Summary

The national and provincial levels of Chinese government are clear authoritarian systems of rule, with Communist party control over all important government offices. However, since the 1980s, open popular elections have spread at the lowest level of Chinese governance, that of the village committee.  While these rural elections vary greatly in form and result between regions, they have become increasingly well organized and mature since their inception. 

Origins

The origins of the Chinese village self-rule movement lie in the reforms undertaken at the end of the Cultural Revolution.  The collapse of people’s communes and the shift towards a market economy in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s led to the decay of Chinese rural governance.  Decollectivization of agriculture shifted economic control over land and production from party cadres towards peasants.  Similarly, new economic policies created an environment in which villages could establish profitable local enterprises.  Increasing economic diversity in Chinese villages created serious difficulties for local political governance.  On the one hand, some villages experienced a collapse in local leadership, as party cadres simply abandoned their posts for the private sector.  On the other hand, some villages fell under the control of corrupt local strongmen, who often abused their positions of government power to extort money earned from the new economic policies from the local populace.  Both scenarios generated serious local unrest.  By the mid-1980’s, this rural discontent reached a critical point, compelling the central government to reconsider basic forms of governance in the Chinese countryside.

Village Self-Rule

Rural instability presented the Chinese central government with a twofold challenge: restoring some semblance of popular legitimacy to Communist rule, and designing an administrative system allowing effective control of the more than 900,000 Chinese villages.  After intense political debates, reformers and party elders concluded that popular, open local elections might serve this purpose.  First, popular local leaders might be more successful than outsiders at carrying out central government policies.  Second, elections could help to identify popular local leaders who could be co-opted into the Communist power structure.

In 1987, the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) enacted the Organic Law on Village Elections (Experimental).  As an experimental law, it merely encouraged the development of village elections for the members of the village committee, essentially the executive branch of the village.  It did not make them mandatory.  Further, the law did not detail precisely how such elections should be carried out.  Although responsibility for providing overall guidance fell to the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA), the Organic Law left provincial governments a great deal of latitude to design the precise form elections should take.

Given such leeway, different areas in China charted radically divergent courses throughout the 1990’s.  Some areas simply held no elections at all, or tightly controlled the nomination process to rig the eventual outcome. Others experienced bottom-up change, including spontaneous development of open primary systems to complement the general elections.  In addition, foreign organizations such as the International Republican Institute and the Carter Center become closely involved in Chinese election efforts through the MCA, both as observers and as trainers for local election officials.

Despite these experiments, most Chinese village elections would not be recognizable as fully democratic to a Western observer.  First, the absence of any form of party politics or organization (other than that of the Communist party) restricts competition to the purely individual level.  Second, Chinese and foreign estimates as to the number of villages conducting elections, prior to 1998, in accordance with the MCA’s own criteria range from a mere 10 to 33 percent.  Partly in response, the NPC passed a revised and updated Organic Law in 1998, making local village elections mandatory, and adding specific requirements these elections should fulfill, such as the secret ballot, the open counting of votes, and the immediate announcement of the winner. As foreign observer groups have noted, the 1998 law has prompted village elections in provinces such as Yunnan and Guangxi, which had not previously held them, and led such provinces to model their own electoral efforts on those of provinces with more experience.

Issues

As the Chinese experiment with local democracy has unfolded, institutional problems have become more apparent.  One particular source of friction is the interaction between popularly-elected village committees and the non-elected governmental layer directly above them, that of the township governments.  Previously, village officials were simply appointed by the townships, giving them somewhat greater control to force villagers to conform to township economic or political policies.  Confronted with village committees’ open rejection of certain directives, some township governments openly interfere with or alter the result of local village elections.

Conversely, reforms have also created political pressure on township governments to institute political reforms.  In 1998-9, Sichuan officials instituted the first direct elections at the township level, filling a vacancy created by the removal of a township leader for corruption.  Despite a wary central government attitude towards this development, similar experimentation with forms of electoral politics is slowly developing in various regions, often relying on popular elections for a slate of candidates, from which the local people’s congress selects the final victors.

A second latent problem is that the relationship between popularly elected village committee officials and the local branch of the Communist party is extremely ill defined.  The 1998 Organic Law does not subject the village committees to the supervision and leadership of the Communist party, as is the case with the national non-Communist parties, for example.  On the other hand, the 1998 law also does not explicitly direct party cadres to refrain from interference with the affairs of the village committee.  Rather, it vaguely states that local party cadres are to play a “key leadership role,” supporting the development of local self-rule by directly exercising their democratic rights.

In practice, the unclear relationship between the Communist party and village committee has created vastly divergent outcomes in Chinese villages.  In some, power remains concentrated in the hands of a single official serving both as party chairperson and village committee head.  In others, not only has real power shifted to the village committee, selected through competitive open elections, but experimentation has also occurred with the selection of local party cadres through similar processes.

Conclusion

The Chinese experiment with village self-rule has introduced an encouraging element of political change in an authoritarian political system.  However, the unwillingness of the Chinese leadership to compromise on the central tenet of the Chinese political system, Communist party control over all key issues, limits the likelihood the village self-rule movement will generate anything resembling Western-style multi-party democracy anytime soon.

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