Political Culture and Participation in the Chinese Countryside: Some Empirical Evidence

Abstract

Democracy in rural China has attracted much attention in recent years. During President Bill Clinton's visit to China in 1998, he made a public stop at a village outside Xian to chat with a few Chinese villagers about village elections in China. In fact, village democracy has become one of the rare subject matters that the Chinese government is eager to publicize and the Western academia and media are interested to investigate. The Chinese government, often through the Ministry of Civil Affairs, has organized and allowed foreign journalists, social scientists, dignitaries, diplomats, and political, academic, and social organizations (such as the U.S. International Republican Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Carter Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations) to go to Chinese rural areas to observe village selfgovernment and elections. There is no doubt that the Chinese government intends to showcase its village selfgovernment to the outside world, hoping to improve its tarnished image from the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Western media and governments are interested in this new development in China in the hope that this will be the beginning of the long-delayed democratic transition in the most populous country in the world.