The 1980 County-Level Elections in China: Experiment in Democratic Modernization

Abstract

DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL REFORMS have an important but ambiguous status in China's post-Mao modernization drive. On the one hand, the regime is confident of overwhelming popular support for its removal of ultraleft dogmatism and promotion of material welfare. On the other hand, instruments of popular political expression and control confront any established regime with specific challenges to its authority. The post-Mao regime has already shown its impatience with the antiestablishment tendencies expressed on Xidan Wall (Democracy Wall) and with wall posters in general. Democratic institutions are supposed to guarantee the influence of mass opinion; they are not supposed to provide an enclave for anarchism. But as democracy becomes institutionalized, tensions necessarily increase between democracy and centralism. Among the many aspects of political reform in China, electoral reform is particularly deserving of attention. The election law adopted by the Second Session of the Fifth National People's Congress (NPC) in July 1979 contained a number of radical departures from the 1953 law, including a system of more candidates than positions, direct election of delegates to the county people's congresses, and a more open nominating process. If such reforms should be put into practice in China, it might be expected that in the long run public opinion would become a more formal part of the political process through the formation of electoral constituen-