Elections in China - what will they think of next?
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VILLAGE ELECTIONS IN CHINA
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ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 8, 2002
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
Available via the World Wide Web: cecc.gov
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate
House
MAX BAUCUS, Montana, Chairman DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska, Co-
CARL LEVIN, Michigan Chairman
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California JIM LEACH, Iowa
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota DAVID DREIER, California
EVAN BAYH, Indiana FRANK WOLF, Virginia
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska JOE PITTS, Pennsylvania
BOB SMITH, New Hampshire SANDER LEVIN, Michigan
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
JIM DAVIS, Florida
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
D. CAMERON FINDLAY, Department of Labor
LORNE CRANER, Department of State
JAMES KELLY, Department of State
Ira Wolf, Staff Director
John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Thurston, Anne F., associate professor of China Studies, School
of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins
University, Washington, DC..................................... 2
Liu, Yawei, associate director, the Carter Center's China Village
Elections Project, Atlanta, GA................................. 6
Dugan, Elizabeth, regional program director, Asia and the Middle
East, International Republican Institute (IRI), Washington, DC. 9
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Thurston, Anne F................................................. 34
Liu, Yawei....................................................... 37
Dugan, Elizabeth................................................. 40
VILLAGE ELECTIONS IN CHINA
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MONDAY, JULY 8, 2002
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:30
p.m., in room SD-215, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Ira Wolf,
(Staff Director) presiding.
Also present: John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director; Chris
Billing, Director of Communications; Matt Tuchow, Office of
Representative Levin; Jennifer Goedke, Office of Representative
Kaptur; Amy Gadsden, U.S. Department of State; and Holly
Vineyard, U.S. Department of Commerce.
Mr. Wolf. Let me welcome everyone to the eighth issues
roundtable of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
These roundtables are being held because the Commission
Chairman, Senator Baucus, and our Co-Chairman, Representative
Bereuter, have instructed the staff to delve deeply into a
number of very specific issues of concern to the Commission.
This format provides an opportunity to focus on important
issues dealing with human rights and the rule of law in China.
We have two more roundtables scheduled during the summer--
on July 26, a roundtable on China's criminal justice system,
and on August 5, an open forum where anyone--any group or any
individual--can speak for 5 minutes about any issue of concern.
Of course, anyone who wants to appear at the open forum needs
to check our Website and register.
Today we will address village elections in China--the
background, how they have been carried out, information about
technical assistance, advice, and monitoring from American
groups who are represented here today, and the implications of
village elections on human rights, the rule of law, and
governance in China.
Let me introduce the staff members here today. I am Ira
Wolf, Staff Director. John Foarde is the Deputy Staff Director.
Jennifer Goedke works for Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. Holly
Vineyard is from the Department of Commerce and works for our
Commissioner, Under Secretary of Commerce Grant Aldonas.
Chris Billing is our Communications Director and the
Commission's expert on the media, the Olympics, and many other
areas of concern to the Commission. Amy Gadsden works at the
State Department for our Commissioner, Lorne Craner, the
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor Affairs.
Let us begin. We have three presentations today. First is
Dr. Anne Thurston, who is associate professor of China Studies
at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.
Second will be Mr. Liu Yawei, associate director of the
China Village Elections Project at the Carter Center. And,
finally, Elizabeth Dugan, the regional program director for
Asia and the Middle East at the International Republican
Institute [IRI].
Anne, we will start with you.
STATEMENT OF ANNE F. THURSTON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CHINA
STUDIES, SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (SAIS), JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Thurston. I want to thank my friends and my colleagues
here on the Congressional-Executive China Commission for the
opportunity to share with you some of my experiences with
village elections.
I have been observing village elections in China since 1994
and have both spoken and written about my observations. I
brought one of the pieces I did in 1998 and have some copies
for those of you who may want it.
My two fellow panelists--friends, and colleagues, Elizabeth
Dugan and Liu Yawei--both direct on-the-ground, concrete
programs in China. My contribution today will be to provide
some historical background about how village elections came
into being in China, to give a broad overview about what we
know about how successful those elections have been, and also
to say something about how significant those elections have
been, both for the people in rural areas who participate in
them, and also for their implications for possible political
evolution in China.
Let me start by saying something about how these village
elections came to be introduced into China.
The process, as some of you know, traces to the demise of
the people's communes or the collective system of agriculture
in China, that began in the late 1970s and was completed by the
early 1980s.
One of the unintended consequences of this process of
decollectivization is that many villages in China began to face
serious problems of leadership. Those problems were generally
of two types.
In some villages, previous village leaders were able to
take advantage of the new economic opportunities afforded by
decollectivizations and they thus left their positions of
leadership and searched for other, more lucrative pursuits.
In villages of this type where the leaders actually left,
many villages were faced with a vacuum of leadership. This
vacuum, in some cases, also resulted in a breakdown of social
order: the rise of banditry, of lawlessness, and the rise of
violence, for instance.
In other cases, some villages came under control of what
the Chinese often call ``local emperors,''--strong men who are
capable of exploiting and bullying, and generally making life
miserable for the ordinary people under their control.
By the mid- to late 1980s, many people thought that rural
China was in a State of potential crisis. Above all, the
Chinese Communist Party [CCP] was worried about the potential
for instability and chaos in these rural areas.
At the outset, there was considerable disagreement within
the higher reaches of the Communist Party about what to do
about this potential for chaos and instability. Some people
naturally wanted a strengthening of Party leadership within the
village. They wanted a sort of tightening of top-down controls.
Others, though, began to suggest that perhaps the best way
to restore order in Chinese villages was to institute village
elections. What they reasoned is that by instituting popular
elections, village leadership would fall to more popular, more
respected members of the village community.
Moreover, there was also the thought that if those people
who were elected at the village level were not members of the
Party, then perhaps they could be recruited into the Party,
thus infusing the Party with--at local levels, in any case--a
new respect.
So the debate surrounding village elections as it played
itself out was not really about the ``good of democracy'' as an
ideal, but rather a very practical question about whether
elections could, in fact, promote or would impede stability or
chaos. The question was: What effect would village elections
have on this potential for chaos?
In the end, those people who argued that elections would
promote stability won. In 1987, the Chinese National People's
Congress passed an Organic Law on Village Elections, which
promoted village elections on an experimental basis.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs [MCA] in Beijing was
responsible at the national level for overseeing implementation
of these village elections and every province was responsible
for coming up with its own concrete regulations governing how
each province would carry out these experiments.
By 1998, more than a decade later, these experiments had
been going on long enough and with sufficient success that they
were mandated finally into law. As of 1998, all villages in
China have been required by law to hold competitive elections.
At that time, in 1998, the guidelines for how to carry out
village elections were also more clearly and thoroughly spelled
out. Most of these measures, as we read them, move village
elections further along the democratic spectrum.
Candidates have to be chosen by the villagers themselves
rather than by outsiders; secret ballots are required; and the
number of candidates must exceed the number of positions to be
chosen.
One of the great frustrations of anybody working on this
issue of village elections is that we simply do not know yet
how widespread they are or how well and how universally they
have actually been implemented.
There are some 930,000 villages in China, and some 900
million people live in those villages. But the number of
villages visited by foreigners like those of us in this room is
painfully limited.
My own experience has also been very limited, but I have,
nonetheless, seen a broad spectrum of types of village
leadership in China, and also different ways of choosing
village leaders.
I want to mention the various types of leaders that I have
seen in China, but dwell particularly on the more positive side
of what I have seen.
First, the local emperors who came to power with the
collapse of communes still exist in some parts of China. There
is little doubt about that.
Second, many villages continue to exist in the same vacuum
of leadership they found shortly after decollectivization.
Third, I have also seen cases where these local emperors are
actually elected, ostensibly democratically.
Finally and most importantly, and what I want to talk about
a bit here, is that I have also seen elections that, by any
measure anywhere in the world, would be recognized as genuinely
competitive, fair, and democratic.
If I could generalize about some of the most successful
elections I have seen, I would say, first--and pretty
obviously, I suppose--that the issues confronting the
electorate and addressed by the candidates are very local,
practical, and economic.
The rural voters behave in exactly the way that democratic
theory says they should behave, which is to say they vote in
their own self interests. They want very simple things. I
mentioned some of those things in my longer statement.
Most of the people who I have seen elected have been
younger, entrepreneurial, better educated, and generally
significantly richer than the older generation of collective
leaders.
Whether these newly elected village leaders are members of
the Communist Party or not seems not to be an issue with the
voters, although in my own experience--and I think probably in
the experience of everybody else here who has witnessed village
elections--most often the newly elected leaders are members of
the Party, simply because Communist Party members have more
connections at higher levels, and thus they have a greater
ability to make things happen at the village level.
We do not really know the percentage of village leaders
being elected now who are members of the Party, but we know
that figure is pretty high, probably as high as 80 percent
nationwide.
It is hard, given the limited number of elections that we
have observed, to say why some elections are successful and
some are not, although it seems to me that the key is generally
in leadership.
In order for elections to be successful, you really have to
have significant political commitment at every step of the
political ladder, from the top, which is to say the Ministry of
Civil Affairs, to the province, to the township, right down the
chain to the village.
I would also say, and I think others who have observed
village elections would agree, that elections are also very
much a learning process. With good leadership, with experience,
they do tend to get better over time.
One of the most important things I have learned observing
village elections over the years is that the technical details
that we take for granted about how to organize an election are
by no means obvious to the Chinese. Election officials have to
be properly trained.
Here, I would commend heartily the work of both the IRI and
the Carter Center for what they have done in training election
officials at several levels of the election hierarchy, and also
in directly monitoring those elections, which gives them also
an opportunity to make recommendations for improvement in how
elections are carried out.
So the question is, what difference did these elections at
the village level make? I think, certainly, they are definitely
a major advance over the previous ways of selecting village
leaders in China. They present rural people with choices that
they did not have before. They give them a real voice in the
selection of their leaders. They provide a sense of political
participation, of community, of empowerment.
Moreover, there is some evidence--although I think we need
a lot more research on this--that governance in villages that
have had competitive elections does improve, that finances
become more transparent, that corruption declines.
Above all, though, it seems to me that by giving rural
people the experience of electing their local leaders,
elections at the village level are putting in place the
mechanisms for elections of higher-level officials. That, of
course, is the final question.
The question is, can we expect elections at the village
level to begin working their way up, which is to say, to the
township, the county, the province, and eventually the national
level? This is, of course, how Taiwan began its long-term
process of democratization.
There is pretty universal agreement both in China and among
western academics that reforms that actually begin this upward
movement from the village, to the township, to the county, to
the province, and so on is going to have to be instituted from
above, which is to say from China's top leadership.
We all know that China's current leadership has been
decidedly conflicted about the issue of further democratization
there. We also know that China is currently in the process of a
major leadership change, which also means that this is not the
time for political innovation. That is to say, full-blown
democracy is not likely to come soon to China.
But, having said that, I think the note that I would like
to close on is that I have been going to China for some 24
years now, and never at any time since I have been going to
China have I heard more sentiment in favor of democracy as I do
now.
Among China's intellectuals, in particular, I think there
is a general understanding that democratization in the long
term is both necessary and inevitable. The question is--and it
is a very big question for everybody--how to proceed along a
more democratic path without risking the chaos and instability
that so many people in China fear.
Many people in China, like people in the United States,
believe that democratization is tied to China's continued
economic development, and also to the spread of economic
benefits from urban to rural China, and from the coastal to the
inland areas.
But to conclude, I will say that in the meantime, before
this process actually gets under way, I think that the Chinese
Government's continuing commitment to village elections offers
us in the United States a rare opportunity to cooperate with
China in a very positive way in their long-term, but still
uncertain, political evolution. Thank you all.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Thurston appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Mr. Liu Yawei, please go ahead.
... continued ... |
