Was Democracy in China begun by farmers (and where is it now)?

The rural protests mentioned in my last post (with aims I also mentioned in the last post) had been directed mostly at corrupt town governments but the village committee system tended to be trusted (and on the side of the people in the land compensation disputes) so this was what motivated the CCP to focus on the propaganda value of its further extension of democratic rights to people at least at that lowest, most trusted (village) level of government.

This process had begun with the 1987 Village Election ‘experimental’ Law. That law had provided for the election of 652,718 rural village heads, 652,718 Village Committees/Councils (VCs) and a smaller number of village parliaments/representative assemblies under 36,952 town/township governments, 1,464 county governments, 30 provincial governments and the central government every three years. The CCP hoped the elected villagers would provide a check upon corrupt town governments and as I mentioned above they did clash with some of those governments. On average around 2,000 people were represented by each VC. The CCP (in typical pseudo Maoist style) called the councils ‘mass organisations’. The VCs had the power to appoint local government cadres such as school heads and village council staff and oversaw the village's administrative budget and the budgets of schools, clinics, and village enterprises under the village’s control.

The electoral law and other laws concerning village government were amended in 1998 controversially in a number of ways to improve the powers available to village people. Ballots were made secret, villagers could nominate candidates (who were no longer required to be party members), there were required to be more candidates than positions to fill at elections and it became open for the first time to a VC once elected to appoint non-party members as cadres. There was also a new rule that villagers could formally petition for the removal of a village head under this electoral law.

The idea that even an elected village head might not be a party member was the main controversy within the party because it seemed to contravene at least one of Deng’s sacrosanct Four Cardinal Principles (especially the one about the party leading the government). The reformers in the Central government nevertheless prevailed in the argument within the party. They argued this liberalisation would help address breakdowns in law and order that had recently been occurring at the village level by providing ownership of government, enable incompetents to be replaced by younger, more able and better-educated leaders and would lead to improved compliance with state taxes, grain quotas and family planning regulations. The opponents (mostly in local government) argued that the wrong sort of people (gang or lineage leaders) might more easily get simple peasants to elect them by various manipulative means, village leaders being beholden to town governments for their appointments/elections was a more stable system, state quotas might suffer if villagers chose governments that weren’t as interested in enforcing them and finally, of course, the primacy of the CCP’s leadership status was threatened.

This controversy and the liberalisation/democratisation that came out of it attracted global interest as well as interest throughout China. Several foreign governments and NGOs as well as both foreign and local media organisations have noted it and reported on it with interest and encouragement (the EU, the Ford Foundation and the Carter Center are a few notable boosters for the changes).

One recent example of the media interest involved the Guardian. The paper picked up on a petition for the removal of the village head of “XXX Village”. Apparently the head had been found to be corrupt in a land deal and in this had apparently been in cahoots with a town government. The town government concerned simply chose not to accept this petition which had been correctly made according to the requirements of the new electoral law and the Guardian was there to cover that story (if not altogether accurately – the refusal had led to a series of events that had finally ended in the beating of a local democracy activist (witnessed by a Guardian reporter) which the paper in turn ‘beat up’ into a murder).

Now this tendency to democracy was also occurring in a post-danwei city environment. Under the Central and Provincial governments in this case were now City governments, district governments within the cities, Street Offices (governing sub-district populations of 25 to 50 thousand) and Community Residents’ Committees under them (now ‘self-governing’ ‘mass organisations’ with from 1,500 to 4,000 constituent households). The lowest two levels had been workplace based but were now residence based.

The lowest level received a democratic makeover in the mid 1990s after the lowest level in the countryside had (partly in response to the need to replace the danwei system that could no longer operate in the new world of private enterprise). The central government now sought to bring about “community building” to replace the danwei ethos and welfare system, create a sense of unity in newly diversified city lives and restructure the city spaces that had been planned with different ways of living in mind. The countryside had provided the model for this in several respects. All of this was about legitimacy but in the cities the lowest level remained largely an administrative level carrying out policies set out by higher levels.

Typically the newly settled populations covered by this lowest level are separately walled-in and gated so they are a bit like gated communities in the US with guards at the few entrance gates. They are called xiaoqu (small districts) and much of their building and running has been done by private enterprise in newly subdivided areas. The centre of the area usually contains the council offices, swimming pools, tennis courts, family planning centres, etc. In well-to-do areas, especially, the committees actually employ management companies to manage their areas.

Maoist style mobilisations and dissemination of health messages also began again at this level, guided from above. Staff members at this level were now paid for the first time, however, and this promised an improvement in professionalism, at least, at this level – the focus also began to be on local residence-based grassroots governance but both better and more complex versions than had ever occurred at the residence level. The plan was for “self-governance” or “autonomy (zizhi -自治)” China-style. It doesn’t really mean autonomy. It means governing oneself as individuals and as communities but within an established framework. Monitoring of the people in their homes also remained a feature of this level of government, especially, as they were often so far away from their newly private workplaces now. The welfare needs of the elderly, especially, also continued to be the responsibility of this level of government.

Volunteering in the community was encouraged (perhaps even occasionally coercively) without truly giving the residents a real say, so this was less of a democratic reality than rural residents now had. Files were kept on all the “good deeds” that occurred in the community. The hope of the CCP appears to be (if I view it charitably) that this is training people for self-government at a later time and improving their suzhi (quality). So they are getting an education in morality, manners, being democrats and living in the community cooperatively and successfully. In the meantime the government is hoping that a sense of self-government will help to maintain the public order it perhaps desires more and prevent unruly demonstrations and petitions to higher levels. It’s to be the friendly and helpful face of government for the people at the coal face.

Structurally, the committees follow the so-called “Shenyang Model” with input from both the local party and the elected local congress (in some cases the congress might simply be the whole community) and work of various kinds being done by staff, groups and volunteers at various geographical levels (xiaoqu, yard, building and section). The congress would typically meet annually and the party leader would typically also be the committee leader as it made sense to many communities to elect the powerful party heads to head the government too. Volunteers at the lowest levels actually did most of the real work of the committees apart from policing and there were specialist associations for the aged, youth, business people, etc. The committee members themselves were all paid.

It’s really about cost effectiveness and efficiency, law and order, productivity and stability rather than democracy and it’s also ongoing.