Democratic Empowerment via Village Elections During Imperial China

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China is a country that has succeeded to empower its people through the introduction of village elections. The people at the grass-root level have felt part and parcel of their governance by being given the power to choose and reject the leaders. Due to its success in promoting economic growth and stability at village level, the system is gaining access to higher levels of governance. It is also giving rise to an informed group village leader who can be relied on for higher responsibilities. The leaders are trained to be responsible and always be ready to serve the people rather than their own interests.

Since the introduction of village election system in ancient china in 1987, tremendous developments have been experienced. Village election of leaders has ensured democracy in leadership as the villagers have the right to choose who should lead them. This system of leadership was introduced to minimize the frustrations that were being experienced by the rural community due to unequal distribution of power and resources. It was the expectation of the party leaders that, once the villager committee is in place, there would be political stability and economic growth. They also aimed at improving and strengthening the relationship between the village and the state government so we to enforce policies such as taxes and family planning. There were increased riots and demonstrations from unsatisfied citizens and an election was the only alternative that could solve all these problems. Currently 70% of rural china conducts elections and the results have been positive (Diamond, 2008).

In this process, nominees are selected and thoroughly screened by the local party officials to find out the most suitable candidate. After the suitable candidates are selected, the villagers come together and carry out the elections through the secret ballot box. Through this system, the people of rural china have felt empowered politically as they can be led by the people they are proud of personally electing. Corrupt leaders and those that are not perfectly performing are eliminated through recall procedures. This leadership system gains its strength from the fact that it is closely connected to the political parties that are responsible for the nominations of the chiefs before the final elections are carried out. It is because of this fact also that there has been a recorded case of competition for the post of the chief which is an evidence of development in socialist democracy. The local chiefs have also gained the attention of top leadership and as a result, experiments from the local political arena are being integrated on the national level and also giving rise to self-confident and more innovative class of political leaders.

Rural democratization is aimed at promoting the rule of law to the nine hundred million Chinese communities that live in the rural areas. This is done by making them aware of their rights and responsibilities under the village committees and also their rights to choose leaders whom they can vote in and out of the office if found incompetent. The work of the village committees according to the constitution of china include; handling public affairs and social services, assist in maintaining public order, manage and allocate village lands, support cooperative economic projects and act as a mediator of opinions between the people and the government. The villager committee works hand in hand with the township governments and assists them in collecting grain and tax, implement family planning methods and in military conscription. They also spearhead the raising of funds for development projects like the construction of schoolhouses, installing cables for viewing television and the construction of better roads. The villager committee is made up of a minimum of three members and a maximum of seven. This includes one chairperson, a vice or vice-chairperson, and other ordinary members. The tenure of service is usually three years. The turn-up of women and the national minorities is still very low due to their low quality of education. There is no salary guaranteed to these villager committees instead they receive some compensation during their service period. The villager assembly is always composed of adults above the ages of eighteen years who review the annual report of the VCs and evaluate their progress. In case of any vacancy, the assembly recalls the VCs and holds a bye-election. The villager assembly oversees the progress of the VCs and ensures that the decisions they make are for the common good of the rest of the villagers.

The villager assembly is usually chosen from the villagers by a show of hands. In selecting leaders, the following measures are usually taken to ensure free and democratic elections; nominations are done openly by individuals, multiple candidates are nominated from which the leaders will be voted, election is done through secret ballot for safety and integrity of the voter, voting booths are made mandatory, the votes are counted in public, the results of the elections are announced immediately after counting and the recall procedures taken where there is dissatisfaction.

It was discovered that democracy could not be ensured if appointment and selection of nominees were done by groups. Two stipulations were therefore made by the law where the first candidates are directly nominated by the Individual villagers, secondly, no organization or individual is allowed to either designate, appoint, remove or replace a village committee member if it is not by election laws and recall procedures. For a candidate to be considered by the villagers for nomination, a method called ‘sea election’ is used where the candidates are allowed to make campaign speeches and also answer questions posed to them by the villagers for their kind consideration. To strengthen transparency and accountability among the preferred leaders, the VC has introduced four democracies namely; democratic decision making, democratic elections, democratic supervision and democratic management. The VC, in making its decisions is supposed to adhere to the rule of ‘the majority wins’ and also be open in the management of the village affairs. To accomplish this they are required to publicize matters concerning finances after every six months and make the community aware of decisions on matters that concern them like family planning, payments of bills like electricity and water, disaster relief programs, and remunerations of the leaders. All this was published on the notice boards. According to the VC law, the villagers have the right to report the VCs to higher levels of authority, if they act unresponsively by not publishing the matters of vital concern to the villagers on time. The VC law is however not strong on enforcement provisions, complaints concerning fraud in financial reports, late elections and not properly installing VC leaders are usually handled by the administrative appeal.

This system of administration has been of much help to empower the villagers who are now fully aware of their rights and are therefore not afraid of filing complaints on poor administration and making good use of the recall system to get rid of irresponsible and corrupt leaders. Despite the efforts of the VCs to instill stability in rural china, there have been reports of corruption, illegal charges and abuse of power from other higher officials. Because these officials hold more powerful positions than the VCs, they spend excessively on infrastructure and are not fair in the distribution of government services (Perry, 2007). To make matters worse they are not directly accountable to their respective constituents.

The villagers have also been empowered in a way that they vote for their representatives and also the deputies to the township people’s congress after three years and also for deputies to the counties people’s congress after every five years. The township people’s congress will consequently elect magistrates and other officials at the township level. The county people’s congress on the other hand elects officials at the county level and also the representatives to the provincial people’s congress which will subsequently elect representatives to the national people’s congress. The deputies of the township and county are directly accountable to the people who voted for them. The law governing the elections of the people’s congress has provisions for competition among candidates through write-in candidates, multiple candidates and secret ballots. The party leaders’ election compared to the VCs election is not open and competitive and the relevant party organizations thus have control in determining the official candidate’s list. It is mainly because of this reason that the people’s congress deputies show more responsibility towards their parties and superiors than to the residents they represent. The people are cautiously becoming corrupt by exercising their own powers concerning the leaders elected and there have been recorded cases where at the provincial level, people’s congress has elected their own desired candidates for vice governors and mayors and rejecting the elected party candidates.

The democratic improvements in the 1998 villager committee law have created the need to revise the 1979 law of the peoples’ congress which was last amended in 1995. The law was to go through changes to check the possibility of amending it. In order to encourage interactions between the peoples’ congress deputies and their constituencies, the local government has instituted regular meetings through which deputies report to their various constituencies on how they do their work, take questions from the citizens concerning what should be implemented to ensure development, and to educate the voters on matters concerning the duties of the congress and their deputies.

There has been a subsequent increase in the experiments since 1998 when there was an increase in the number of voters participating in the election of township officials. The party began to promote open administration by laying foundations of accountability in village and township administrative affairs. In one of these experiments, all registered voters in selected areas were made to participate by way of ‘sea election’ to nominate candidates for the post of the town magistrate. Electors who represented about twenty-five percent of the towns’ population were selected by organizing committee of elections from local officials, members of the party, members of the village committee, Small group chiefs from the village, committee members of the town residents and representatives from unions and enterprises. They then voted for the five qualifying candidates who received more than a hundred votes during the first ballot in what was termed as the ‘opinion poll’ (Gilley, 2008).The candidate with the most votes was submitted to the people’s congress at town level for a vote of confirmation according to the current law. It is however a complicated process of transforming a system that was used for fewer residents that typically knew each other to a higher township level. The government will face a challenge of financing the campaigns of the candidates. The candidates that are lesser-known have to appeal in order to aggregate their interests through which a possibility of forming political parties and groups will immerge.

The party has remained adamant that China will not allow the influence of multiparty politics and stick to its traditional form of electing the leaders. Several experiments are being carried out in the remaining regions to determine its applicability in the entire china. The committees of the urban residents are called the resident’s committees. They were introduced in 1954 to serve the urban residents who did not belong to any unit of state such as a factory or a government agency. These committees were to handle matters concerning the registration of households, family planning procedures and civil mediations. They were however not as popular as the VCs and generally competed with service organizations like the local parties, communist youth league and the women’s association. A resident’s committee law was enacted in 1989 which required that the RCs be composed of a hundred to seven hundred households that will be answerable to the residents’ assembly. Compared to village committees, resident committees are elected by the representatives of the residents’ small group or households instead of directly being voted for by the individual residents. The RCs were not of importance to the city dwellers as they never experienced any positive change during their service. The urban residents were forced to look for help somewhere else as they experienced high levels of unemployment, few housing facilities, inadequate schools and medical facilities. In 1999, the formula of appointing VCs experimented in bigger cities where the household communities were increased from hundreds to thousands. With the success of these experiments, the law on RCs will be subject to revision.

The Chinese people have high esteem for the villager committee law, it is therefore considered as a countries’ strategy towards the establishment of the rule of law. This law has succeeded in ensuring that deserving officials are chosen who will serve the people with diligence and commitment to ensure economic growth and social stability of the common man. The economic developments and the various reforms that China is experiencing is due to the success of the rule of law,the reforms allow the citizens to prosecute corrupt government agencies, appointment of party and government leaders by openly examining them, hotline numbers to report any corruption case and the registration of complaints (Diamond , 2008). With these procedures in place, the leadership is put on toes to ensure that it delivers according to the needs of the people.

From the above discussion, it is clear that village elections have contributed to a higher degree the improvement and the development of China’s political system. It is a setup that has influenced the top leadership of the Chinese government. It is a base through which the rule of law was established and a means that promotes democracy in a country. It has also helped to eradicate ignorance through the various forums where the people are enlightened on their rights and encouraged to freely demand what they deserve. With strict observation of these laws and their applicability to the higher level of governance, china will continue experiencing political and economic stability.

References

Diamond J. (2008): The Spirit of Democracy: Macmillan.

Diamond L. (2001): Elections and Democracy in Greater China: Oxford University Press.

Gilley B. (2008): Political Change in China: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Perry J. (2007): Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China: Harvard University Press.

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Democratic Empowerment via Village Elections During Imperial China

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