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Village Elections and Grassroots Corruption in China

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Village Elections and Grassroots Corruption in China Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, No. 2: 107-129 Village Elections and Grassroots Corruption in China Andrew Wedeman Abstract After nearly a quarter century of village elections in China, many now see them as having failed to curb corruption at the grassroots level. A comparative analysis of the development of local elections in the United States and Taiwan suggests that the pathologies found in village elections in mainland China are hardly unique. On the contrary, the advent of local elections in both the United States and Taiwan often led to the emergence of machine politics and the use of the public authority obtained through the ballot box to manipulate the electoral process. In the case of mainland China, local politicians have used many of the same tools (e.g., vote buying) as machine bosses in the United States and Taiwan to suborn the electoral process. Heretofore, they have not created political machines, but nevertheless they often have used their offices for self-enrichment. Keywords: China, corruption, machine politics, Taiwan, United States, village elections. When mainland China first began to hold elections for village committees (村民委員會) and village representative assemblies (村民代表會議) in 1990-1991, some saw what they hoped would prove to be the “sprouts of democracy” in communist China.1 Even though the village committees were Andrew Wedeman is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. <[email protected]> 1 International Republican Institute (IRI), “People’s Republic of China: Election Observation Report” (May 15-31, 1994), http://www.iri.org/news-and-resource?type=808&country=671 (accessed June 22, 2015). Village committees were formed on an informal basis in the early 1980s after the adoption of the household responsibility system led to the collapse of the brigades and communes. They were formally recognized as legitimate administrative bodies in 1982. In 1988, the Organic Law on Village Committees formally implemented the formation of village committees. Over the several next years, some 940,000 village committees were elected nationwide. Village committees varied in size, most having between three and seven members, and typically had a chair and one or two vice chairs. The village committee, which had administrative responsibility, was paralleled by the village party committee, which had political authority over the village committee and in many cases de facto control over it. Whereas the village committee, in essence, was an executive body, the village representative assembly December 2017 | 107 considered nonstate “community” organizations and hence not part of the formal political system, it was believed (or perhaps one should say, hoped) that elections would lead to grassroots democracy and that democracy would incrementally spread upward into the formal legislative structure of the Chinese state. It was envisioned that if this occurred, electoral empowerment of these bodies would transform them from “rubber stamp” legislatures, serving at the whim of state officials and party cadres appointed via the nomenklatura system and hence answerable not to “the people” but rather to the hierarchical party state.2 Melanie Manion argued that democratic village elections would steadily decrease the gap between the interests of villagers and cadres, transforming cadres from agents of the state to representatives of the voter.3 Over time, Susanne Brandtstadter and Gunter Schubert asserted, grassroots elections would create a “moral economy” based on the notion that local leaders should serve the local collective interest rather than act as agents of the external state.4 More immediately, according to Tianjian Shi, competitive elections would enable villagers to oust corrupt cadres from office, reducing the severity of corruption and arbitrary use of authority at the grassroots level.5 Two and a half decades later, optimistic assumptions about progressive democratization in mainland China appear misplaced. Although there were experiments with elections at the township level6 and reforms designed to was to act as a local legislative body and to provide oversight over the village committee. See Kevin J. O’Brien, “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 32 (1994): 33-59; Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State: Village Elections in China,” China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000): 465-89; Daniel Kelliher, “The Chinese Debate over Village Self-Government,” China Journal 3, no. 7 (1997): 63-86; and Susan V. Lawrence, “Democracy, Chinese Style,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 32 (1994): 61-68. 2 Minxin Pei, “‘Creeping Democratization’ in China,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 4 (1995): 65- 79, and Young Nam Cho, “From ‘Rubber Stamps’ to ‘Iron Stamps’: The Emergence of Chinese Local People’s Congresses,” China Quarterly, no. 171 (2002): 724-740. 3 Melanie Manion, “The Electoral Connection in the Chinese Countryside,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 4 (1996): 736-48; id., “How to Assess Village Elections in China,” Journal of Contemporary China, no. 60 (2009): 379-383; and Lianjiang Li, “The Empowering Effect of Village Elections in China,” Asian Survey 43, no. 4 (2003): 648-662. 4 Susanne Brandtstader and Gunter Schubert, “Democratic Thought and Practice in Rural China,” Democratization 12, no. 5 (2005): 801-819. 5 Shi Tianjian, “Village Committee Elections in China: Institutionalist Tactics for Democracy,” World Politics 51, no. 3 (1999): 385-412; Xu Wang, “Mutual Empowerment of State and Peasantry,” World Development 25, no. 9 (1997): 1431-1442; and Jude Howell, “Prospect for Village Self-Governance in China,” Journal of Peasant Studies 25, no. 3 (1998): 86-111. Zwieg and Fung’s 1999 survey of four counties in Anhui and Heilongjiang provides some empirical evidence that elections in fact checked cadre corruption, at least in the short run. See David Zweig and Chung Siu Fung, “Elections, Democratic Values, and Economic Development in Rural China,” Journal of Contemporary China, no. 50 (2007): 25-45. 6 Lisheng Deng, “Searching for a Direction after Two Decades of Local Democratic Experiments in China,” China Elections and Governance Review 2 (2009): 1-16; Yawei Liu, “The Elections of Township Magistrates in Buyun, Depeng and Linyi, 1998-1999,” China Elections and 108 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, No. 2 make elections to local people’s congresses at least semi-competitive,7 by the mid-2000s, movement toward greater democratization had faltered. Local people’s congresses had become more independent in some areas and more assertive vis-à-vis the administrative organs of local government, and village elections had enhanced rural residents’ sense of empowerment and citizenship.8 But elections for formal state legislative bodies remained fundamentally undemocratic, with the local party/political apparatus continuing to effectively dictate who could be selected to run for elected office, and, hence, who would win elective office.9 Moreover, in some areas, the advent of village elections had not purged corruption. On the contrary, the elected “new bosses” looked and acted much like the appointed “old bosses,” using their authority to grab and expropriate collective resources and enhance their personal wealth or form collusive alliances with the private entrepreneurs who scraped rents off the local economy.10 Moreover, reports of increasing conflicts over the expropriation of rural land and the sale of use rights for commercial and urban residential development suggested that, rather than acting as a hedge against corruption at the grassroots level, which had been one of the leading rationales for implementing village elections in the 1980s, village elections actually had spawned a new class of rogue officials who were operating on a scale of corruption unimaginable in the early reform period.11 Under the terms of the household responsibility Governance Review 2 (2009): 16-24; and Nadir Shams, “The Case of Yangji: Lessons for Township-level Success,” China Elections and Governance Review 2 (2009): 25-27. 7 Jie Chen and Yang Zhong, “Why Do People Vote in Semicompetitive Elections in China?” Journal of Politics 64, no. 1 (2002): 178-197. 8 Kevin J. O’Brien, “Villagers, Elections, and Citizenship in Contemporary China,” Modern China 27, no. 4 (2001): 407-445; John James Kennedy, “The Face of ‘Grassroots Democracy’ in Rural China: Real Versus Cosmetic Elections,” Asian Survey 42, no. 3 (May/June 2002): 456- 482; Lianjiang Li, “The Empowering Effect of Village Elections in China,” Asian Survey 43, no. 4 (2003): 648-662; and Jie Chen, “Popular Support for Village Self-Government in China: Intensity and Sources,” Asian Survey 45, no. 6 (2005): 865-885. 9 Some provinces made a more limited attempt at grassroots democratization in urban areas by setting up Community Districts (社會) to replace the old neighborhood committees in a relatively small number of cities. Unlike the village committees, most of the Community Districts were not democratically elected but, like the village committees in rural areas, they were supposed to provide community-based administration independent of the formal state and were to be, at least in theory, answerable to the local community. James Derleth and Daniel R. Koldyk, “The Shequ Experiment: Grassroots Political Reform in China,” Journal of Contemporary China 41 (2004): 747-777. 10 Yusheng Yao, “Village Elections and Redistribution of Political
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