better than having Russia turn into Somalia on the Volga
Hi, Derek. You hadn't posted for three days, I wondered where you were. One of the articles I posted recently mentioned that Russia's GNP was about the same as Hollands. The left always puts out a lot of flak about going to Capitalism in Russia was a huge mess, and imply it was our fault for not handling it better. It's a very difficult transition.
This article by Pomfet in the "Washington Post" shows how scared the Chicoms are. any little sign of Democracy is stomped on. But they just can't stop it. Even the lowest Ag workers know what they need. The ability to be "Free to Choose."
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Taking on the Party in Rural China
Reformer Risks Livelihood for Direct Elections
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 27, 2003; Page A14
PINGBA, China -- The trash-filled streets of this township in southwestern China look like those of any other poverty-stricken rural backwater. Farmers bedeck their mud and brick huts with dried red peppers and thresh newly harvested grain in the central square.
But last month the town of 10,000 people became a front line in China's battle over political reform. Wei Shengduo, a low-level Communist Party secretary here, made the daring and, as it turned out, risky decision to organize a direct election for the head of the township government, a position that is usually appointed by party bureaucrats.
The day before the election, the party secretary at the county seat, one notch above Wei, canceled the vote and had the 34-year-old would-be reformer arrested, then detained for two weeks. The official announced that he had smashed an "anti-party clique" and led a delegation to Beijing last week to ask authorities to punish an academic who had advised Wei, sources in the capital said.
The story of Wei's attempt to bring democratic change to this mountainous corner of China is one that is being played out across the country. Experiments in limited democracy have been occurring quietly, but most are stymied by Communist Party officials fearful of losing their monopoly on power in a closed political system that appears increasingly at odds with China's opening economy.
The Ministry of Propaganda has banned news coverage of Wei's incarceration and the aborted ballot, Chinese journalists said. Nonetheless, several reporters from prominent publications have made the trip to Pingba, and Wei has since been released from custody. Residents of Pingba have also launched a petition calling on party officials to allow him to return to his job. Thousands have signed it, the residents said.
Wei is currently under house arrest, sources said. A party official has been assigned to answer his mobile phone and said recently that Wei would lose his job and be expelled from the party despite the groundswell of support for him.
Wei's case, analysts and researchers say, also amounts to a challenge to the central authorities, particularly to Hu Jintao, the president and party general secretary. In a speech on July 1, Hu said that power should be used by the people and that the people's interests should come first. Before the speech, rumors had swirled that Hu would use it to give the green light for limited political liberalization. He did not.
"People are waiting for Hu to live up to the great expectations they had for him," said Li Fan, the Beijing-based academic who advised Wei on the ballot. "But I think this case shows that our optimism about real political reform was misplaced."
Li is encouraging lower-level officials to experiment with reform, and he mailed copies of his book "Innovation and Development" to each of China's 2,500 counties two years ago. At the time, Wei was studying in Chengkou, his local county seat, and he contacted Li after reading it.
"Wei was really eager to carry out some kind of reform," Li recalled. "He said the situation was very bad in Pingba, and he thought democracy could help improve relations between the government and the people."
These are difficult times for many local officials. Most of China's 30,000 townships, the lowest rung of government, are deeply in debt. They are squeezed between counties, which rely on them to collect taxes, and the 700 million rural dwellers who depend on them for schools, public irrigation works, road maintenance, health care and other services.
The tax base of places such as Pingba has shriveled over the past decade. Fewer and fewer people can or want to make a living off the land. Almost anyone who can leave the rural areas does, joining an army of construction workers, day laborers, prostitutes, pickpockets and street sweepers in the ballooning cities. Pingba is no exception. More than a third of its working-age population has left in recent years to seek work, mostly in factories either in Chongqing, six hours southwest by car on a rutted road, or along the booming southern coast in Guangdong province, 650 miles away.
Last year, Pingba collected $78,000 in taxes and sent most of it to the county, according to government statistics. The town had to borrow $30,000 from state-run banks to make ends meet.
Wei believed that democracy was a way out, according to Li. By giving Pingba's people more of a say in politics, Wei thought, tax collection could go up, official corruption would decrease and a wide range of policies would be easier to implement.
Wei also had personal reasons for pushing change, Li said. In 1957, his father, who was a teacher, was branded a "rightist" during one of Mao Zedong's many political campaigns. The elder Wei was sent to teach in an isolated village, then fired and forced into hard labor in an even more remote mountain community. He was not released from this bondage until the 1980s. On his deathbed, he summoned Wei and his older brother, both government officials. "He told them that he didn't mind that they were both government officials, but he wanted them at least to do something for China's ordinary people," Li said.
Wei was appointed Pingba's party secretary in 2001 and quickly won the support of many of the town's residents. According to the petition supporting him after his arrest, Wei played a key role in reducing an annual head tax from $24 a person to $5, a big drop in a township with an average annual income of less than $200. Wei also helped start a cement factory and convinced Chinese companies to invest in Pingba, the petition said.
He was briefed on local political experiments elsewhere by Li, who traveled to Chongqing last year to meet him. Li had engineered several of these experiments, including China's first publicly acknowledged direct election, in Buyun township in Sichuan province in 1999. Wei said he wanted to organize a direct election for Pingba's township chief in 2004.
This summer, however, Wei told Li that the election should be held right away because he was going to be transferred from his post as Pingba's party secretary to fill a spot vacated by one of more than 30 senior county and township officials who had been either arrested or fired after charges of corruption. It was either hold the election in late August or don't do it all, Li said.
"I was against this," Li recalled, "because if an election like this is held at the wrong time, then the upper level of government could easily reject the results of the vote. But he insisted. He said, 'We've got to do it now.' I felt obliged to help him."
Township governments are not supposed to be directly elected. They are chosen by the township's People's Congress, which in effect means that they are appointed by Communist Party officials.
However, Li and other reformers have been encouraging local officials to, as Li put it, "benevolently break the law" and organize direct elections for the township government. The topic is one of the hottest issues in reform circles in China. As the Pingba battle was unfolding, for example, government officials and scholars held two conferences in late August on the issue of direct elections for township chiefs.
One reason for the pressure for direct elections in townships is that in 1998 China began allowing elections for the heads of its 700,000 villages. A crisis of legitimacy has erupted, pitting village chiefs, who often have popular support, against township governments, which are appointed.
"The township governments have a choice," said a government researcher who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They can either try to fix the village elections and derail the process or they can push for democratization as well. But if they do that, then the county government above will be faced with the same choice."
Wei chose to push for democratization. The county government above him chose to derail the process.
At a meeting of the township's party members and local legislature in Pingba on Aug. 18, Wei made the case for a direct election and seemingly won their support, according to town residents. The election was set for Aug. 29, but another problem emerged. No one was interested in running.
The town's experience with voting had not been good. In 1993, using write-in ballots, residents elected a member of the local People's Congress to the post of deputy township chief. But authorities in Chengkou overturned the choice and installed their own candidate, who had failed to get 50 percent of the vote.
On Aug. 22, Ma Menglin, a 29-year-old teacher, stepped forward and said he would run. Ma told Li that he understood the election was just for show and that he was fulfilling a traditional role in China's one-party system where the losers, like the winners, are picked before the voting starts.
"But I told him there were a lot of things he could do to at least make it an interesting race," Li said. No one thought Ma could win, but a good return might be a steppingstone out of the schoolhouse and into city hall, something Ma had dreamed of.
Li promised Ma that he would lobby election organizers to stop village chiefs from voting on behalf of their whole village and allow only family heads to cast ballots for a maximum of three people. Li also promised Ma that he could send his supporters to polling stations to supervise the vote to avoid ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities. Li said Ma would be allowed to put up posters and even campaign.
In addition, party secretary Wei organized a meeting where each candidate was allowed to put forward a platform. In an unprecedented development in a country where senior government officials are suspected of hiding money in secret bank accounts, he also made the candidates report their financial assets.
"When Ma heard this he said, 'I am really going to try,' " Li recalled.
Two days before the vote, nine teams of teachers fanned out to villages in Pingba to campaign on behalf of their fellow teacher.
When Li bumped into township chief Liu Tingyan, who was running for reelection, the incumbent said he wasn't worried by his competitor's eagerness. "I'm not going to put on a show," he said.
But sources in Pingba said Liu appeared to have been worried. They believe that he complained that Ma was mounting too strong a campaign. On Aug. 29, party officials from Chengkou county appeared in Pingba, arrested Wei and stopped the vote.
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