State leaders hope experiments like this will further democracy in the countryside,where already more than 2.3 million rural residents have been elected to 604,000 villagecommittees since 1988.
The failure to set up clear mechanisms to address the rights of rural constituentsafter those elections, however, has seriously hampered the government’s push for ruralautonomy. Many village chiefs have continued to find ways to impose autocratic rule,having won office through bribery or threats, said analysts.
The general offices of the State Council and CPC Central Committee acknowledgedthe danger of the situation in June 2009 in a jointly issued circular that stated: “Villagecommittee elections are not properly conducted in some rural areas, where bribery is graveand seriously harms impartiality.”
Candidates running for village heads in richer regions can spend millions on electioncampaigns, said Li Changping, a former rural official and now a researcher with HebeiUniversity. “There’s only one thing that’s certain - once they are sworn in, they wantplenty more back,” he added.
Conflicts between village committees and Party branches have also been a problem. In2004, the year before the democratic measures were introduced, 15 percent of villages inDengzhou experienced such conflicts, according to official figures.
Analysts say Liu Chaorui’s experiment has resulted in a huge leap forward in ruraldemocracy.
However, real change needs to come from the grassroots cadres, who must understandthat they need to negotiate and compromise, not bully and threaten, Liu said.
“They must learn that there are procedures and that decisions made through certainprocedures are bound to be more democratic than those without them,” he told ChinaDaily. “Decisions based on democratic procedures may not always bring the most correctresult, but they are definitely always more scientific than those that aren’t.”
For Liu, ensuring farmers’ rights to be informed lies at the heart of his measures.
“This is what Chinese people care about the most. We have to let people know first.
Only after people learn what’s going on can they truly exercise their right to participate andsupervise,” he said.
Liu said he believes villagers now have unprecedented rights to veto projects pushedby local leaderships against their interests.
By the end of 2009, almost 20 percent of all proposals in Dengzhou were rejectedduring the reading process, said Zhang Youyin, deputy director of the OrganizationDepartment of CPC’s Dengzhou Committee.
Zhang, who said he has visited all 579 villages in Dengzhou to monitor theimplementation of the measures, insisted that, for now at least, deepening grassrootsdemocracy depends on the competence of township leaders and village Party chiefs.
“The real problems in the Chinese countryside stem from township and village cadres’
inability to follow procedures. Without qualified village Party chiefs, the measures cannotbe fully promoted,” he said.
Village cadres in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province, which borders northwest Henan,found it difficult to accept the democratic measures during a training session just beforeSpring Festival, said Zhang. “Our measures not only curbed their power but also increasedtheir workload.”
Ultimately, charismatic grassroots leaders are still needed because, even after 22 yearsof universal suffrage, most Chinese farmers still do not have mature notions of democracy,said Wang Haizhou, a senior official with Dengzhou’s measures implementation office.
“This has helped foster bribery in elections and, in turn, hampered rural democracy.
Sometimes, even a pack of cigarettes is enough to buy a rural constituent. Democracyshouldn’t be that cheap,” he said. “At this point, systematic improvements to assuredemocracy will have to be implemented through powerful or influential local leaders.”
Gao Facang, Party chief for Maying village, is among several officials who have shotto national fame for championing the democratic measures in Dengzhou. He warned thatestablishing rural autonomy is no easy task.
“The fundamental premise of the measures is that we must work within theframework of the Constitution, meaning we have to make certain ‘necessary sacrifices’ forthe greater good,” he said.
In practice, local cadres have used the measures to persuade rural residents to backprojects that higher authorities believe will bring long-term benefits.
Although this may go against the immediate interests of local people, Liu said it isalready a huge improvement on the days when cadres would blatantly, and often forcefully,push forward their agendas.
“The cadres have to reason with the public even when they are trying to do good,”
said Liu.
Gao can testify to that, especially following his painstaking efforts to get all 3,229residents in Maying to donate farmland to give to 1,100 people from Guojiaqu, a villagein the neighboring Xichuan county that will be relocated in May as part of the massiveSouth-to-North Water Diversion (SNWD) project.
Tens of thousands of people are to be moved as part of the central government plan tochannel water from the Yangtze River to the drought-prone northern provinces. Althoughthe State is building new homes for families in Guojiaqu, those in Maying argue they arethe ones losing out.
“We understand the SNWD is a State initiative, but why do we have to make thesacrifice and give away good farmland to these people and work on bad land miles away? Idon’t get it,” said 61-year-old villager Wang Chengjin.
The proposal by the Maying branch of the CPC to allocate farmland for the migrantswas defeated by a landslide at three meetings in September 2009. It even suffered anunprecedented rejection at the second reading.
For weeks, representatives for the village’s three units that would have to give away themost land refused to attend the meetings.