Institutions of Democratic Governance

According to a report from the 21st Century Business Herald, the personnel bureau of the Shanghai municipal government has issued a comprehensive plan for the reform of local public institutions. These aim at regularizing public institutions, and may lead to increased independence for at least some of them.

Chinese public institutions are state-controlled organizations providing a range of public services. Examples include hospitals, schools, and sports organizations. As of 2001, they employed over 25 million people. Many regularly lose money, creating sizable financial burdens on local governments. Public institutions are a significant component of China's state-dominated civil society. For further information, see the civil society section of the 2004 Annual Report.

In a compelling article (in English), the China Internet Information Center (a Web site run by the Chinese government) describes the absurd number of obstacles that a group of seven farmers faced in challenging the compensation paid to them when they were evicted from their farms to make way for urban construction.

As of November 1, the Chinese government lifted a ban on the sale of arable land that was imposed in April as part of an effort to cool China’s overheated economy and address abuses related to land seizures (see posting on 10/26). In place of the ban, the State Council issued a new circular on land management in an effort to clamp down on unlawful land requisitions and prevent a flood of new problems and social unrest. An analysis posted in Caijing notes that the circular is not a “fundamental solution,” but a “makeshift step” designed to ameliorate a series of problems until amendments to China’s land management law and related regulations are passed.

According to a China Daily commentary published on November 16, a recent investigation of Anhui province uncovered more than 110 unlawful provincial directives. Local governments in China often flout central government laws and regulations or exceed their own power in issuing local rules. The commentary argues that legal restraints are necessary to check unlawful local government acts and notes (positively) proposals to amend the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) to give citizens the right to challenge the legality of local directives in court. Currently under the ALL, citizens may only challenge the legality of “concrete administrative acts,” or administrative decisions that affect them individually (such as a decision to grant or deny a license), not the legality of regulations and policies themselves.

Cai Dingjian, former member of the Secretariat of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, argues that further revisions to the most recent draft of the PRC Elections Law will be needed to make elections fair, open and competitive.

1. Candidates must not be appointed, but must put their own names forward.

2. Voters must be registered to vote according to the district in which they reside. For this reason, laborers from outside should not have the right to vote in the district they work in, unless they have lived there for a long period of time and become local tax payers.

3. Voting districts should not be divided according to the voter's work unit, or danwei, as this tends to encourage bosses to try to control their employees' voting behavior.

4. The system should require candidates to introduce themselves and publicly express their views so the voters can come to know them. This also will help develop the candidates' sense of duty to the people.

Human Rights in China reports that Hu Shigen is in extremely poor health. Boxun reports that Huang Qi's health is also deteriorating.

Hu Shigen was arrested on May 27, 1992, together with other members of the “Beijing Fifteen,” a group of labor and democracy activists tried for “counterrevolutionary crimes” in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Hu was a co-founder Chinese Progressive Alliance and the Chinese Freedom and Democracy Party, as well as a member of the Preparatory Committee of the Free Labor Union of China. Hu was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for “heading a counterrevoutionary group” and “spreading counterrevolutionary propaganda,” including an alleged plan to use a remote-controlled model airplane to drop leaflets on Tiananmen Square to commemorate the anniversary of the crackdown.

As noted in a Beijing News article, on October 27, the National People's Congress (NPC) passed a series of amendments to the Election Law governing China's system of local and provincial legislatures, the local people's congresses (LPCs).

The reforms leave untouched core aspects of the electoral process, which the Party and goverment continue to control. Party bureaus and officially-approved social groups still control nomination procedures, and ill-defined official "electoral commissions" retain the power to influence the final determination of candidate list.

According to an October 20 report in the Legal Daily, Minister of Land and Resources Sun Wensheng stated this week that structural reform of China’s system of land management bureaus will be complete by the end of the year. Last December, the MLR announced that local land officials would no longer report to local governments but would instead be placed under the direct control of provincial-level land management bureaus. The move was designed to combat corruption in local land transactions. Sun noted that implementation of the new system had been “slow” in some areas.