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

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

The U.S. Response to Chinese Political Reform

For all the sometimes strident American rhetoric on the need for political reform in China, official efforts to cooperate with the Chinese government have been limited. The nature of political reform in China presents some well-intentioned, democratic-minded organizations with a conundrum. Despite limited efforts at political reform, China today remains both fundamentally undemocratic and incapable of articulating a long-term plan for democratization. Competing political parties continue to be illegal, and one reason the Communist Party is implementing political reform is to strengthen its own legitimacy. Not only are democracy and one-party rule fundamentally incompatible, but there is no guarantee that even China’s limited reforms will work or that grassroots democracy will spread.

     Why, then, should American organizations committed to fostering democratization cooperate with China?

     First, for the foreseeable future, the only way to influence the process of democratization in China is to work directly and cooperatively with the Chinese government. The process will be a long one, and Chinese democracy will necessarily look very different from ours. Second, cooperative efforts hold the promise of helping China pass through this very difficult transition period with a minimum of violence and upheaval. If it is true that rural unrest is rising in areas where democratic elections have yet to be introduced, minor reforms, peacefully implemented, can avert the risk of widespread violence.

     Third, even minor, imperfect reforms are better than none. The competitive election of village committees is a major advance over higher-level appointments of village leaders, election by acclamation, and noncompetitive elections. The free and fair village elections now being fostered by the Ministry of Civil Affairs present rural people with choices they did not have before, give them a voice in the selection of their local leadership, allow (for the first time since 1949) for a peaceful transition of leaders, and provide a sense of political participation and empowerment. At their best, village elections introduce the notions of competition, choice, and justice into local societies where submission to authority and domination by local emperors have long been the norm; where cleavages often run along clan lines; where families are ruled by the senior male, and women lack even the concept of equality. In the most democratically organized villages, where elections are competitive and the village committee and representative assembly work in tandem, the sense of community that faltered with the demise of the production brigade is being restored, as the contrast between Bend in the River and Guanjiang has demonstrated.

     Finally, while competitive elections at higher levels are a long way off, village elections are at least putting in place the mechanisms for elections of higher-level officials. When peasants are allowed to elect their township and county officials (and the Ministry of Civil Affairs says that county elections will begin within five years), the villages will serve as precincts.

     Several international organizations and American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are already working closely with the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs to promote grassroots political change. In 1996, the United Nations Development Programme began contributing to a three-year program to develop curricula, training materials, and capacity for “training the trainers” at the ministry’s new Rural Official Training Center on the outskirts of Beijing. The European Union is working out implementation of a $12 million, multifaceted project that would include considerable personnel and curriculum support for the Beijing training center as well as two-way academic exchanges between China and the European Union.

     Among American organizations, the Ford Foundation, whose Beijing office was established in the early 1980s, has been supporting the research arm of the Ministry of Civil Affairs department of basic-level governance since 1992 and has sponsored workshops and conferences on implementation of the Organic Law. The International Republican Institute has been cooperating with grassroots reformers since 1993, collaborating in the training of local-level officials, conducting workshops for election officials, and sending observers to witness and report on village-level elections. The Asia Foundation is also working with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, focusing particularly on providing training materials. The Carter Center has sent two delegations to observe village elections and is laying the groundwork for further cooperation.⁸⁹

     At present, U.S. NGOs are better structured to cooperate with China than are governmental agencies, both because of the NGOs’ longtime expertise at the grassroots and because they are better cushioned against Washington’s changing, and often powerful, political winds. Cooperative efforts could benefit greatly from an infusion of funding, both governmental and private, however. A multiplicity of efforts by a variety of NGOs runs little risk of overlap. Most of China’s thirty provinces are larger than most countries of the world. Several new programs, in addition to the ones already under way, could be fruitful.

     First, NGOs need to identify reform-minded leaders at the provincial and local levels and to develop more direct, sustained contact with them. A few long-term, targeted programs at the provincial level might have a more lasting effect than scattered efforts in different parts of the country.

     Second, training programs in local-level governance and election procedures, of several months’ duration and tailored directly to Chinese needs, could help alleviate China’s current problem of “training the trainers.”

     Third, funding for collaborative, policy-oriented research in the Chinese countryside could begin to fill the huge lacunae in our understanding of the transformations taking place there and the problems rural people face.

     Even with the best of intentions, such cooperative programs carry no guarantees of success, and the hope of making China “more like us” is not likely to be fulfilled. As the Chinese government confronts the several crises that rapid economic development is bringing in its wake—parasitic state enterprises, a dangerously overextended banking sector, massive internal migration, increasing unemployment, widespread official corruption, a collapse of old values—the country is in a race against itself. Some future instability, even violence, is almost inevitable. Although fear of chaos led some in Beijing to support the introduction of grassroots elections, the outbreak of disorder could equally well spur attempts to reassert authoritarian control. The question is whether the forces of corruption and chaos will overwhelm the forces of reform, whether the disaffections engendered by the widening gap between the urban, coastal nouveaux riches and the hundreds of millions in the rural hinterlands will spill over into protest, violence, and political breakdown. Tocqueville’s dictum that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself was proven in China with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and with the fall of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union less than a decade ago. These are dangerous times for China—and therefore dangerous for us all.

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

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