When looking at the PRC, the concept of political reform seems to be non-existent. But when Deng Xiaoping
had the Four Modernizations adopted in December 1978, a measure of
political reform that would flank the developments in the economy was
quite high on the agenda. Aside from attempts to delink Party and
government, which were closely associated with Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang,
most reform initiatives in the political sphere stranded in the face of
resistance from Party conservatives. Once Hu and Zhao had been removed
from the scene, and in particular after the Tian'anmen Incident of June
1989, political reform became a taboo. The poster reproduced below,
entitled "Only socialism can help China, only socialism can develop
China" and showing the official answer to the 1989 demonstrators' Goddess of
Democracy, nicely encapsulates the political atmosphere that existed in
China in the early 1990s.
Despite the prevailing sentiment, some measure of
political reform has been slowly taking shape. In 1982, the
Constitution for the first time legitimized villagers' self-government.
By 1987, the provisional Organic Law on Villagers' Committees was
enacted by the National People's Congress. On the basis of this
legislation, the Ministry of Civil Affairs started experimenting with
direct, competitive village elections in that same year. The initiative
did not derive from a sudden love for democratic procedure, but rather
from the necessity to reestablish Party control in the countryside in
the aftermath of the destructive policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (1957-1976). The idea was that unpopular policies (birth control, taxes) would be easier to accept when they were carried out by locally elected rather than appointed officials.
Officially, the Party can veto nominees, thus
ensuring that politically reliable cadres are elected. At the same
time, the fact that villagers now have the opportunity to choose their
own leaders seems to have given them a sense of accountability and
greater control over their own lives. Representatives are no longer
elected on the basis of their political purity, but whether they can
improve the economic conditions in the village. Until early 1999, such
elections were strictly limited to the villages, although elections on
higher administrative levels have been promised for a number of years
already. Such an election did take place once, on the next higher level
of the township, and was immediately declared illegal by the Party
while it lauded the use of democratic procedures. After the initial
official criticism, however, movements are underfoot to indeed expand
the principle of democratic elections at the township level. It may be
a slow process, but things are definitely changing: in Spring 2000, it
was announced that the process of direct elections would be expanded to
the neighborhood residents' committees in the urban areas. In 2005,
Premier Wen Jiabao reaffirmed his and the Party's commitment to the
election process.
External Link:
Building of Political Democracy in China,
Government White Paper, October 2005
Sources:
Merle Goldman, "In Rural China, a Brief Swell of Electoral Waters", The Washington Post, 21 February 1999, p. B02
Thomas Heberer, "Urban Elections in the People's Republic", IIAS Newsletter No. 39 (December 2005), p. 15
Jiang Wandi, "Fostering Political Democracy from the Bottom Up", Beijing Review, March 16-22, pp. 11-14
Daniel Kelliher, "The Chinese Debate over Village Self-Government", The China Journal, No. 37 (January 1997)
Lianjiang Li, "The Two-Ballot System in Shanxi Province: Subjecting Village Party Secretaries to a Popular Vote", The China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999)
s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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