China to Allow More to Run in Local Elections

In an effort to defuse student demonstrations for democracy, China’s Communist Party newspaper Sunday made public new rules allowing more than one candidate to run for each seat in local elections to be held throughout the nation next year.

In an interview in the People’s Daily, Wang Hanbin, a leading official of the National People’s Congress, China’s Parliament, asserted that new election rules approved earlier this month will “give full play to democracy.” The rules allow any group of 10 people or more to nominate candidates for local elections.

Not Western Democracy

But Wang made clear that the new voting procedures--which were adopted before the wave of student protests that has swept China during the last 10 days--still fall short of democracy in the Western sense of the word.

An election committee appointed by party authorities will winnow the nominees to a final list of candidates through a process of “discussions and democratic consultations.” In the past, “democratic consultation” has been the description for a process in which the Communist Party listens to different groups or points of view but retains the power to make the ultimate decisions.

“They’ve been having more than one candidate per seat for several years,” one Western analyst said Sunday. “That’s not new. The issue isn’t the number of candidates; it’s how they’re picked (for the final list).”

While the People’s Daily gave prominent display Sunday to Wang’s pledge of multi-candidate local elections next year, other party-controlled newspapers were portraying Western-style democracy negatively.

“We should bravely study and attract the advanced management techniques and technology of the West, but we absolutely cannot do a complete Westernization,” the official newspaper Workers’ Daily quoted one engineer as saying. “Western things are not all good. Their electoral system and elections, in fact, are controlled behind the scenes by a handful of financial monopolies.”

Local Elections Next Year

China is scheduled to hold elections for local people’s congresses next year, and delegates to the National People’s Congress will be selected in 1988.

The series of student demonstrations on Chinese campuses this month began with a protest in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, over the way in which representatives were being selected for the provincial People’s Congress. “No democracy, no modernization,” said some of the demonstrators.

The protests appeared to have died down by Sunday, although some demonstrations were continuing in Nanjing.

On Dec. 2, less than a week before the demonstrations for democracy began, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress approved a new series of election rules to govern local elections.

It was these rules that Wang, the secretary general of the Standing Committee, discussed in the People’s Daily article Sunday.

More Candidates Than Seats

Wang pointed out that under the new regulations, the number of candidates presented to voters at county- and village-level elections should be from 33% to 100% larger than the actual number of seats.

In addition, he said, when the local people’s congresses meet to choose their delegates to provincial or municipal congresses, the number of officially approved candidates should be between 20% and 50% higher than the number of seats.

In Shanghai, where tens of thousands of people demonstrated for democracy last week, the newspaper Liberation Daily on Saturday published an interview with Fudan University historian Zhou Gucheng, who warned that “Western bourgeois democracy isn’t a bed of flowers.”

“If this (Western democracy) is introduced to young people without analysis, it will take over their thoughts, obstruct their intellectual development and can even totally extinguish their ambition,” Zhou said.