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Table 2.3. Dominance of CCP Members in Villagers’ Committees

Sources: Liu Xitang, “Hunansheng 1999 niandu 40 ge xian cunweihui xuanju shuju fcnxi baogao”; Wu Miao, “Cunweihui xuanju zhiliang dc lianghua fenxi: Yi Fujiansheng 9 shi 2000 niandu cunweihui huanjie xuanju tongji shuju wei jiju”; Cao Ying, ‘Jilinsheng cunweihui xuanju shuju fenxi baogao”; Liu Hong, “Tuijing cunmin zizhi yu jiaqiang jiceng dangzuzhi jianshe de guanxi” (The Relationship between Promoting Villagers’ Self-government and Strengthening the Building of the Party at the Grassroots Level), Neibucanyue(Internal Reference), 28 (2001): 11-20.

Similar incidents were reported in Shandong. In March 2001, fifty-seven elected villagers’ committee officials in four townships in Shandong collectively resigned because the village party committees and township governments did not transfer any power to the elected officials. A year after they were elected, the officials were not able to control the village budget or the official seals. They were also subject to arbitrary dismissals by the party and township officials.128

Elected villagers’ committees often find their power curtailed by the presence of the CCP branches in the same villages. The tense relationship between the villagers’ committees and the CCP branches has been widely reported in the Chinese press and studied by scholars. In a study of five hundred villages in Hunan, two researchers affiliated with the provincial CCP party school reported that in 40 percent of the villages surveyed, the elected villagers’ committees were totally powerless, and the village party committees held all the power. The relationship between the party committee and villagers’ committee was considered cooperative in only 40 percent of the villages.129 Another survey in 1999 of 2,600 rural residents in four counties (two in Anhui and two in Heilongjiang) indicated that local government officials and party organizations were perceived as more powerful than the newly elected villagers’ committees.130

Despite the mixed impact of village elections on rural democratization, the advent of grassroots democracy in the countryside has encouraged small-scale experiments in democratization in urban areas. In 1999, the Ministry of Civil Affairs selected twenty-six cities for experiments in electing urban residents’ committees, which arc, like villagers’ committees, civic groups responsible for providing local services. Experimental elections of urban residents’ committees began in June 1996 in Shenyang and were allowed in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Hefei, Xi’an, and several other large cities in 2000.131

The CCP, however, appeared to have drawn the line on how far it would allow such grassroots democratic experiments to spread. As a result, it blocked elections above the village level. Except for the attention devoted to a few occasional minor experiments in township elections, the government-controlled media did not have much discussion or debate on the desirability or feasibility of township, let alone county-level, elections. It seems that nearly all the experiments in introducing township elections in various forms were initiatives of local officials. The most well-known experiment, a direct competitive election for the township mayor of Buyun in Sichuan, was pushed by a local reformist county official in January 1999. Although the election, considered fair by observers, installed the official candidate, it caused a political furor around the country because no Chinese law permitted direct elections of township mayors. The election was subsequently declared illegal, even though the elected mayor was allowed to remain in office. Notably, while the government used legal technicalities to prohibit the holding of township elections, it has made no attempt to pass a new law to address the legal hurdles to such elections.

Consequently, a few politically sanctioned township elections were confined to a mixture of open primaries and indirect elections