Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Anne F. Thurston

Summary

Among the most significant political reforms implemented by the Chinese government since 1989 is the introduction of competitive elections into rural villages. This study, based largely on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 1997, examines China’s efforts to bring competitive elections to the country’s rural areas and attempts to explain why local democracy has proved more successful in some places than in others. By focusing on the realities and complexities of rural China, the study also attempts to reintroduce China-as-China into public dialogue.

The basis for village elections is a law promulgated in 1987 by the National People’s Congress, China’s nominal legislature, which specifies that village leaders be directly elected by the villagers themselves for terms of three years. Elected village leaders are not government officials. Rather, they are transmission belts between the government and the villagers, reporting popular opinion and proposals to the government, helping to maintain social order, and mediating civil disputes. The election law is less the result of popular demand than of an unusual alliance between conservative party leaders, who believe that democratic elections will help maintain stability and thus preserve party authority, and younger government reformers, who have been influenced both by Western political values and by the success of democratic reform in Taiwan.

At the central level, the task of overseeing the nationwide implementation of village-level democracy has been assigned to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. For the foreseeable future, the evolution of the electoral process will be dictated by government officials rather than grassroots or nongovernmental organizations.

China has some 1 million villages, and they are remarkably diverse. We have no idea how many peasants live in villages with democratically elected leaders. International observers have witnessed, at most, only a few dozen elections. Village leadership must be seen along a broad continuum, from the least to the most democratic. At the least democratic end of the spectrum are villages where elections have failed and leadership has broken down, as well as villages that continue to be governed by “local emperors.” At the most democratic end are villages with popular and innovative new leaders elected by majority vote, who work in tandem with village representative assemblies. In between are villages where elections are merely nominal. In some, candidates are chosen by higher-level authorities without regard to villagers’ wishes. In others, the distribution of patronage guarantees a candidate’s electoral success.

The best of China’s village elections are very good, however, recognizably competitive even with their distinctly Chinese characteristics. There is no obvious correlation between the level of economic development and the level of rural democratization. Rather, the villages that have staged the most successful elections are those that have received the greatest attention from higher-level officials most committed to making village democracy work. Genuinely competitive elections seem to have a greater likelihood of success in more pluralistic villages—that is, villages where neither economic nor political power is overly concentrated and where villagers engage 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 are in fact managed by one person or a small group of people. Many villages, though, are electing their most prosperous members to lead them.

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 with a significant voice in those decisions that most directly affect them, and fostering greater transparency in village finances. Enormous organizational efforts will be required to expand competitive elections into all of China’s villages. 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. The ministry plans to train 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, 1.5 million township-level officials. The ministry’s goal is that by the year 2000 each prefecture will have one model county for village self-government, each county will have one model township, and each township will have one model village. These models, the ministry hopes, will have a demonstration effect that will spread to all of China’s villages.

Longer-term development of basic-level democracy will require significant changes at both the bottom and the top. At the grassroots, democracy will remain stunted without the development of a more pluralistic, civil society. At the top, the development of democracy will ultimately require a major commitment at the highest reaches of Chinese political power. Key people at this level pay lip service to democratic reform, but no one has articulated a carefully considered long-term plan. Unless leaders such as Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji begin soon to articulate a new rationale for democracy, that task is likely to be left to 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 helm of Chinese politics, 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.

Foreign cooperation, sensitively tendered, can exert a positive influence on China’s democratic process. Several international organizations and U.S. 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 to assist the Beijing training center and to promote two-way academic exchanges between China and the European Union. Among U.S. organizations, the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute, the Asia Foundation, and the Carter Center have all been active, supporting efforts by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and by grassroots reformers to implement the election law. This cooperation should be continued and expanded.

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. In the meantime, 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 between 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.

At present, U.S. NGOs are better structured to cooperate with China than are government 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. Potentially fruitful areas for NGO action include identifying reform-minded leaders at the provincial and local levels; tailoring training programs in local-level governance and election procedures to meet Chinese needs; and funding collaborative, policy-oriented research into the problems facing people in the Chinese countryside.

Even with the best of intentions, such cooperative programs carry no guarantees of success, and the hope of making China “more like us” is unlikely to be fulfilled. Furthermore, despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to confront the several crises that rapid economic development is bringing in its wake, some 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. These are dangerous times for China—and therefore dangerous for us all. This is thus a story without an ending. While there is room for significant cooperation between the United States and China as the story unfolds, it is a history that China and the Chinese people will largely write themselves.

Foreword

There is a Chinese expression for the coexistence of contradictory forces in a given entity: “To sleep in the same bed while dreaming different dreams.” Democratic elections in China’s villages coexisting with a one-party dictatorship are such unlikely bedfellows. Even when the elections are limited, localized, and orchestrated by the dictatorship, the coexistence of popular, competitive voting and one-party control still strikes most Westerners as peculiar. Such contradictions, however, reflect life in today’s People’s Republic of China, a country being pulled in different directions by complex and competing forces: modernization and tradition, socialism and capitalism, centralization and localism, order and chaos. Contemporary China has a tendency to defy expectations and generalizations. For those of us in the West whose job or interest it is to understand the People’s Republic and to factor its likely future development into our own plans, it is imperative that we grasp the idiosyncracies and complexity of the world’s most populous—and potentially most economically formidable and politically explosive—nation.

To this end, Anne Thurston’s vivid account of the practice of village elections in China is an invaluable resource. A longtime student of China and a frequent visitor there, Thurston understands better than most the need to leave stereotypes at home when exploring the People’s Republic, and instead to bring an open mind, an ear attuned to cultural nuance, and a journalist’s eye for assessing what is really going on beneath surface appearances. Thus equipped, she has traveled several times to China to investigate village-level democracy and has returned with fresh information and rich insights. In this report, she offers a fascinating, first-hand look at village elections and village life in China today. Her account will provoke much speculation about the longer-term implications of Communist Party experimentation with local democracy for the party’s own future.

In early 1994, Thurston met Wang Zhenyao, a key official in the implementation of the nationally directed policy of holding elections for village assemblies and village committees. Wang belongs to the reform-minded generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution—although, as the author explains, it is not only the reform-minded who have championed these elections. Confusingly, the policy of local democracy has been promoted, both before and since the violent suppression of mass demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, by aging conservatives fearful that the local party cadres had lost touch with the peasants and might further discredit Communist Party rule. Their hope was that the revolutionary tradition of the “mass line” could be revived with local elections—in contrast to the Maoist tradition of periodic “mass movements” and chaotic political purges.

Between January 1995 and March 1997, Thurston observed three rounds of village elections in nearly twenty villages spread throughout three provinces: Sichuan, in China’s southwest heartland; Jilin, in the northeast; and Fujian, on the coast opposite Taiwan. As Muddling toward Democracy makes abundantly clear, at every turn Thurston encountered remarkable diversity in the character and extent of electoral democracy as practiced in today’s China. She also saw great disparities among and within provinces in the type of leadership, economic development, and sense of community to be found in individual villages; indeed, even if her study did not mention democratization, this assessment would merit publication for providing an all-too-rare glimpse of contemporary life in China’s villages, which seem as various as they are numerous.

Despite this diversity, Thurston has drawn several conclusions from her field research. “First, the best elections are very good indeed, recognizably democratic even with their distinctly Chinese characteristics. Second, enormous organizational efforts will be required to expand competitive elections into all of China’s villages. Third, a core of people at the Ministry of Civil Affairs is determined to ensure that . . . the best examples of village elections become commonplace. . . . Fourth, key people at the highest reaches of the party publicly support the ministry’s goals.”

Muddling toward Democracy concludes with a recommendation that the United States support China’s ongoing democratic experiment. The author counsels that, for the most part, assistance should not be provided directly by the U.S. government, and should instead be channeled through nongovernmental organizations suited to low-key, low-level cooperative efforts. This advice seems wise, both because of U.S. domestic considerations and because of the risk that high-profile support for democratization by the United States would weaken political backing in China for the process. China, as we have noted, is today being pulled in different directions by contradictory forces. Should the “Middle Kingdom” fracture under these strains, the results would be devastating—not just for China itself, nor just for East Asia, but for the entire international community. “These are dangerous times for China,” the author remarks, “and therefore dangerous for us all.” As Americans, we are idealistically inclined to support democratization whenever and wherever it occurs; our national interest also argues in favor of supporting political reform in China, on the grounds that we are likely to have more harmonious relations with a popularly supported government. But neither our idealism nor our national interest will be served if we embark on a course that threatens the stability of the Chinese body politic. Thurston allows the reader to draw broader lessons from her account. One such lesson would appear to be that while we are right to express our support for democratization in China, it would be counterproductive to insist on it.

The reader is sure to find Muddling toward Democracy an important contribution to the ongoing debate in the United States about U.S.-Sino relations. Highly illuminating, sometimes surprising, and invariably colorful and compelling, this report is likely to become required reading for those who wish to understand what is happening at China’s grassroots. As such, it complements other recent reports issued by the United States Institute of Peace that focus on what is happening at the “rice roots” level of today’s China. For instance, the Institute has just published The China Challenge in the Twenty-First Century, in which former Institute fellow Chen Jian examines the foreign policy behavior of the People’s Republic from the perspective of those inside the country. The Institute has also supported significant work on broader trends in the East Asian region, as reflected in two recent Special Reports: Beyond the Asian Financial Crisis, published in April 1998; and North Korea’s Decline and China’s Strategic Dilemmas, issued in October 1997.

Like these Special Reports, Muddling toward Democracy seeks to provide foreign observers with the information and the analytical tools necessary to fashion a far-sighted policy toward a country that is full of surprises, tensions, and possibilities—and of enduring significance for America’s interests.

Richard H. Solomon, President
United States Institute of Peace

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Contents