The whole third page of the June 13 "News from Southern China" section in the People's Daily was dedicated to articles and commentary on the direct urban community-level elections in Guangxi Province. The introduction said that the election experiment, which began in 2000, "has provided an important breakthrough toward providing a solution to the difficulties that for a long time have been hampering the introduction of direct elections of neighborhood committee members to cities in China."
To understand the significance of the report, we must first understand two pieces of background information. The first is that the bottom-up political reform model that China has been implementing in the form of local elections in rural villages seems to have come to a standstill. The second is that with the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) 16th National Congress being held this autumn, all circles of society have expectations about the progress of political reform.
First, the CCP's dozen or so years of implementing direct democratic elections at the village level have led to tension between village party branches and the popularly elected village committees. This has caused plans to use China's village-level democracy as the strategic model for bottom-up political reform to come to a standstill.
The development of more competitive and open elections and the elimination of the township or party committee intervention in the election process has not happened, showing that many aspects of village-level democracy can't be consolidated.
What's more, no breakthrough has been made in the upward expansion of village democracy -- ie, the implementation of direct elections for township leaders -- despite several years of calls for this to happen. Even though township leader elections of real significance were held in Buyun and Nancheng townships in Sichuan Province in 1998, the expansion of these elections has been suppressed by the central leadership of the party.
Also, no policy documents have been issued by the CCP regarding the direction the expansion of village elections to the cities should take. Even though the Organic Law for Resident Committee (居民委員會組織法) promulgated in 1990 states that residential committees in China's cities should in theory be autonomous, the residential committee has over the past dozen years still been appointed by the neighborhood committee, the administrative level above the residential committee, and approved by the residential committee in a rubber-stamp election. Its actual democratic autonomy lags far behind that of the village committee.
Under these circumstances, the People's Daily report of the Guangxi experience leaves a different feeling. In fact, the direct elections in Guangxi tried a kind of bottom-up, pioneering reform, utilizing grey areas in government policy to push political reform forward. The difference is, however, that while the Sichuan experience was suppressed, the Guangxi experience has been praised and even given a full page in the People's Daily, and we must therefore recognize that it has certain unique characteristics.
These characteristics can only be understood by looking at the timing of the report. This autumn will see the CCP's 16th National Congress. Apart from implementing the most significant transfer of leadership power, another issue is whether the Congress will bring a breakthrough to long-stagnant political reforms. There are some recent developments worth paying attention to. Circumstantial pressures may force the CCP to initiate a limited response to strong social and internal party needs for political reform, the core of which would be internal party democracy.
One example of such reform would be the ongoing reform of the cadre system, so that party cadres would have to be "democratically recommended." Public opinion would be surveyed and the appointment of cadres to cities at the prefectural level would be elected in a secret ballot at a plenary meeting of the corresponding level of the CCP party committee. A system of open and public competitive elections prior to the appointment of leading cadres to departments at the prefectural level would be implemented.
However, party democracy is still only a limited and elitist kind of democracy. Whether or not it can be fully realized is dependent solely on the supervision and control of the CCP. Even the party itself must admit that it faces increasingly serious social discontent and protest. Such restricted party democracy is in reality not a sufficient response to these pressures. The CCP has, however, never taken the initiative to implement further democratic political reforms, since true political opening in the end is a great threat to the party's political power.
There is no way the party will implement any ill-considered political reforms in the run-up to the 16th National Congress. Under such circumstances, even though direct elections to urban neighborhood committees is not a fixed policy yet, this reform, among all options for political reform with true democratic significance, probably carries the least risk and the smallest cost to the CCP and it's also a political reform measure that carries a certain sense of true democracy.
That the People's Daily, on the eve of the power transfer at the 16th National Congress, carried a long report on this bottom-up political reform experiment could plausibly be conceived as the CCP being forced to provide a kind of passive response to the strong demands for political reform that it is facing.
From a positive perspective, this is a step forward for democracy and is a development that has moved from the rural areas toward the cities. Even though this is a road full of obstacles, behind the passive response by the CCP we can sense the nature of the domestic political situation and the strong reform pressures a new party leadership will face after the 16th National Congress.
For the CCP, this will be a political situation where it will become ever more difficult to implement some kinds of political reforms, but it will also be a situation where it will be ever more difficult to postpone such reforms. Regardless of which leaders will step down and who gets appointed at the Congress, it will be no easy task to change the situation. A choice to go against the situation will have both far-reaching and great consequences.
The CCP's political reform choices and their limitations must be given objective consideration, since they will affect Taiwan's evaluation of China's development, as well as Taipei's arrangements for and considerations of long-term cross-strait relations.
Hsu Szu-chien is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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