Letter from Anhui: There was incalculable pride in the shy face as an early winner of the village committee election in Chang Xin Dian showed off his new villager committee member certificate.
Voting in Shangdong province was not unlike voting in local elections in Mayo or Kerry. Election day was preceded by the selection of the seven-member villager election committee by the villager representative assembly. Then there was voter registration, and a nomination process in which residents could register to run for the village committee or be registered by others. At a five-hour candidates' forum each candidate got up on a soapbox, made the trump speech and took questions.
Voters lined up to four ballot stations in the local primary school in this farming village two hours from Weihai, a prosperous city of this northwesterly province. Election monitors checked voter identification cards against the registration list. Cards stamped, voters were then given a blank ballot before going behind a curtained-off desk. Volunteers from outside the village helped illiterate or blind voters to cast their vote.
It is not the first time Chang Xin Dian has gone to the polls. Since the early 1980s, the Chinese government has been quietly promoting what it terms a grassroots democratic education process, through the establishment of directly elected village committees in rural China. Villagers across the country are meant to see the benefits of having accountable leaders whom they can vote out of office and even recall.
Supervised by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Beijing, they constitute the lowest level of civil administration in China. The 1998 Organic Law on Villager Committees says the committees must run clean, accountable administrations and it provides for the recall of members who don't oblige.
China's 1982 constitution provides for villager committees, elected by villagers to manage local budgets and services while representing their electorates at higher levels of government. In 1987 the National People's Congress, China's top legislative assembly, provisionally adopted the Organic Law on Villager Committees. After a cautious trial run of 11 years the law was made permanent in 1998.
Under the law village committees are made up of three to seven members, including a chairperson, and serve three-year terms. Candidates must be nominated directly by individual villagers, not by political organisations. Committees are accountable to the villager assembly, a gathering of all villagers aged 18 and older.
Democratic reform was always supposed to accompany China's economic development. That was former leader Deng Xiaoping's theory, and his promise is, in word at least, carried on by his successors. Modern Communist Party chiefs stick to the line that China isn't ready for universal suffrage because its people aren't educated enough in the ways of democracy. Party bosses in Beijing at each annual gathering of the National People's Congress promise the masses "scientific and democratic" decision-making, and an expansion of citizens' participation in political affairs in an "orderly way". Sure enough, recent reforms have given slightly more say to the people. Citizens are now allowed to sue government agencies in certain cases.
There is also more competitive recruitment of government and party officials, while locals are encouraged to dial hotlines to report corruption and sloppy work by local officials. Increasingly, though slowly, draft legislation is being published to allow the citizen to offer suggestions.
A swell of rural protests and riots are warning enough that Chinese farmers are getting restless. Farming villages complain about corruption and illegal fees exacted by officials. Elected committees take some of the steam out of the protest. They've proven popular and have added stability to an increasingly frustrated farming populace. Villagers have been quick too to take up their rights under the committee system, filing administrative complaints, liaising with the press and ousting corrupt and incompetent officials in recalls.
A much-reported case last year involved the ousting of a village official who swindled the equivalent of more than €50,000 from village coffers.
Aside from village elections, democratisation has hardly kept pace at other levels of government. Selection procedures for people's congress deputies are neither as open nor as competitive as those for villages. Township people's congress deputies answer to the party rather than to the residents they are supposed to represent. But there's been some change here too. Since 1998 the party has started to experiment by opening the election of township officials to the public. All registered voters in Dapeng near the southern industrial mecca of Shenzhen, for example, were allowed to participate in the nomination of candidates for town magistrate. Some provincial people's congresses have been courageous in exercising their powers. In spring 1993, six candidates nominated by people's congress deputies - and not on the party list - were elected as provincial vice- governors, a major feat considering the huge population of many of China's provinces. Meanwhile, candidates put forward by the provincial people's congress deputies have defeated party-sponsored candidates for provincial governorships in Guizhou and Zhejiang.
Spreading direct elections from villages of a few hundred or a few thousand residents to townships and higher levels becomes more complicated. The party prefers to allow quiet experiments in populous, poorer provinces such as Anhui, and Henan, as well as richer Shenzhen, to get some insight into how the people react before making formal moves to widespread local elections. In no hurry to open itself to serious electoral competition, the party has been cunningly adapting its powerbase too. The number of Communist Party members serving on village committees has risen, as party officials see the value of recruiting popular village committee members.
With the success so far of village elections, wealthier and more educated urban dwellers are looking for a chance to cast a free vote too. The urban counterparts of villager committees, residents' committees are also authorised by the constitution. In 1999 the Communist Party chose 20 cities to experiment with more open resident committee elections, though no radical changes have yet been implemented. Wang Zhenyao, an official with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, who has overseen more than 1,000 village elections, said: "Democracy is becoming more widespread . . . it's snowballing."
Wang may be over-optimistic. All China has thus far is experiments: the country has no tradition of democracy and rule of law. Its legal system is still a work in progress and the party, despite leaders' pronouncements, remains above the law. Still, the grassroots elections are nurturing a society that understands the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democratic state.
China may be feeling its way towards "democracy with Chinese characteristics", in party parlance. Countryside experiments may provide some valuable intelligence for Beijing bureaucrats but the Communist Party has not wavered from its stand that China will not move to a multiparty political system nationally.