

     Coastal Fujian, some 100 miles across the straits from Taiwan, has long been prosperous without being greatly developed. Because of its strategic vulnerability to attack from Taiwan, few state industries were established there during the Maoist regime. But the coast has thrived under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening up. The Fujian city of Xiamen was one of the country’s first special economic zones.

     Much of the province’s success is related to its special relationship with Taiwan. Most Taiwanese trace their ancestry to Fujian, and since the late 1980s, with a relaxation of prohibitions against cross-straits exchanges, businessmen from Taiwan, traveling via Hong Kong, have poured in to invest, often setting up new factories in their old hometowns, becoming Confucian-style patrons of the place they left decades before. The Taiwanese investors are often markedly different from the supranational class of sleek, impeccably tailored business-school graduates who have been key actors in the development of Hong Kong. The Taiwanese compatriots are often nouveau riche peasants: weathered, chain-smoking men in rumpled, ill-fitting suits. Their female counterparts attempt to cover the ravages of the sun with heavy applications of makeup, their clothes are garish and their costume jewelry ostentatious, and they wobble uncertainly on high-heeled shoes. Corruption has arrived together with rapid development, and Xiamen’s foreign-owned hotels seethe with prostitution.⁸⁴

     In the countryside, the arrival of Taiwanese compatriots has been accompanied by a revival of traditional Fujianese culture. Relatives separated since 1949 have been reunited, and long-unused clan temples are undergoing repair. Local Buddhist temples, earlier assaulted by an antireligious socialism that reached its height with the Cultural Revolution, have been refurbished and reintegrated into the fabric of village life. Shrines to village gods dot the rural roads.

     Not all of Fujian has always been prosperous, however. Traveling inland, toward the mountains that occupy most of the province and span the border between Fujian and Jiangxi, villages have traditionally been poor. Gutian county, four hours’ drive from the capital city of Fuzhou at the foot of the Jinggang mountains, has long been one of the poorest. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gutian was incorporated for a while into the Jiangxi soviet, one of the earliest independent guerrilla base areas established by the struggling communists. In recent years, even Gutian has begun to prosper, largely, local officials proudly explain, because of the cultivation of edible fungus—delicacies that range from the readily identifiable mushroom to species that look more like soft white coral or chewy sponges. Believed in many parts of Asia to be both nutritious and medicinal, Gutian’s edible fungi fetch a handsome price both domestically and abroad.

     In Guanjiang village, a short fifteen-minute drive from the Gutian county seat and typical of others in the area, the fungi are cultivated at home.

     Guanjiang village is cut in half by the two-lane highway linking it with distant Fuzhou and the several prosperous towns en route. Peasants in Guanjiang have no complaints about getting their produce to market; Fujian’s roads are among the most extensive in China.

     From the highway, Guanjiang seems composed almost entirely of newly built three-story brick homes. As elsewhere in China, Guanjiang homes follow a distinctive pattern. Fujian is semitropical, and homes are open to the elements and built to catch the breeze. A wide, open door facing the narrow dirt street reveals the family’s public sitting room. The view inside to the inner courtyard is blocked by a narrow wall, open on either side and hung variously with posters depicting the ideograph for good fortune (often turned upside down to signify that good fortune has actually arrived—fu dao le) or pictures of such Communist Party luminaries as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping. The outdoor courtyard serves as the family kitchen, with a propane-fueled stove, a tile sink, and a spigot for cold running water. The first-floor storage and bedrooms face the courtyard. The mushrooms are generally cultivated on the second floor, or in an adjacent shed, on layered shelves.

     Many of the village leaders, both the elected village committee and members of the party branch, live in the newly constructed homes along the highway. Building does not begin without first consulting a local geomancer, the feng shui master, one villager told me. Homes with the best feng shui are located at the edge of the village fields, where an orchard-dotted hill stands in the background and a small stream separates the orchards from the village land.

     But the view from the highway is deceptive. Tucked away in the interstices of the village, out of sight from the main road, are many older, traditional, single-storied buildings with mud-packed walls and gray-tiled roofs. In March 1997, the head of the Guanjiang Women’s Federation, Wei Baozhu, took me by the hand to show me the village. She led me first to the traditional-style village temple—an eclectic combination of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism dedicated to a local goddess. There, she taught me how to light the incense, place it in the sand-filled incense burner, and bow three times before each of the dozen or so idols. The gods properly tended, she led me deeper into the village and up a hill to the old clan temple, then undergoing repair. The site belonged to the Chens, the larger of the village’s two major clans, but the Weis were repairing their temple, too. The Communist Party has been trying to wipe out the lineage organizations since coming to power in 1949, but the clans are inevitably revived in periods of political relaxation. Their existence poses a peculiar problem for village democracy, because majority rule almost ensures that members of the numerically larger lineage will triumph over the smaller groups.

     The village’s official organizations—the party branch, the village committee, the Women’s Federation, and the Youth League—are housed in a small office building adjacent to the primary school just off the main road. The building’s first-floor sitting room, similar to those in private homes, is a gathering place for old people to watch television, play chess, or otherwise while away the day. The offices were upstairs. Outside, on the office’s outer walls and on the walls of adjacent buildings, were the village bulletin boards, decorated now in red and crammed with information about the upcoming election. One blackboard outlined the qualities of a good candidate, including an exemplary moral character and a commitment to carry out state policies; another listed the names of the candidates and their basic biographical data. Another contained an announcement of the election and gave the locations of the three polling places. The village committee’s financial statement was posted, too, listing all income and expenditures for the previous year. A public announcement system, with a hookup in every home, broadcast election announcements, the candidates’ speeches, and other essential news. The contrast between Guanjiang’s public spaces and those in Bend in the River was dramatic.

     Fujian had yet to introduce Lishu’s haixuan primary method. The only way to become a candidate was through a petition signed by five or more villagers. Several days before the final election, the names of all candidates nominated through petition are placed before a meeting of the village representative assembly, which then selects the final slate by secret ballot. In March 1997, eleven names were put before the Guanjiang assembly, which winnowed the number to six. Zhang Xiaogan, the provincial-level civil affairs official charged with overseeing village elections, is not satisfied with this type of indirect primary. In the next round, he hopes to emulate and surpass Lishu’s haixuan, with the entire electorate participating.

     At the Guanjiang meeting to select the final candidates, Chen Bangxing, the sitting village chief, began with a year-end report on the village committee’s activities. Chen Bangxing was proud of the committee’s accomplishments. The village’s living standard had improved. Average per capita income was 2,300 yuan a year. A new road, linking Guanjiang with the Gutian county seat, had been built under Chen Bangxing’s leadership. Chen was proud of his ties with the township and county governments and was especially pleased to have been singled out for praise by county officials. Chen was leaving the village in good financial shape, as attested by a report on village finances by Chen Youdi, who was not a member of the committee but served as the assembly’s accountant. Collective income, largely from raising chickens and ducks, was 270,000 yuan, and the budget was balanced.

     Chen Bangxing was running for reelection, and the meeting was the opportunity for him and the other primary candidates to deliver their campaign speeches. Chen promised, if elected, to get permission to open up more land for villagers to build new houses, to get clean running water delivered to all the homes in the village, to inaugurate a beautification program, and to invest 30,000 yuan in a collective vegetable plot for the benefit of the villagers. He wanted to strengthen the collective economy in order to continue improving the villagers’ standard of living, but he was still looking for the best way to do that and welcomed the encouragement and advice of the representative assembly. The committee’s accomplishments depended on the villagers’ support, Chen said, for which he thanked them. Despite the accomplishments, he continued, much had not been done well. He promised to try to improve himself and do more.

     Guanjiang’s villagewide elections were held three days later. The major procedural improvement, an innovation of provincial leader Zhang Xiaogan, was the introduction of polling places open from 6:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon.

     The innovation was a direct outgrowth of Zhang Xiaogan’s 1995 visit to the United States, where he had been particularly impressed with the organization of polling places. He tried in Gutian to duplicate their spirit, if not their exact construction. In the past, all the villagers had been gathered together at the same time for a “voting meeting,” Zhang said. The result was a very high turnout—98.6 percent—but voting was not entirely secret and the high turnout was the result not of the voters’ physical presence but of the proxy. One member of the family was allowed to vote for all.

     On election day, polling stations were set up in the front sitting rooms of three Guanjiang family homes. At a table just beyond and to the left of the entrance, each voter presented his voter registration card and picked up his ballot as his name was checked off the official registration list. The voting booth was at another table to the left of the registration stop, shielded on three sides by bright red cloth suspended from bamboo poles attached to the table’s four corners. A pair of reading glasses sat on each table for those who needed them, and high on the wall directly across from the voting booth, easily visible to the voter, was an enlarged mock-up of the ballot with a picture of each candidate above his name—an aid not only to those who could not read but to those who might know a candidate only by his family position—eldest son of Chen Weiguo, for instance —rather than by formal name. The sealed ballot box, covered in festive red, was just beyond the voting booth.

     Each candidate was allowed one monitor in the room, and because Guanjiang was a demonstration village, higher-level officials and the four foreign observers wandered from place to place to comment and observe. Peak periods of voting required creative efforts at traffic control, but the process was remarkably smooth.

     Shortly before four in the afternoon, when the voting was officially to close, election officials carried the ballot boxes to the homes of voters who were registered but had yet to come to the polls. The assumption was that the nonvoters would be elderly or disabled. In fact, the nonparticipants were generally younger and apathetic. Voter participation remained extremely high, however. Only 46 out of 1,022 voters did not cast ballots.

     With the voting complete, the ballot boxes were carried to the school yard for the count. Villagers brought chairs into the yard to observe the process, and many people went to the school’s second-floor balcony to watch from above. Each of the three boxes was emptied separately, and the ballots were counted to make sure the number of ballots equaled the number of people who had voted. Blank and spoiled ballots were set aside. The properly executed ballots were then mixed together, and the results were tallied on a large blackboard.

     Chen Bangxing was reelected village chief by an overwhelming majority—787 to 179. His challenger was a member of the smaller Wei clan. Chen Youdi, the accountant who had read the financial report at the meeting to nominate final candidates, was elected to the village committee with more votes than the chief. Chen Youdi had run but lost in the last election, and he attributed his 1997 victory to the quiet campaign he had waged for the past three years. Not surprisingly, all the male victors were members of the dominant Chen clan, highlighting a problem in many parts of southern China where clans are still important and one lineage is often numerically and politically stronger than others.

     Wei Baozhu, the thirty-something head of the Women’s Federation who had shown me around the village, was also reelected. Indeed, regulations mandate that at least one woman be elected to the committee, though the mechanism guaranteeing that representation was never clear. Wei Baozhu gained face, and possibly votes, by showing a foreigner around, but the warmth of interaction between her and the villagers would have been difficult to feign.

     There was a curious contradiction between Wei Baozhu’s obvious popularity and the role she played as head of the Women’s Federation. Her major responsibility was to ensure implementation of state policy on family planning.

     “Why does everyone like you so much when your job is to limit the number of children they have?” I asked her in front of several villagers.

     “Family planning is state policy,” she responded, as the observers nodded.

     “But isn’t it unpopular?” I asked.

     The question made no sense. The policy was necessary. The assumption of many foreigners that the family planning program is widely unpopular in the Chinese countryside is, perhaps, too simple. The policy, after all, has been accepted as necessary by many in the cities, and with proper education—and significant economic development—the policy may also be acceptable in many rural areas, too. And if the policy is accepted as necessary, surely its implementation by a warm-hearted, sympathetic woman of childbearing age is preferable to the granny brigades who have been known to patrol the cities.

     The villagers of Guanjiang were richer—economically, politically, and spiritually—than those of Shanxi’s Bend in the River. The natural environment seemed to favor Guanjiang, and so did the man-made system of roads and the attention being showered from above. One peasant, fresh from the fields, responded to my question about improvements in his standard of living with a wail that his life was not good. But most villagers of Guanjiang had found their path to prosperity—in the cultivation of mushrooms. Their challenge was not what to sell but how to expand their market both domestically and abroad.

     Leadership had long since been passed from the old collective cadres to a new entrepreneurial elite, and the competition between the contenders was genuine. Wealth and power continued to be linked. The head of the party branch was one of the richest men in the village, and so were members of the village committee. But control over village resources did not appear to be the way to get and keep power, as it was in Sichuan’s Wugang village. There was no patronage in Guanjiang—or none, at least, that was obvious. Collective enterprise supplemented family income but was not the major source.

     To say that Guanjiang was a civil society in the making is perhaps an exaggeration, but the villagers had a multiplicity of associations—religious, political, economic, and familial—that together made up a community and mediated against the excesses of power that were characteristic of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. One could argue about the relative power in Guanjiang of the party, the representative assembly, and the village committee, but the balance among them ensures that no single political institution can gain full control. No local emperor is likely to rise in Guanjiang.

     Technically, Guanjiang’s elections were close to flawless. For provincial leader Zhang Xiaogan, only a few issues remain. The question of how to include legal residents working outside the village has yet to be solved. With the proxy abolished, absentee ballots had been mailed to people who were away. None had been returned. Final candidates were chosen only three days before the election, which did not leave enough time for the ballots to be printed, mailed, and returned.

     How to duplicate Guanjiang’s success in other parts of Fujian is also a vexing question. The task of training election officials and village leaders for the province’s 15,000 villages is enormous.

     Zhang was also wrestling with the more philosophical and long-term question of how to raise the villagers’ “democratic consciousness.” (“The most serious problem,” Mao Zedong said a half century ago, “is the education of the peasantry.”) Zhang recognized that the villagers’ understanding of democracy increased with each succeeding election, but he thought that most peasants were still infected with “feudalist” thought, that they were too well adjusted to years of authoritarian rule. The process of democratic consciousness- raising would be lengthy, he thought.

     The most powerful consciousness-raising tool in Gutian county is not likely to be elections for village committee but participation in the representative assemblies, which were strong and lively throughout the county. Major decisions affecting Gutian villages were decided not by the village committee but by the representative assembly. The primary responsibility of the village committee was to implement rather than initiate decisions. Indeed, future researchers of democratization in rural China will need to look more closely at the role and functions of the representative assemblies and guard against equating democratic elections of village committees with democracy itself.

     In the end, the most impressive difference between Guanjiang and Bend in the River villages was Guanjiang’s spirit of community in contrast to the sense in Bend in the River that something important was missing. Guanjiang was pervaded by optimism and a conviction that the future could only be better. Many factors contributed to Guanjiang’s sense of community—the villagers’ certainty that they were on the right path to economic development, the strength of the lineage, their religious revival, even the attention they were receiving from above. But the activity of organizing and conducting elections and the designation of the representative assembly as the major decision-making body also served to strengthen communal bonds.

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

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