Long Time Coming

The Prospects for Democracy in China

John L. Thornton

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.

JOHN L. THORNTON is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution.

Given the gap between the democratic aspirations professed by leaders such as Hu and Wen and the skepticism that their words elicit in the West, a better understanding is needed of where exactly the process of democratization stands in China today. Chinese citizens do not have the right to choose their national leaders, but for more than a decade, peasants across the country have held ballots to elect village chiefs. What is happening in the vast space between the farm and Zhongnanhai, the CCP's leadership compound in Beijing? Some answers can be gleaned by examining the three pillars of Wen's definition: elections, judicial independence, and supervision.

The Chinese constitution calls for a combination of direct and indirect polls to choose government leaders. In practice, competitive popular elections occur widely only in the country's 700,000 villages. With over 700 million farmers living in these villages, this is not an insignificant phenomenon, but the details tell a complex and at times contradictory story.

The original impulse behind village elections, which began in the early 1980s, was to promote competent local leaders who would grow the rural economy and implement national priorities such as the one-child policy. With the abandonment of collectivization at the end of the Cultural Revolution, a power vacuum emerged in the countryside. By most accounts, at first elections enjoyed the central government's active support and were generally conducted fairly. But in the early 1990s, authorities were reportedly taken aback by figures showing that only 40 percent of elected village chiefs were CCP members. Beijing eventually instructed local officials to ensure that the "leading role" of the Communist Party was maintained. Today, the majority of village chiefs are again party members, although the size of that majority can vary widely by region. Over 90 percent of the village heads in the provinces of Guangdong, Hubei, and Shandong belong to the party, but the figure drops to 60-70 percent in Fujian and Zhejiang. And even these figures overstate the actual percentage of village chiefs who were elected as party members: when nonparty candidates are elected, the CCP nearly always recruits them so as to ensure that it remains in charge while giving farmers the leaders they want.

Village elections have serious problems, including nepotism, vote buying, and the selection of incompetent or corrupt leaders. Proponents nonetheless maintain that the polls serve as a grass-roots training ground for democratic habits. In fact, the most fervent opponents of village elections in China tend to be the township officials whose own jobs would be in danger if the central government decided to expand direct voting to the next level up.

Some of the more intriguing electoral experiments in China over the past decade have in fact taken place in townships. Burdened with administering the numerous social programs and benefits on which many citizens depend, township governments are often the focus of antigovernment sentiment and social unrest. Effective leadership there is thus critical to preserving social stability, a top priority for Chinese leaders. A few competitive township polls took place as early as 1995-96; the boldest experiment occurred in 1998 in Buyun, in a remote corner of Sichuan. The local Buyun government conducted a competitive, direct election in which some 6,000 eligible adults cast votes. The process received wide media coverage inside China and was criticized in the official press for violating the constitution, which grants the local People's Congress authority to choose the township leader. But to the surprise of many, the central government neither approved the Buyun results nor nullified them, and the elected mayor, Tan Xiaoqiu, remained in office. In 2001, the CCP Central Committee reaffirmed that directly electing a township head was unconstitutional. Buyun responded by tweaking its election process to bring it in line with the letter of the law but not its spirit: in the next election, citizens elected a candidate for township head, who was then recommended by the local party committee and elected unopposed by the People's Congress.

Perhaps in part due to Buyun's legal troubles, most townships that have experimented with elections have chosen the less radical model called the "open recommendation and selection" system, under which any adult resident can run for township head, a council of community leaders then narrows the candidate pool to two finalists, and the local People's Congress makes the final selection. This is not a direct ballot but a way of introducing a measure of competition and transparency in the selection of local leaders. By 2001-2, there was some form of competitive ballot in almost 2,000 township elections, five percent of the national total.

The significance of township elections should not be overstated. Townships are at the lowest administrative rung in the Chinese government structure, and even election supporters acknowledge that the process is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, when conducted successfully, such electoral experiments can give township leaders a degree of popular legitimacy. They introduce competition among cadres and, to a lesser extent, between party and nonparty members where absolutely none existed before. The expectation is that competition, even if controlled, will raise the quality of governance. Some Chinese scholars also find it notable that some township heads are conducting themselves with greater confidence because they know they enjoy a popular mandate and are therefore more willing to challenge the local party secretaries. This can create headaches for the CCP, one central government researcher noted, but it may also be the first seed of a culture of checks and balances.

Authorities in Beijing, for their part, are closely watching the experiments. In an echo of the dynamic that initiated market reforms in the 1980s, the center now encourages governance experimentation at the local level, albeit within boundaries. A senior official at the Central Party School told me, for instance, that in the prosperous province of Jiangsu, a pilot program would soon have all of the townships conducting competitive polls. As different localities try different things, he said, the Central Party School will study the results.

Electoral experiments at the county level -- one administrative rung up from a township -- have also attracted attention. Since 2000, 11 counties in Hubei and Jiangsu have conducted "open recommendation and selection" polls for the position of county deputy chief. This represents less than half a percent of the counties and county-level cities nationwide, but any reform of leadership selection in counties, which have an average population of about 450,000 each, would be significant news.

Limited experimentation has also occurred in urban areas. In 2003, 12 private citizens stood as independent candidates for district People's Congresses in the city of Shenzhen, with two of them winning seats. A handful of independent candidates have also run for the People's Congress of the Haidian district in Beijing, home to China's top universities. Almost all independent candidates for people's congresses fail in their bids, yet the number of such candidates is exploding: from fewer than 100 nationwide in 2003 to more than 40,000 in 2006-7, according to Li Fan, a former government official who is now a leading election-reform advocate. Li predicts that the number of independent candidates will reach the hundreds of thousands in 2011-12 and thinks popular demand for political participation will continue to grow as Chinese society diversifies and opens up.