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

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

The Requisites for Success

This overview of village leadership in China today highlights the diversity of local governance in the countryside, the limitations of our understanding of the political situation there, and the folly of drawing early conclusions about how widespread or well run village elections may be. Although village elections may have improved local governance in some parts of the country, villages in other areas face a vacuum of leadership and some continue to be dominated by local emperors. The incidence of corruption, exploitation, and abuse of power remains high. In some areas, peasants have protested against burgeoning taxes and fees, government IOUs, and pervasive corruption. In 1993, some ten thousand peasants in Sichuan’s Renshou county stormed county headquarters to protest taxes levied for the construction of a road. Similar sporadic outbursts of protest, sometimes violent, are liable to continue in many areas of the Chinese countryside, just as Peng Zhen and officials at the Ministry of Civil Affairs predicted. Li and O’Brien also note the rise of what they call “policy based resistance,” as villagers cite “laws, government policies, and other official communications” when challenging unjust and unfair treatment.⁸⁵ The summer of 1997 saw new reports of rural unrest. Some five hundred thousand peasants in Hubei and Jiangxi are said to have rioted over the corruption of county-level officials and the extraction of illegal and excessive taxes and fees.⁸⁶ The spring of 1998 witnessed a new wave of protests and renewed calls for order from the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee.⁸⁷

     Even where elections are held regularly, some are clearly a sham and others are badly managed. Local emperors with patronage to dispense can be democratically elected. Moreover, even in the most progressive villages, where elections are both well run and genuinely competitive, the impact of “democracy” on peasants’ lives is limited. Nonelected, higher-level officials continue to make many decisions directly affecting the villagers’ lives. Major policies continue to emanate from Beijing, and an important responsibility of elected village-level officials is to carry out policies that villagers had no part in making and that they may or may not support. Democracy, where it is being introduced, is thus circumscribed and limited in scope.

     Moreover, whatever the long-term positive relationship between economic development and democratization, that relationship does not yet exist in rural China. Henry Rowen argues that “the transition to stable democracy correlates with mean incomes between $5,000 and $6,000 and becomes impregnable at the $7,000 level.”⁸⁸ Even the wealthiest rural areas are still too poor, or their wealth too new, for that correlation to work. Rowen predicts that at its current rate of growth, China, with a per capita GDP of $2,500 in 1996, will become a democracy sometime around 2015. China’s peasants are not yet demanding democracy. In their hierarchy of needs, material well-being still takes precedence over political reform, as the case of Bend in the River illustrates. Although peasants may rebel against local emperors and villagers in poor areas may flee to the cities, the concept of democracy as an alternative form of government must come from outside. Private farming is part of the rural tradition, and hence peasants could spontaneously abandon the collective in favor of arrangements they knew and trusted. Exposure to new ideas that might introduce rural China to different modes of political organization—carried by returned migrants and the telecommunications revolution, for instance—is just beginning. For now, the impetus for democratization is coming from officials in Beijing and in the provinces.

     At present, five factors seem most decisive in determining whether competitive elections can be successfully introduced into Chinese villages.

     First, the most successfully democratic villages are those that have received the greatest attention from those higher-level officials most committed to making village democracy work.

     Second, genuinely competitive elections have a greater likelihood of success in more pluralistic villages, that is, villages where neither economic nor political power is very concentrated and where villagers are engaged in a multiplicity of associations—religious, political, economic, social, and familial. Thus villages where wealth is created by many entrepreneurs are more likely to have competitive elections than villages where enterprises are ostensibly collectively owned but managed by one person or a small group of people. Many villages are electing their most prosperous members to lead them, but in a company town like Wugang, where flourishing community enterprises are controlled by a handful of people, the liberal use of patronage limits voter choice and corrupts the democratic process.

     Villages with strong and active representative assemblies are similarly more likely to foster a dispersion of power and thus to encourage genuine political competition. The village representative assembly offers a check against the power of both the party branch and the village chief, providing villagers a significant voice in those decisions that most directly affect them and fostering greater transparency in village finances. Village representative assemblies are not always democratically chosen, however. In some cases, they are dominated by the village’s senior, most experienced and respected men. Although it is tempting to argue that village democracy will be further strengthened with the democratic election of representative assemblies, the successful transition to grassroots democracy will also require accommodations to Chinese tradition, including respect for village elders. In many places, retired or defeated village leaders are given a place on the village assembly, where their voices are heard and proper respect is tendered but they are not at the same time granted great personal power. Such arrangements serve to give legitimacy to village-level political reform and may suggest what is meant by “democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

     Third, elections can succeed only in villages where election officials have been properly trained. Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is a belief that democracy is the natural state of affairs, that, given a choice, people everywhere will naturally set up electoral systems very much like our own. China’s efforts thus far suggest otherwise. There is little that is intuitively obvious about the organization of democracy, and there are many ways to hold open and fair elections. The details of election procedures must be taught, supervised, and learned. Training is one of the major challenges currently facing the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which estimates that in order to implement village democracy nationwide, at least 1.5 million township-level officials need to be trained. The ministry has opened a training center on the outskirts of Beijing to carry out this task. The goal is to train, in phases, 12,000 national-, provincial-, and county-level officials and 3,330 prefectural level trainers (for China’s 333 prefectures), who in turn will train, within the prefectures, the township-level officials. By the year 2000, the ministry’s goal is to have one model county for village self-government in each of the 333 prefectures, one model township per county, and one model village per township. The hope is that these models will have a demonstration effect that will spread to all of China’s villages.

     Fourth, experience is important to the long-term success of village elections. As the examples of Lishu and Gutian counties demonstrate, elections are a learning process for officials and villagers alike, improving through trial and error with each successive round. Although peasants are not initiating the movement towards democratization, rural people have demonstrated that they are quite capable of responsibly exercising their democratic rights when given the opportunity. Peasants have a strong sense of their own self-interest and can be depended upon to vote according to those interests when given a chance. City folk and intellectuals who argue that China’s villages are not ready for democracy are wrong.

     Finally, foreign cooperation, sensitively tendered, can exert a positive influence on the democratic process. At one level, the mere presence of foreign observers during the election process is a strong incentive to organize elections well. Foreigners are ordinarily invited to observe elections in demonstration or model districts, where official attention is greatest. Foreign training can also be useful, as programs by the Ford Foundation and the International Republican Institute attest. Opportunities for Chinese officials to observe local elections in the United States and other countries can also have a powerful effect. Wang Zhenyao, Zeng Fanxu, Zhang Xiaogan, and Fei Yuncheng—notable for their efforts to make the democratic process work—have all visited the United States.

     The most important next step in China’s process of grassroots democratization would be the institution of direct, competitive elections at the township and county levels. Whether and when this may happen remain to be seen. There is a fundamental logical flaw in the reformers’ argument for the limited democratization now taking place. In the short run, no harm and much good is done by concentrating, as reformers insist, on action rather than talk, on election procedures rather than long-term goals. But the rationale for elections at the grassroots—to repair deteriorating relations between leaders and led, to check widespread official corruption, to restore failing legitimacy, and to quiet seething discontent—is equally applicable to higher levels. Gardens may indeed be planted with many flowers, but in the long run democracy at the bottom but not at the top does not make sense. Democracy and one-party rule are ultimately incompatible.

     Unless leaders such as Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji begin soon to articulate a new rationale for democracy, that task will likely be undertaken by the generation of officials now in their forties and fifties, who will come to power early in the twenty-first century. These younger officials tend to be less tied to ideology than the Soviet-trained technocrats currently at the pinnacle of Chinese political power, and they are more broadly educated and more attuned to ideas from the West—and, more importantly, from Taiwan. The passage of time will eventually give China a leadership more disposed by education and experience to favor democratic norms.

     For the moment, however, the outlook is less encouraging. Recent changes in personnel are matters of concern. In the spring of 1997, Wang Zhenyao, the young reformer at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, was, ostensibly for bureaucratic rather than for political reasons, laterally transferred from his position as head of rural basic-level governance to the ministry’s department of disaster relief. Wang’s replacement apparently does not yet share his predecessor’s evangelical calling. Further personnel changes may soon follow as the political logic of the Communist Party congress plays itself out at both the national and provincial levels. These changes will be important, because the push for village elections thus far has come from key people within the national-level Ministry of Civil Affairs and its provincial departments. Whether new appointments at provincial levels will include champions of basic-level reform remains to be seen.

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

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