Christian Science Monitor features a telling story of Fang Zhaojuan. She launched legal petitions signed by a large majority of her fellow villagers from Huiguan concerning proper compensation for land sold for industrial development by their village council. The commonly held land was sold to a neighboring township and then resold to developers for nearly twice the original price. Suspecting corruption, Huiguan villagers began a process specified by the village democracy law to recall their elected council.
The authorities obstructed the process by raising various formal obstacles such as disputing who had the right to participate in the recall vote. Despite that, villagers conducted the vote as scheduled, gathering the required majority to pass the motion. Still, council president Yuan Shiwan and his colleagues refused to leave the office and three days later seven people (including two of Yuan’s sons) broke into the house of Fang Zhaoujan and brutally beat her. Then Fang’s son and his friend were arrested and held for two weeks with no formal charges.
This case clearly highlights that even though on paper China might have made some progress toward representative democracy on the local level, in reality the rights that Chinese citizens are supposed to enjoy are often not there.
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Chinese law prescribes direct democratic elections for village councils, and provides for recalls if a majority of villagers lose faith in their leaders. “But that is only the law,” cautions Yawei Liu, head of the China Program at Atlanta’s Carter Center, which has worked with the Chinese authorities to strengthen village self-rule. “Once you move into the real world it is very difficult to enforce,” he adds.
Ten years ago, when China’s definitive law on village elections came into effect, many officials and some foreign scholars touted it as heralding broader democracy nationwide. Today, such hopes are sputtering. Fang’s fate illustrates one key weakness of the experiment: It is very hard for grass-roots democracy to thrive in a vacuum where superior levels of government are undemocratic.
The key problem with local democratic experiments in China is that the rights conferred on village populations have no backing in the higher level of the government when push comes to shove. Local democratic procedures have little legitimacy if the higher authorities – who in a democratic country would defend them – do not derive their own legitimacy from the same democratic principles. China’s village democracy laws will continue to be suppressed in practice, or at best difficult to enforce, as long as the law remains, well, just the law.
Published Date: September 08, 2008