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

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Notes

     1. Jiang Zemin, “Speech by President Jiang Zemin of the People’s Republic of China at Luncheon by the America-China Society and Five Other Organizations,” October 30, 1997 (copy of speech distributed at luncheon, in the author’s files).

     2. See, for instance, Kenneth Lieberthal, “Domestic Forces and Sino-U.S. Relations,” in Ezra Vogel, ed., Living with China: U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 254–276.

     3. Several recent books with very different points of view nonetheless agree on China’s importance. See, for example, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); and Vogel, ed., Living with China.

     4. Michel C. Oksenberg, Michael D. Swaine, and Daniel C. Lynch, The Chinese Future (Los Angeles and Santa Monica: Pacific Council on International Policy and RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy, n.d.), 3.

     5. I am grateful to Bai Guangzhao, then at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, for arranging and accompanying me on this trip.

     6. The January 1995 delegation to Lishu county, Jilin, was organized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and included Lincoln Kaye from the Far Eastern Economic Review, Steve Mufson from the Washington Post, and Lorraine Spiess from the International Republican Institute. The delegation to Sichuan, in November and December 1995, also arranged by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, included longtime Time magazine Beijing bureau chief Jaime Florcruz, AP’s Renée Schoof, and Lorraine Spiess. The delegation to Fujian province was organized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and sponsored by the Carter Center. Other delegation members were David Carroll from the Carter Center; Allen Choate from the Asia Foundation; Ian McKinnon, the president of Pacific Issues Partners in Canada; Robert Pastor from the Carter Center (delegation leader); and Qingshan Tan from Cleveland State University. Mary Brown Bullock, president of Agnes Scott College, accompanied several members of the delegation to Hebei.

     7. Bend in the River is surely no worse politically than most Chinese villages. Its inhabitants were exceptionally gracious, and my visit was rewarding in every respect. We agreed to change the name because the village does not compare favorably with others where elections have been successful, and we do not want to embarrass Bend in River through this description.

     8. See Jiang Zemin, “Political Report by CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin at the Fifteenth CPC National Congress Held in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, September 12, 1997,” FBIS-China, September 12, 1997; and Jiang Zemin, “Speech” (see n. 1 above).

     9. Hong Kong News, March 24, 1998.

     10. New York Times, March 20, 1998.

     11. A. Doak Barnett, China on the Eve of the Communist Takeover (New York: Praeger, 1963), 108.

     12. C. K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1959), 103.

     13. For a smattering of articles and reports, see The Carter Center Delegation to Observe Village Elections in China, March 4–16, 1997, Working Paper Series (Atlanta: Carter Center of Emory University, 1997); Kathy Chen, “Chinese Villages Get a Taste of Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 1995; International Republican Institute, People’s Republic of China: Election Observation Report (May 15–31, 1994), Village Committee Elections in the People’s Republic of China (January 1997), and Election Observation Report: Fujian, People’s Republic of China (May 1997); Lincoln Kaye, “Flourishing Grassroots: Village Democracy Blooms,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 19, 1995, 23; Steven Mufson, “China Dabbles in Democracy to Run Villages, Reform Party,” Washington Post, January 26, 1995; Thomas L. Friedman, “It Takes a Village,” “Here Comes the Sun,” and “Get a Job,” New York Times, March 10, 14, and 17, 1998; and Yap Gee Poh, “Chinese Villages in for Changes,” Straits Times (Singapore), August 24, 1996. See also the Journal of Democracy 9, no. 1 (January 1998), which includes ten short articles on the question of China’s possible democratization.

     14. “China: The Titan Stirs,” The Economist, November 28, 1992, 3.

     15. With massive rural to urban migration, the number of people who continue to live in the countryside is a matter of speculation. The Chinese often use the figure 900 million. The figure presented here is based on a calculation of a total population in China of 1.3 billion, of whom 70 percent live in the countryside.

     16. See Yan Jiaqi’s preface to Han Minzhu, ed., Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), vii. See also Yan Jiaqi, Toward a Democratic China: The Intellectual Autobiography of Yan Jiaqi, trans. David S. K. Hong and Denis C. Mair, with a foreword by Andrew J. Nathan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992).

     17. A copy of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China can be found in Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution through Reform (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995). See p. 377 for Article 111.

     18. See especially Daniel Kelliher, “The Chinese Debate over Village Self-Government,” China Journal, no. 37 (January 1997): 63–91; Kevin J. O’Brien, “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (July 1996): 33–62; and Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, “The Struggle over Village Elections” (unpublished paper prepared for the Conference on Self-Government in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Duke University, N.C., May 2–3, 1997).

     19. Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York: Pocket Books, 1939). See also Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

     20. Xiangcun Sanshi Nian: Fengyang Nongcun Shehui Jingji Fajan Shilu (1949–1983 nian) [Thirty years in the countryside: A faithful record of Fengyang’s social and economic development, 1949–1983] (Beijing: Village Materials Press, 1989), 194–196.

     21. Ibid., 190.

     22. Ibid.

     23. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996), 211–219.

     24. Xiangcun Sanshi Nian, 186–188.

     25. I am grateful to Andrew J. Nathan for pointing this out.

     26. Xiangcun Sanshi Nian, 198–200.

     27. Becker’s Hungry Ghosts is the best study of the famine and contains the most extensive consideration of the death figures. See pp. 266–274.

     28. Ibid., 272.

     29. See, for instance, Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, and Robin Zeitz, “Famine in China, 1958–61,” Population and Development Review 10, no. 4 (December 1984): 613–644.

     30. Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 1.

     31. Ibid., 10.

     32. See the description in Yang, Chinese Communist Society, 3.

     33. The nature of enterprise management in the Chinese countryside is complex and unique. For a much fuller description, see William A. Byrd and Lin Qingsong, eds., China’s Rural Industry: Structure, Development, and Reform (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Allen Choate also gives a good description of the importance of economic management committees in “Local Governance in China: An Assessment of Villagers Committees,” Asia Foundation Working Paper Series, no. 1 (February 1997).

     34. Figures for rural migrants vary, and migrants are obviously exceedingly difficult to count. This figure is from Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China., 7, citing Chinese sources. See also Cheng Li, Tidal Wave of Migrant Laborers in China (Hanover, N.H.: Institute of Current World Affairs, June 1994), who says that in 1994 110 million peasants had moved to urban areas and another 105 million had migrated to areas recently designated cities or townships.

     35. Carl Goldstein, Lincoln Kaye, and Anthony Blass, “Get Off Our Backs,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 15, 1993, 68.

     36. Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1987), 81.

     37. Ibid., 81–82.

     38. Kelliher, “The Chinese Debate over Village Self-Government,” 66.

     39. See, for instance, ibid., 70–71; and Li and O’Brien, “The Struggle over Village Elections,” 5.

     40. Ibid., 4.

     41. Ibid.

     42. Ibid., 4–5.

     43. Interview with Wang Zhenyao, July 1994.

     44. Interview with Wang Zhenyao, January 4, 1995.

     45. Li and O’Brien, “The Struggle over Village Elections,” 5.

     46. This description is taken from my notes of the July 1995 meeting.

     47. Ibid.

     48. Research Group on the System of Village Self-Government in China, Chinese Research Society of Basic-Level Governance, The Report on Villagers’ Representative Assemblies in China (December 1994), 162.

     49. China Rural Villagers Self-Government Research Group, Chinese Research Society of Basic-Level Governance, Study on the Election of Villagers Committees in Rural China (December 1, 1993), i.

     50. This brief description of Wang Zhenyao’s life is based on a series of interviews conducted with him between 1994 and 1997.

     51. For a description of the first trip, see Li Zhisui with Anne F. Thurston, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994), 268–271.

     52. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, 122, 112–129.

     53. Research Group on the System of Village Self-Government in China, The Report on Villagers’ Representative Assemblies in China, i.

     54. Susan V. Lawrence, “Democracy, Chinese Style,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 32 (July 1994). Choate, “Local Governance in China,” also notes the long-term importance of the village representative assemblies.

     55. Research Group on the System of Village Self-Government in China, The Report on Villagers’ Representative Assemblies in China, passim.

     56. Ibid.; and Lawrence, “Democracy, Chinese Style.”

     57. See Article 111 of the Chinese constitution in Lieberthal, Governing China, 377.

     58. Research Group on the System of Village Self-Government in China, The Report on Villagers’ Representative Assemblies in China, 11.

     59. Ibid.

     60. China Rural Villagers Self-Government Research Group, Study on the Election of Villagers Committees in Rural China, iii–iv.

     61. Li and O’Brien, “The Struggle over Village Elections,” 13–14.

     62. Discussions with ministry officials, March 1997.

     63. See Jean C. Oi, “Economic Development, Stability, and Democratic Village Self-Governance,” in China Review, 1996, ed. Maurice Brosseau, Suzanne Pepper, and Tsang Shu-ki (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996), 139–140.

     64. See Lawrence, “Democracy, Chinese Style,” 62.

     65. O’Brien, “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages,” 47.

     66. Amy B. Epstein, “Village Elections in China: Experimenting with Democracy,” in China’s Economic Future: Challenges to U.S. Policy—Study Papers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 1996), 414–418.

     67. O’Brien—in “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages”—develops a very interesting matrix based on slightly different criteria than those used here: degree of political participation and the effectiveness with which the village committee implements unpopular state policies. The matrix identifies as “run-away committees” those that have high political participation and ineffective execution of state policies. Such committees would make for fascinating study, but I have never seen such committees myself.

     68. Willy Wo-Lap Lam, “Cadres in Blitz on Rural Party Cells,” South China Morning Post, June 6, 1996.

     69. O’Brien would describe it as “paralyzed.” See his analysis in “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages,” 41.

     70. “The Record of Yu Zuomin’s Crime,” Beijing Evening News, August 23, 1993.

     71. Ibid.

     72. Most of this description is taken from “Former Daqui Leader Yu Zuomin Convicted,” Xinhua, August 27, 1993, reprinted in FBIS-China, August 30, 1993.

     73. Ibid.

     74. This description of Wugang village is taken from notes during my visit in November and December 1995.

     75. I use a pseudonym here, largely out or respect for the Chinese concern over face.

     76. Bureau of Civil Affairs, Lishu County, How Did We Carry Out the Changing Session Election of the Villagers’ Committee (Jilin Province, People’s Republic of China, January 1995), 11.

     77. The Villager Self-Government and the Rural Social Governance in China (Lishu County, Jilin Province, People’s Republic of China, January 1995), 1.

     78. Interview in Beijing, December 1994.

     79. See Geoffrey Crothall, “Police Crack Mafia-Style Gang after Reign of Terror,” South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995.

     80. This description is taken from notes of my visit in 1995. Lincoln Kaye was also at this meeting. See his report, “Flourishing Grassroots: Village Democracy Blooms,” in Far Eastern Economic Review, January 19, 1995, 23.

     81. Interview with Wang Zhenyao, January 4, 1995.

     82. This description is taken from notes of my visit in 1995. Mufson notes this election, from a different angle, in “China Dabbles in Democracy to Run Villages, Reform Party.”

     83. Discussions with Zhang Xiaogan in Fujian, March 1997. See also the two reports on Fujian elections by the International Republican Institute: “People’s Republic of China: Election Observation Report, May 15–31, 1994”; and “Election Observation Report: Fujian, People’s Republic of China, May 1997.”

     84. For a description, see Anne F. Thurston, “The Dragon Stirs,” Wilson Quarterly (spring 1993): 10–34.

     85. Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, “Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China,” Modern China 22, no. 1 (January 1996): 29.

     86. See Cheng Mu, “Peasant Riots Erupt in Hubei and Jiangxi,” China Focus 5, no. 10 (October 1, 1997): 1.

     87. Ming Pao, April 29, 1998; and South China Morning Post, May 6, 1998.

     88. Henry S. Rowen, “Elections in China,” National Interest, no. 45 (fall 1996): 68–69. Rowen’s use of the $2,500 figure for per capita GDP is much higher than World Bank estimates, and many times higher than overall figures for the Chinese countryside.

     89. See Carter Center, Carter Center Delegation Report: Village Elections in China and Agreement on Cooperation with the Ministry of Civil Affairs People’s Republic, Working Paper series (Atlanta: Carter Center of Emory University, 1998).

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

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