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Guo, Gang
Department of Political Science
University of Rochester
November 1998
One of the most distinctive feature of the "Third Wave of Democratization" is that every state is to some extent in support of democracy, at least rhetorically. In China, the major remaining authoritarian state in the world, a political reform toward "socialist democracy" was first quietly but profoundly launched in the vast rural areas. This putative democratization affects nearly one fifth of the people in the world, and has since attracted great attention from international organizations, foreign governments as well as political scientists who apply scientific theories to explain it. Also, Chinese village elections have been carried out for three to five rounds in nearly 1 million villages with enormous diversity, and so provides us with a good opportunity to test, or at least to illuminate, theories of democratization developed in other settings of democratic transitions.
In China, successful revolutions and reforms all start in the countryside. From 1978 through 1983, most of the Chinese villagers were emancipated from the socialist commune system and obtained autonomous management of the land allocated on the basis of individual families. This de-collectivization set off the economic reform in China for two decades. One of the effects of this rural reform is the autonomy of the villagers. Moore argues that the Chinese communist regime managed to establish a link between the political power of the state and the peasant through the destruction of the landlords and with it, of the old order. But now, with the destruction of the commune system, the role of the state has been transformed from a distributor to an exactor, and the villagers have gained partial economic autonomy from the state. This autonomy is essential to the meaningful village elections, as it is simply unimaginable that the villagers would be able to express their individual preferences if their income had to be distributed by the communes, the link between the state and the villagers.
Two other effects, probably unexpected by the central Party leaders, is the dysfunction and disintegration of the basic level Party organizations in the rural areas, and the incompetence and corruption of the village cadres. As the basic level Party organs lost the almost absolute power of distribution, these are only natural consequences as nobody has incentive or interest to revitalize them. These, in turn, have caused widespread expressions of grievance by the villagers that more often than not lead to violence that alerts the central leaders.
In 1982, a new Constitution was passed by the National People's Congress that, in the quite inconspicuous Article 111, stipulated the direct election of village committees. This is undoubtedly the result of much argument inside the party center, and presumably the Party center's alarm at the above-mentioned two other effects of de-collectivization worked. After another five years of debates inside the Party selectorate, a draft of the Organizational Law of Village Committees was finally passed by the National People's Congress in 1987. This law defined village committees as mass organizations of self-government at the grassroots, popularly elected and accountable to a village council comprised of all adult villagers. These committees of three to seven members, elected to three-year terms, were to help, but not be led by, township governments carry out their work. This law took effect in June 1988, so most villages in China have conducted three to four rounds of elections by now.
The village elections in China are generally, or at least academically, regarded as a sign of liberalization in an authoritarian communist country. Despite all those mass media propaganda at home and abroad, these elections do not constitute democracy in China, and whether they represent part of the first step of a long-term democratization process in China still depends, to some degree, on the Chinese Communist Party center. As long as the communist party still holds monopoly of power in political and economic spheres and prohibits any opposition, it is very unlikely that this strictly controlled and instrumental process of liberalization would be, or lead to, democracy in China. Huntington made clear distinctions between liberalization, democratization, and democracy, and these distinctions are certainly significant in this case.
The liberalization process of village elections shows great variation over time and across localities. Although virtually every village holds elections, their quality, in terms of freeness, fairness, and competitiveness, varies a lot. There are also significant variation in the progress the villages have made in improving their elections over time. The quality and progress of the Chinese village elections have been the focus of the international observers interested in the process. While we still need more rigid specification and measurement of the procedural variable in scientific terms, it nonetheless constitutes quite naturally a dependent variable in political science research. As to the more fundamental problem of representation of preferences, Manion's 1996 article exemplifies explorations along the approach.
The most significant and direct factor influencing the quality and progress of village elections is, as also widely perceived by international observers, bureaucratic attention paid to them by government and Party organs at different levels, or more specifically, from the township (the level just above village level), the county, up to the provincial/ministerial level. From the different accounts of village elections by government officials and non-governmental organizations, it is probably not an exaggeration if we claim that most of the variations in the quality and progress in Chinese village elections can be explained by the bureaucratic attentions at these three levels, especially at the township level. Although previous political science literature has shown that bureaucracies can be regarded as more or less autonomous institutions that have their own preferences, we can still discern, in this specific setting, pressures from three different directions that have considerable sway on the bureaucratic attention to village elections. They are from above, from below, and from beside.
From above, the Chinese Communist Party center comprises the initial momentum that pushes the village elections through. As I mentioned earlier, the severance of the link between the political power of the Party state and the villages, and in consequence, the threat to the performance legitimacy of the communist regime alarmed the Party center, and prompted both the insertion of a stipulation of village elections in the Constitution and the promulgation of the organizational law of village committees.
From below, the peaceful or not-so-peaceful expressions of the villagers?grievances, ranging from complaints to organized riots, against incompetent or corrupt cadres, against unfair distribution of state policy burdens, or against dishonest elections are often the direct pressure on the intermediate bureaucracies to introduce and to improve the free, fair, and competitive village elections. At the national level, widespread violence of this kind in the villages is a constant reminder on the Party center of the deepening problem of the undermining of the Party's performance legitimacy. In this respect, pressures from below also contribute to the pressures from above on the bureaucracies.
From beside, the successful (or sometimes even not so successful) elections in one locality have an, in Huntington's term, "snowball" effect on nearby villages, townships, counties or even prefectures. The villagers and the bureaucracies learn from the examples or lessons from nearby areas and the villagers press for more meaningful elections or the bureaucracies carry out measures to improve the elections.
Considering the highly bureaucratic and instrumental character of the Chinese village elections, it is relatively difficult to discern other factors that might play a role here. One of the outstanding variables is economic development. As Lipset points out, "[p]erhaps the most widespread generalization linking political system to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development"(1959:75). But in this specific case, does economic development make a difference in the actual outcomes of liberalization? Some people explicitly claim that "[t]here are no obvious correlation between the level of economic development and the level of rural democratization"(Thurston 1998:iii). So do general theories of democratization fail just in rural China? Probably not. Despite the highly bureaucratic and instrumental "noise" in the analysis into the village elections, we can still discern a certain pattern of the association between economic development level and the quality and progress of village elections. It is generally accepted that the relatively well-off villages are more likely to succeed in introducing and improving free, fair and competitive elections, however, the major puzzle is the relatively poor performance of the richest villages in conducting elections. In this respect, the observations by the Carter Center of village elections in a district of Dalian city, one of the booming and prosperous coastal cities in China, offer clue to a possible explanation. Compared with the other poorer villages where they had observed elections, the "Party branch was more prominent in guiding the elections" in this district. In China, the Communist Party normally has a stronger and easier control over the cities and the rural areas nearby. On the other hand, the villages near cities are normally the most prosperous ones. Some of the other most affluent villages usually attribute their wealth to entrepreneurs in the village who are well connected in the Party. No doubt there are also some other factors that cause the observed association between stronger Party dominance and wealth in those richest villages. As a result, we fail to observe changes in the quality and progress in village elections in the expected direction, when we move from moderately rich villages to the richest villages. This hypothesis still needs rigid empirical test, but even the test itself will sure offer us more insights to look into the relationship between economic development and the quality and progress in village elections in China.
According to the accounts of international observers, freer, fairer, and more competitive elections are more likely to be held in villages where the political, economic, or lineage powers are more diffused. This is more or less consistent with other account of democratization in settings that lack a dominant power center. This hypothesis can also be readily testable in Chinese villages.
In conclusion, the Chinese village elections represent a process of liberalization in an authoritarian communist state. Although the quality and progress of the village elections to a large extent depend on the bureaucratic attentions, we can still discern patterns of the association between this liberalization/democratization and other factors proposed in theories of democratization developed in other settings, especially economic development.