The village self-government movement: Elections, Democracy, the Party, and Anticorruption—Developments in Guangdong

China Information

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 28-65

  Levy, Richard ^a  

^a SALEM STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

anticorruption; Guangdong; village elections; village self government

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992828859     PISSN: 0920203X     EISSN: 1741590X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0920203X0301700102     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. The “common ownership system” (gongyouzhi), i.e., stock-holding companies for economic development, was pioneered by Wanfeng Village under the leadership of its long-term Party secretary and head of the Wanfeng Stock Corporation (Ltd.), Pan Qiang'en who has authored or edited more than thirty books on the “common ownership system” and related issues.
2. Two issues which have not appeared in Guangdong relate to (I) proposals for “cabinet-style” village committees, with village leader candidates presenting slates for the village committee and (2) questions concerning whether the team (which has no formal legal basis) or the village is the owner of the land and how and by whom the land can be alienated.
3. Because of its economic success linked to its “common ownership system,” Wanfeng is nationally known. The village's history and development are well documented in numerous works, including Pan Qiang'en, Wang Jinhong, and Guo Zhenglin, Gongyouzhi yu gongtong fuyu: wanfengcun shehui jingji fazhan yanjiu (The common ownership system and common prosperity- research in socio-economic development) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1998); and Zhu Laichang, ed., Wanfengcun shi (The history of Wanfeng Village) (Beijing: Dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 2001).
4. These costs may be quite significant, i.e., the first round of Guangzhou's elections cost some RMB 53 million, of which RMB 31 million came from village budgets, with one village spending some RMB 400,000. At the March 2000 Guangzhou Research Conference on Village Committee Electoral Work in Guangzhou (Collection of materials, forthcoming, 2002), Guo Zhenglin cited one village's costs amounting to RMB 90,000, more than the village's annual collective income. In the absence of adequate funding, or, in some cases, clans which undertake various forms of voter mobilization at no cost to the village government, elections may never be run according to law.
5. For their own purposes, clans frequently disseminate such information (at no cost to the Party or state).
6. See David Zweig and Chung Siu Fung, “Strengthening Democracy: Direct Nominations and Electoral Legitimacy in Rural China” (paper presented at Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 3--4June 2002).
7. When women were elected, they were almost always placed in charge of family planning and “women's work.” In some cases where no woman was elected, the village leadership replaced the male victor with the least votes with the female candidate, although this has been held to be improper.
8. Village-level Party leadership is also effectuated by overlapping membership in and joint meetings of the two committees, with the Party secretary, not the village leader, calling the meetings and setting the agenda or, where joint meeting are not held, the Party branch approves village committees’ drafts of major policies prior to their transmittal to the village assembly/village representative assembly for approval and by Party approval of the division of labor within the village committee. In addition, the township Party committee has the ability to influence, if not control, the election schedule, putting potential problem villages at the end so that they will be more pressured to follow “successful” ones.
9. Initially, Guangdong tended to have the Party branch election first (sometimes utilizing the liangtui yixuan system) and then encourage the newly elected village Party secretary to run for village leader.
10. According to the 2002 Election Work Schedule for one prefecture, the village election committee should, “in line with the legal processes, guide villagers to nominate candidates (for the village committee) in line with those suggested by the township Party committee and village Party branch.” Similar language, e.g., “cause Party thought to become the thought of the villagers” appears in other documents.
11. Article 32 has also been justified as a means of reducing election costs.
12. By early 2002, anecdotal evidence suggests that Party leadership in Guangdong has also been strengthened organizationally at various levels. In line with the suggested list of nominees being developed by the Party alone, rather than in coordination with the township government, in at least one township in Guangdong, the Party Organization Department (which is frequently critical of elections), rather than the Civil Affairs Department (a government organ which is frequently more supportive of elections), maintains the files for village elections. At the provincial level, one leading official in the Guangdong Civil Affairs Department was told he could no longer officially observe elections despite the fact that responsibility for supervising the elections is with the government, not the Party. In addition, in 2001 the Guangdong School of Public Administration was switched from South China Normal University to the provincial Party School.
13. For example, Articles 20 and 21 of the “Detailed Regulations” (in line with many other regulations) set out five qualifications for nominees, including carrying out the Party line, self-discipline and honesty, as well as leadership and organizational skills to be able to lead the masses to prosperity. They also set age and educational qualifications, including a five-year lower maximum age for women than men. The utilization of such terms as “generally” (yiban) and “a certain level of’ (yiding de) creates the potential for manipulation by election authorities. Cunmin zizhi guicheng (Rules and regulations for villager self-government), which is part of a nine-volume set of training materials for cadres entitled Xiangcun ganbu cunmin zizhi zhishi peixin jiaocai (Training materials on village self-government for township and village cadres) by the Civil Affairs Ministry (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 2001), 29-30, also suggests establishing similar and even additional specific candidate qualifications at local levels.
14. Dongguan's leadership stated that some one hundred individuals had their candidacies cancelled because they did not meet the requirements for candidates and some twenty unqualified candidates who were elected by the “two majorities” subsequently had their elections voided, see Tu Du, Director, Dongguan City Civil Affairs Bureau, “Guanyu Dongguanshi dierci cun (ju) weihui xuanju gongzuo de qingkuang huibao” (Report on the situation of villager (resident) committee election work in Dongguan), 14 March 2002, (hereafter “Dongguan report”).
15. In the former, though less frequent, case, this would mean a direct nomination, since the village assembly is composed of all voters in the village.
16. Li Jiangtao, Wu Chongqing, Zhang Jiang, and Zhang Xiaojie, “Guanyu ‘wosheng cunweihui zhixuan yu cunmin zizhi gongzuo de wenti yu jianyi’ shoudao shengwei, shiwei lingdao kending” (Questions and suggestions on ‘Our province's village committee elections and villager self-government work’ affirmed by provincial and city Party leaders), Guangzhou Academy of Social Science Research Newsletter, 2001.
17. Although there is no definitive evidence of such a practice in Guangdong, a township Party secretary in Hubei argued that asking incumbents about corruption during their term of office is disruptive and should be discouraged, “Cunweihui huanjie xuanjuzhong de wenti ji duice” (Problems in village committee elections and policies for dealing with them), 2000 Niandu nongcun jiceng minzhu zhengzhi jianshe ziliao huipian (Collected materials on democratic construction of basic-level rural democracy in 2000) (Beijing: Xiangzhen luntan zazhishe, 2001), (hereafter Collected Materials 2000),397.
18. Data drawn from Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 postings on village committee elections around the country on .This data is no longer posted. See also Li Jiangtao et aI., “Questions and Suggestions” and Collected Materials 2000.
19. “Dongguan Report.”
20. This is significantly lower than the female representation on Dongguan's urban residents committees.
21. In addition to four female village leaders, twelve female deputy village leaders were also elected.
22. Down slightly from 17.3% in the first round elections.
23. Down from the first round figure of 69% and significantly lower than the provincial first round figure of some 80%.
24. In other villages, such as Longyan in Humen Township, Dongguan, many workers live in more sanitary and newly constructed, but still crowded, dorms. Various villages have made considerable efforts to provide recreational areas and activities for migrant workers, but many still regard them as potential security problems necessitating various forms of security management.
25. Exceptions are allowed in advanced villages in Guangdong, see “Explanation.”
26. Wang Jinhong, “Nongmin zizhi yu Guangdong nongcun cunji zhili de fazhan” (Village self-government and the development of village-level governance in rural Guangdong) (unpublished paper, 2002). Wang is part of the team undertaking the investigation of the 2002 village elections in Guangdong for the Guangzhou Academy of Social Science (GASS).
27. Jean C. Oi and Scott Rozelle, “Elections and Power: The Locus of Decision-Making in Chinese Villages,” China Quarterly, no. 162 (2002): 51339.
28. For more on the definition of corruption, see Richard Levy, “Corruption, Economic Crime and Social Transformation since the Reforms: The Debate in China,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 33 (1995): 1-25; Richard Levy, “Fubai: Differing Chinese View of Corruption since Tiananmen: Does a Road Paved with Corruption Lead to Socialism,” International Journal of Public Administration 23, no. II (2000): 1863-98; Richard Levy, “Corruption in Popular Culture,” in Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, ed. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 39-56; and Kin-man Chan, “Corruption in China: A Principal-Agent Perspective,” in Handbook of Comparative Public Administration in the Asia-Pacific Basin, ed. Hoi-kwok Wong and Hon S. Chan (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1999), 300. Although bribery, which includes giving bribes, is also a crime, these economic crimes are not generally targeted in anticorruption campaigns.
29. See Feng Chen, “Subsistence Crisis, Managerial Corruption and Labor Protests in China,” China Journal, no. 44 (2000): 41-63.
30. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, 8 January 2002, reported peasants in Guangdong blocking roads and refusing to vote when local officials refused to make documents related to past land deals public and Xu Yong also cited a mid-1990s villagers’ sitdown over the lack of transparency and cadre corruption (although not in Guangdong), in Xu Yong, Zhongguo nongcun cunmin zizhi (Village self-government in China's countryside) (Wuhan: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997).
31. See “Guangdongsheng cunwu gongkai tiaoli” (Guangdong Province rules on making village affairs open to the public), 31 May 2000, “Methods for Implementing,” Article 14; and a 1999 provincial notice on transparency in 1999 Niandu nongcun jiceng minzhu zhengzhi jianshe ziliao huipian (Collected materials on democratic construction of basic-level rural democracy in 1999) (Beijing: Xiangzhen luntan zazhishe, 2000), (hereafter Collected Materials 1999),3-6.
32. Although numerous other reports suggest problems in this area in the first round elections, particularly in poor villages, i.e., speeches at the March 2002 Guangzhou Conference, Wang Jinhong, “Village Self-Government” reports that in 2002 all the villages he observed (in Guangzhou) had completed their audits of the prior village committee in a timely way.
33. A significant amount of team-level fiscal information was missing when the system was reviewed in October 2001 and JanuarylFebruary 2002. One cadre did mention that, for proprietary reasons, certain village fiscal data is not posted although private records are kept.
34. The 94 recalls represent 8/100 of I% of the 109,338 village committee members elected. Although likely to be higher than the U.S. rate (eleven state-level recalls in the past twenty-five years with no reliable statistics at the local level), this rate is still negligible.
35. These difficulties are compounded in villages whose village committee is dominated by a single clan and further compounded by a (realistic) fear of retribution against the initiator(s) of a recall.
36. The identity of the investigatory body varies locally. Wuchuan prefecture required the township government and village committee to establish an investigatory committee, Collected Materials 2000, 409-10, while Article 35 of the “Detailed Regulations” requires the village Party branch to undertake the investigation and report to the village assembly or village representative assembly, despite the fact that the village leader may well be a member of the Party branch and village representative assembly.
37. Although Article 16 of the Organic Law says the “village committee should call the meeting in a timely way” (yingdang jishi), Guangdong's July 2001 “Methods” says the meeting should be called within thirty days. These “should's” are controversial, particularly since the village committee is unlikely to call a meeting to recall one of its own members. Addressing this, the October 200 I PRC Rules states that if the village committee does not call the meeting within thirty days, the township government may do so. 52 According to a “Public Letter to the Village Committee,” in one Guangdong village the township removed several village committee members because they did not support what they saw as corrupt actions by township officials. Although they tried to get their appeal published, they were unsuccessful. In a famous case in Hunan, a village cadre successfully sued the township government for unilaterally removing him from office, see Hong Kefei and Zhang Fei, “Minxuan Cunguan Gouyang Zhenzhengfu” (Popularly elected village official successfully sues zhen government), Nanfang zhoumo, 10 January 2002.
38. Although one high-level Guangzhou Civil Affairs cadre, based on interviews in forty villages in Guangzhou following first round elections, did see noticeable improvement in the behavior of elected officials and Wang Jinhong, “Village Self-Government,” argued that the second round of elections produced a significant change in village cadre behavior, most data suggests otherwise.
39. Hao Yufan and Michael Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, Third edition, ed. Michael Johnston and Arnold Heidenheimer (Princeton: Transaction Books, 2002), 598. See also other writings by Johnston and Hao and Richard Levy.
40. See, for example, Zhonggong guangdongshengwei bangongting, Guangdongsheng renmin zhengfu bangongting, “Guanyu zuohao quansheng dierjie cunweihui xuanju gongzuo au ban fa (2002) 2 hao” (On doing the work of the second round of villager elections well), 15 January 2002 and Article 13 of the “Tianhe Guidelines.”
41. See Yu Yi's speech at the March 2002 Conference in Guangzhou. In contrast to this position, He Zengke, in a forthcoming book on combating corruption, calls for developing various forms of large-scale trade organizations to replace a government retreating from the economic sector as one means of combating corruption.
42. Basing themselves on these recent events in Sichuan, He Zengke, Luo Yanming, and Gao Xinjun suggested in a February 7, 2002 interview that higher-level elections are most likely to occur where significant economic hardship at the township levels force the consideration of change, and such change is embraced by bold local leadership supported by provincial leaders.
43. See Edward Friedman, “The Peasantry, Village Elections, and Stable Modernization” (paper presented at International Symposium on Villager Selfgovernment, Bejing, September 2001) for an analysis of the potential consequences of this latter option.
44. Thomas Frank, One Market under God (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).
45. Based on village electoral documents and interviews.