Article
Assessing China’s Villager Self-government
by Yawei Liu
In 1988, China began allowing villagers to elect their leaders in an experiment that democracy advocates hoped would eventually lead to more pluralism throughout the political system. Today, the Communist Party still is in firm command of the high ground and villages are still holding elections. So, what has the experiment accomplished?
This paper will offer an assessment, first looking at the various discourses on villager self-government and trying to determine if there is a consensus on the significance of this undertaking. It will then examine how this political act is transforming the political language, culture and landscape in China and aim to decide if villager self-government indeed constitutes an opening crucial for China’s long overdue political reform. Thirdly, it will dwell on the questions of 1) what is democracy, 2) what is democracy of Chinese characteristics, and 3) will the current village democracy lead to a fundamental transformation from one of choice and little accountability at the lowest rung and to one of choice and accountability at each and every level secured by institutions, not by moral coercion and ideological purification. The paper will lastly take a brief look at what the grassroots Party officials are saying and what Chinese peasants are doing in the age of enjoying the endowed right to engage in self-service, self-education and self-management.
While it is hard to separate the past, present and future of a development that is so young, this paper will focus more on the years from November 1998 when the Organic Law was amended to September 2005 when Premier Wen Jiabao repeated Peng Zhen’s famous remarks to visiting foreign dignitaries: when villagers learned how to manage the village affairs they would then try to manage the township affairs.
Villager self-government: Empowerment or EmasculationWhen the NPC was debating the Organic Law, Peng Zhen, chairman of its Standing Committee, remarked that introducing villager self-government was in line with the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of making common people the masters of their own affairs. It was a very effective way to conduct a democracy seminar for the peasants. When they learned how to govern their own affairs, they would then try to learn how to manage the township and county affairs. In 1989, there was a coordinated effort to discredit the Organic Law and to label it as a sinister plot derived from the Western ideas of democratization. Peng Zhen and his supporters withstood the assault and stuck firm to the need of rule of law and said that a way must be found to allow peasants to hold local officials accountable. With almost a decade-long of persistent effort by the officials of the civil affairs apparatus, the Organic Law was finally amended significantly and adopted officially. Another eight years have passed and what is the current discourse on villager self-government?
There seems to be little change among the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their view of the nature of villager self-government although there is a detectable shift of emphasis and priority. Jiang Zeming called villager self-government one of the three crucial reforms in China’s countryside, as important as the beginning of the household responsibility system and the launch of village and town enterprises. In the political reports of both the 15th and 16th CCP National Congresses, Jiang identified villager self-government as the point of breakthrough for China’s political reform. Since the ushering of the Hu-Wen New Deal in late 2002, growing attention was given to the solution of economic woes of the peasants and social instability in the countryside. From the campaign to promote open administration of village affairs to the elimination of taxes and fees, from the emphasis on increasing the income of the peasants to the call to build a new socialist countryside, we see a pattern of devaluating rural democracy and accelerating pragmatic measures to create better conditions for peasants’ access to education, healthcare and wealth.
This shift of emphasis on the top is indicative of which arguments among the watchers of villager self-government have found more responsive ears among the national leaders. As the current divergent assessments of reform and opening up, the views of villager self-government are also sharply divisive. There are those who perceive villager self-government as a miracle prescription to the chronic diseases of the Chinese countryside and the stepping-stone to the eventual modernization and democratization of China. For those who are less friendly to villager self-government, they see the alarming reemergence of the clans, the susceptibility by the broad masses of peasants to small materialistic incentives and indirect anti-government appeals, and the interruption of the development of village enterprises.
Those who are opposed to the expansion of villager self-government has been aided by two factors: 1) the lack of linkage between the growth of village wealth and the institutionalization of village democracy, the increasing misery among tens of millions of Chinese peasants and the growing sense that they are actually victims of the economic reform that has made China such an integral part of the world economy, and 2) the CCP’s concern that popular choice and strict accountability could undermine the Party’s legitimacy and its insistence on being the paramount decision-maker on all aspects of rural life.
This dichotomy of different perceptions of villager self-government has been in existence when the debate on what to do with the peasants in the wake of the abolition of the communes in the early 1980s. The discussion on whether villager self-government is empowering the rural residents or emasculating the Party’s leadership and on whether it will make peasants feel happier or create obstacles for economic development, will continue in the foreseeable future and have a significant impact on the sustainability of villager self-government.
The renewal of the direct election of local people’s congress deputies in 1978 and particularly the introduction of the direct election of village committees in 1988 have introduced a new sense of political ownership and a new awareness of what constitutes political legitimacy. Real competition at the village level in places where local officials felt direct nomination of candidates and direct election of village committee members with multiple candidates were the most cost-efficient way of providing “guidance” have led the residents there to overcome the initial suspicion if their votes would make a difference and begin to play the political game more and more seriously.
The political scientists who study this new rural political development began to paint a very rosy picture of this undertaking and have even hatched a new field of study. They call villager self-government a “silent revolution” that will lead to the destruction of old feudalistic heritage and the birth of new civic virtues and political activism; they feel villager self-government is the beginning of a new wave of the encirclement of the urban centers by the vast countryside; and they wonder if the lest informed and educated group of the Chinese were given the right to directly elect those who make decisions for themselves, the better prepared residents in the cities should be offered more.
The echoes of the Chinese scholars have not only reverberated in the capitals and classrooms of European countries and the United States but also been heard by the top leaders inside the Forbidden City. This new language has not only crept into the speeches of the China watchers in the West but also been melded into the political jargon of the Chinese leaders. While the image-makers of China have achieved the goal of using villager self-government to prove the nascent rise of a political reform in China, the praise of it by the top Chinese leaders in 1998 at the 15th CCP National Congress led to the unprecedented experiment of a direct election of a township magistrate in Buyun, Sichuan.
If we use Robert Dahl’s two attributes of democracy, 1) contestation or compilation and 2) participation or inclusion, to measure up villager self-government, it seems we may call it a curtailed democracy in a restricted geographical area that is always subject to outside forces with no capacity to resist. Villager self-government also seems to possess the feature of both internal and external efficacy. But, if we use other criteria to determine if villager self-government is democracy with other universally recognized and accepted components, the answer becomes more uncertain and even doubtful.
But, in the context of Chinese political system, both ancient and present, villager self-government can be described as meaningful democracy with Chinese characteristics, or at least, it is an embryonic form of a unique democratic practice that is different from other forms of democracy. First, it calls citizens’ attention to the serious problem of the Chinese political system, i.e. the justice of the systemic design and the injustice of procedures. This injustice is caused by the woeful lack of executable procedures in choice and accountability matters and the gross manipulation of those procedures that are on the paper.
Second, villager self-government is operating in the context of a Chinese system whose center of gravity is located with the Party. The fact that a significant number of Party officials feel the cost of governance is so much lower when the right to choose their immediate leaders and make decisions on things of significant impact on their life is given to the peasants may lead to a reorientation of the belief that Party always knows better and makes wiser decisions. In fact, practice of villager self-government has already trickled upwards and led to many trials of choice and accountability at higher levels.
Thirdly, direct village elections, its competitiveness and its real impact on political legitimacy, governance and the initiatives of those who run and get elected by the ordinary voters is a reminder to those who are contemplating political reform in China that real reform does not have to be wholesale adoption of the Western system of multiple political parties and parliamentary supremacy. The Chinese system on the paper is sufficient if the Party superstructure does not interfere with direct elections of township and county people’s congress deputies and indirect elections of local officials such as township and county magistrates by the directly elected people’s deputies.
Lastly, it appears villager self-government is conducive to the firming of the Party’s legitimacy and likeability in the countryside. This may reduce the fear that is constantly on the lips of Chinese officials: allowing the lowly common Chinese people to engage in democratic elections and decision-making at higher levels will lead to chaos and eventually break the back of the Party.
Yawei Liu is Director of The Carter Center's China Program, Associate Director of the China Research Center and Associate Professor of American history at Georgia Perimeter College.
