Villages Taste Democracy’s Forbidden Fruit in China

On Monday, the island state of Taiwan will swear in the Chinese-speaking world’s first democratically elected president.

The inauguration of Lee Teng-hui, to be followed by a gala celebration with folk dancing and fireworks across the island, is the culmination of Taiwan’s evolution, in just over a decade, from a repressive one-party state under martial law to a full-fledged democracy.

On the same day, 400 miles north in mainland China, residents of this tiny rice-growing village in Zhejiang province will elect a village committee to manage their hamlet, population 718.

The Huajia vote is very limited: Citizens will choose from among four candidates--all Communist Party members--for three open positions on the committee. But it is part of an ambitious rural democratization program launched by the government that in the long term could be much more significant than Taiwan’s crowning achievement.

Both cases debunk myths that Chinese culture, built on a foundation of Confucian ideals, is incompatible with true democracy.

Promoted by one of China’s party elders, the village democracy program began in 1987 as the party struggled to find a way to make local leaders more accountable. The elected local leaders replaced the appointed chiefs of the farm collectives, which were dismantled during economic reforms under senior leader Deng Xiaoping.

Although still labeled an experiment by Communist leaders, some of whom view it warily as a potential challenge to party control, the program has established a surprisingly strong foothold in many parts of the country.

Despite its limitations, the village election plan has permitted millions of Chinese at the grass-roots level to try the once-forbidden fruit of democracy. Not surprisingly, many have found they like it.

Important Step

And in a land bleak of good news on the civil rights front, the village democracy plan has become the darling of foreign governments and international aid programs. The Ford Foundation and the United Nations Development Program, both of which have committed grant money to the project, see it as an important step in China’s political evolution.

“My point is that you have to begin somewhere,” said Tony Saich, a China scholar who directs the Ford Foundation office in Beijing. “The village democracy program is working in an area where there is a need to be filled. It is self-government at the most basic level.”

The main difference between the China and Taiwan cases is one of scale. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island of 21 million people where the per capita income recently topped $12,000. China, home for one-fifth of humanity with a population of more than 1.2 billion, 80% of whom are peasants, is a developing country where the per capita income is $500.

Taiwan’s fledgling democracy touches the full spectrum of republican rule, from affairs of state to the nitty-gritty of local budgets. China’s democratic experiment is limited to the country’s smallest political unit. Village committees are charged with the most onerous and sensitive tasks in China’s society--management of the widely despised family planning program and collection of grain levies from farmers.

Beijing officials claim that the village democracy project has reached 90% of China’s countryside. But so far, the mainland experiment has varied greatly from province to province and even county to county.

An election held earlier this month in Luo Du, another village in Zhejiang province, showed the Communist Party firmly in control. By the standards of a Western representative democracy, it was not much of an election at all.

The candidates for chairman and vice chairman on the village committee ran unopposed. Voters--assembled in the Communist Party meeting hall under portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao--were asked to choose among four candidates for three remaining positions on the village committee. (Under the 1987 “Organic Law on the Village Committees,” villages are permitted to elect three to five local leaders.)

The Luo Du voters filled out their ballots in the crowded hall and deposited them in a cardboard box wrapped in red crepe paper as the local party secretary looked on. Handwritten wall posters exhorted the citizens: “Firmly Implement the Election Rules Handed Down by Our Leaders.”

The village democracy project has had far more success in other localities across China. In the northern provinces of Manchuria and in coastal Fujian province, only 100 miles across the strait from Taiwan, villagers have staged much livelier campaigns and, in many cases, even voted party members out of office.

Jilin province in the north--often held up by the Civil Affairs Ministry that administers the village democracy project as a model case--allows an unlimited number of candidates for all committee positions, including the key position of chairman. Jilin officials proudly call this a “sea vote” that gives the villagers a tidal wave of choices. Thirty candidates for one position is not uncommon. In some cases, the number of candidates has topped 100.

Issues of Corruption

Election issues include modest cases of corruption and abuse of power.

In one case, a village chairman lost his seat when local farmers protested that his son had improperly arranged for a wedding ceremony a few days before it was permitted by law. (Under Chinese family planning laws, rural males must be at least 20 years old before they are permitted to marry.)

In the Jilin province village of Dongdaba, two brothers competed for the position of committee chairman. The issue that decided the election was one brother’s claim that his rich sibling had bribed the voters with free pork.

Some villages have taken the democratization program a step further, establishing performance incentives for elected officials. If the leaders meet economic goals set for the village, they are paid cash bonuses at the end of the year.

It is unclear how far the central government will let this experiment go, once Beijing senses its ramifications. Once the system is established in the villages, for example, the next step could be to install something similar in the townships and counties.

Some scholars believe that Taiwan’s experience with local democracy under Japanese colonial rule and later under the Nationalists formed the basis for its transition to a fully democratic state. On the mainland, some senior party officials are already known to be suspicious of the democracy program and the Civil Affairs Ministry--haven for reformers from the pre-1989 Tiananmen Square epoch--that oversees it. Government funding has been poor.

“There is strong opposition to it both on the national and provincial level from traditional party leaders who see it as the thin edge of a wedge lifting society out of strict party control,” Ford Foundation Director Saich said.

Some provinces, notably prosperous Guangdong in the far south, have been slower than others to take to the village democracy program. Reporters who travel in the countryside often encounter villagers who have never heard of it and who say they have never voted in any form of local election.

Voting Veterans

On the other hand, some villages are veterans of three elections. Western diplomats in Beijing see signs that the system is becoming entrenched.

“I think in some places, in terms of procedures, they’ve really come pretty far,” said Jonathan Hecht, a research fellow with the Harvard University East Asian Legal Studies Program who worked for several years with the Ford Foundation in Beijing. “Some villages hold open and competitive elections with candidates actually putting forth positions.”

Representatives of the European Union, Canada, Norway and Sweden met last week in Beijing to consider aid programs to assist the village democracy system. And the U.N. Development Program is set to announce the creation of a China Rural Official Training Center in Beijing to teach elected officials about democratic institutions.

The village democracy program might never have been launched had it not enjoyed the enthusiastic support of a conservative party elder, Peng Zhen, now 93. A veteran of the famous Long March that brought the Communist Party to power in 1949, Peng instituted democracy in villages under his control during the civil war against the Nationalists.

At the time, the Communists were riding the crest of their wave of popularity. Peng viewed his own grass-roots democracy program as a way of identifying local leaders and potential recruits for the party.

After senior leader Deng disbanded the rural commune system in the early 1980s, a void was created in the administration of villages once ruled by party and commune committees. Deng’s economic reforms allowed peasants to farm their own land and develop side businesses.

In short, for the first time since the revolution, they were given a personal financial stake in village management.

“Having gained more economic autonomy,” Hecht said, “people in the countryside were not as amenable to traditional top-down forms of administration.”

The village election program has been particularly successful in areas that in the past have seen peasant revolts over grain levies and family planning practices.

‘Long-Term Struggle’

If democracy does spread from the villages to higher levels of Chinese administration, the process is likely to be a long one.

“I think it is going to be a long-term episodic struggle between two different views of how to administer the countryside,” Hecht said. “The peasants have said to the party . . . ‘We should do it this way because when we do it your way, officials’ houses get burned down.’ ”

Even in heavily restricted locales such as Luo Du, where the election took place earlier this month, there have been clear signs that the democratic spark has ignited something greater. For example, the villagers were presented only one candidate each for chairman and vice chairman. But they were permitted to write in candidates or vote against those on the ballot by marking an X above their names.

In other villages across China, the write-in option has produced surprising results, according to some government officials who monitor the votes.

In Shanxi province last year, a village chairwoman was elected even though she was not a formal candidate. Her predecessor had run off with the village’s money, about $4,000. The woman, not a party member, won the respect of fellow villagers by chasing the former leader down and recovering the money from him.

Chance to Criticize

Only a handful of voters in Luo Du, a village of 1,419 people where many people work in a ball-bearing factory, wrote in candidate names. But a few dozen voters took the opportunity to reject the listed candidates. And at least one rebellious voter rejected every candidate on the ballot.

The highest number of negative votes went to the candidate for vice chairman, Chen Yaoxin, 58. Opposition to him was strongest among residents who disliked the way he dispensed irrigation water for rice paddies.

Although she voted for him, local pig farmer Yang Guilian, 43, said some voters thought Chen was too old and had a volatile temper.

Despite the opposition, Chen was elected handily. But he took the negative votes as a reproach and vowed to do better in his next three-year term.

In a very small way, China’s incipient democratic movement had made him a little more accountable.

“Maybe I am too bad-tempered,” he said. “I need to get along better with some of the families.”