Elections In China Research Articles

The Post-Election Administration of Chinese Villages

The spread of village elections in China since the implementation of the Organic Law on Villagers' Committees in 1987 suggests to many observers that democracy has taken hold at the grassroots. In examining these elections, foreign researchers have largely focused on voting procedures or on questions such as whether the level of economic development affects the likelihood that a village will hold genuine elections.1

Accommodating “Democracy” in a One-Party State: Introducing Village Elections in China

When residents of a few Guangxi villages decided to elect their own leaders in late 1980 and early 1981, none of them could have known they were starting a historic reform. What began as a stopgap effort to fill a political vacuum, after much debate and two decades of uneven implementation, is now enshrined in a national law. Procedures for holding elections have been spelled out and implementing regulations are being formulated at all levels. Voting is now mandatory every three years in every village, bar none.

Village Committee Elections in China: Institutionalist Tactics for Democracy

Earlier institutionalist studies in Chinese politics have shown how conservatives and local bureaucrats took advantage of institutional designs in the Leninist system of the People's Republic of China to delay and undermine the implementation of reforms. There has been less discussion of how reformers adapted their strategies to existing institutional constraints to overcome the opposition of conservatives. Using the implementation process of the Organic Law of the Village Committees, this article describes how the reformers adapted to the Chinese institutional setting to promote political reform over opposition at the elite and local levels.As the case of the village elections shows, the reformers in China designed a strategy to promote reform incrementally. Each step along the way was arranged to appear to be a natural response to the interaction between the initial reform policy and unforeseen consequences brought about by the previous policy. In this process, reformers deliberately manipulated a crucial variable—time—to bring about gradual change in the important actor, that is, the peasants, from spectators into participants, and thereby to change the balance of power between proponents and opponents of the reform. Other political players were also carefully enfranchised at different stages of the implementation process to help reformers in their struggle against conservatives.

Implementing Political Reform in China's Villages

Why has it been exceedingly difficult to restructure China's village-level, political institutions? Over and above hurdles arising from belated leadership support and bureaucratic squabbling, implementation of The Organic Law of Villagers' Committees has depended on how villagers and local cadres perceive their interests and understand their resources. Although the Law does not generate a single pattern of concerted, localist opposition, aspects of it alienate one or another affected party almost everywhere. Outside the singularly favorable conditions found in not poor, "up-to-standard" villages with a strong collective sector, cadre resistance and villager skepticism have been considerable. In many paralyzed, authoritarian, and "run-away" localities, balancing demands to increase state penetration and popular participation have impinged on the interests of both cadres and villagers and simultaneous acceptance of both key aims of the Law has proven to be difficult to secure.

Elections in China

Until recently, Western observers have dismissed elections in Communist countries as little more than opportunities for the Communist leadership to conduct propaganda among the citizenry. The recent substantial electoral reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have forced us to reconsider the importance of elections in modern Communist political systems. In China, elections have formed an important component of the post-Mao political reforms initiated in December 1978. Closely linked to such areas of political reform as 'democratization', the 'rule of law', and 'political institutional reform', China's electoral reform proceeded more quickly than Soviet electoral reforn. They provided voters, for example, with some choice of candidates as early as 1980, though now Chinese electoral reforms lag far behind those of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Based on field research, including direct observation of the 1987 elections, interviews with participants, and discussions with Chinese social scientists who have studied Chinese elections, this article examines the post-Mao electoral process in China. After placing Chinese elections in their institutional context, we begin with the legal basis of Chinese elections and then consider such topics as China's

Elections in China: A Comparative Overview

Elections in China: A Comparative Overview

The Ideological Context of Chinese Elections

The significance of electoral reform depends on the role of elections in China's governmental system. The role of elections is in part a question of structures: what offices are elective, what is their competence, how do they relate to the rest of the political system. It is also a question of political culture, because the political content of a electoral system depends on what it is expected to be and on what it has done in the past. Two fairly clear components of the Chinese notion of elections are Marxism-Leninism and the party's experience with mass mobilization. Marxism-Leninism makes a more explicitly ideological contribution, while Chinese communist history provides more concrete lessons of success and failure.

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

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-

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

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