Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State
192
Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State
192Paperback
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Overview
The Chinese government believes that this is a step towards ‘democracy with Chinese characteristics'. But to many involved in them, the elections have been mired by corruption, vote-rigging and cronyism.
This book looks at the history of these elections, how they arose, what they have achieved and where they might be going, exploring the specific experience of elections by those who have taken part in them - the villagers in some of the most deprived areas of China.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848138209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Series: | Asian Arguments |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Kerry Brown is Senior Fellow on the Asia Programme at Chatham House, London and the co-author of China and the New Maoists (Zed, 2016).
Read an Excerpt
Ballot Box China
Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State
By Kerry Brown
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Kerry BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-820-9
CHAPTER 1
A brief history of elections, democracy and civil society in modern China
We have been told on innumerable occasions and in innumerable sources in English, Chinese and other languages that China has no history of democracy. One of the most forceful proponents of this view is the current leadership elite in Beijing. To the Communists democracy is a promise, which stands many decades down the line, after China has become a strong, wealthy country, and 'improved the quality' of its people.
The Communists have aggressively promoted a narrative supporting this in which the long sweep of Chinese history has been characterised as 'feudalistic' from the earliest dynasties, over four millennia ago, down to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911–12. Using templates largely borrowed from Marx, the class struggle has continued throughout the centuries between an imperial court elite based in the various shifting capitals of multiple predecessor countries and states that existed before the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the vast majority of the population, divided between landowners, usually small ones, farmers and peasants. Lacking any meaningful industrialisation while Europe and North America were undergoing the first Industrial Revolution, China remained a country based on an agrarian economy deep into the twentieth century. Social relations were seen as being overwhelmingly exploitative, with the Communists talking in the early years of their revolution of 'a dog eat dog society' where the peasant and working class fed the elite with their sweat and blood.
After the fall of the Qing in 1911, Republican China undertook a series of political and economic reforms which were meant to drag the country into the twentieth century, establishing at least some industrial capacity in urban centres like Shanghai. By 1920, however, of a population of over 400 million, only 2 million were categorised as proletarian. While Qing-era economic activity had involved surprising levels of sophisticated artisanship, by 1930 there was little proper infrastructure, and a largely stagnant industrial base. Severe political instability and disunity did not help things. Tragically, what had been built in the first quarter of a century of Republican rule was blown away by the devastating Sino-Japanese war from 1937 onwards. Tellingly, China's victimisation was at the hands of the one Asian power that had managed so far to adopt a Western industrial model and gain from it. This was not lost on China's intellectual elite.
The May 4th Movement of 1919 (see below) celebrated the twin hopes of 'Mr Science' and 'Mr Democracy'. This slogan was to echo hauntingly across the ensuing decades. A student uprising, mostly taking place in Beijing, it had been caused initially by the ceding of German's concessions in North East China to Japan as a result of the Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War. In July 1921, largely as an offshoot of the intellectual ferment which had produced the 4 May events, the Communist Party under the tutelage of the International Comintern of the Soviet Union held its First Congress in Shanghai. But with only a few dozen members the Chinese Communists were doomed to an early history scarred by struggle, setbacks and tragedy, not the least of which was their near annihilation in the main urban base for their activity, Shanghai, in April 1927, when General Chiang Kai-shek, the de facto leader of China at the time, ordered a murderous purge. Over 5,000 were to die. The Communists disappeared into the countryside from this point, radically changing their strategy, recruiting among the peasantry rather than the cities, and articulating a new form of communism under the increasingly charismatic leadership of Mao Zedong.
Early elections
Whatever forms of government existed in China prior to 1911, and however they represented the various views of key segments of society before then, elections did not play a part. In that sense, there was no history, as in England for instance, of elites and sub-elites asserting their rights against kings and emperors and creating chambers for decision-making and a legal framework to support these rights. Even when the first hint of modernisation appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Qing court had its first uncomfortable and unsuccessful encounter with Western imperialists like Great Britain, the USA and Germany, there was no thought of creating upper and lower chambers, and having representatives for regions elected by populations. At most an ancient system existed in which petitions were submitted from subjects to the imperial centre, a system that still exists in the twenty-first century under the new political order. The country was in effect run by a system of provincial and central bureaucracy, with an elite of mandarins who were in charge of everything from collection of taxes to the titles of land. The power system was utterly vertical, with an almost infinite distance between the emperor and his subjects. Some would argue that this too has remained a feature of the post-revolutionary order.
In the late Qing, reformists influenced by exposure to foreign ideas, like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, in a late burst of activity urged radical change on the imperial system, bringing in modernisation and reform. But, as the title of their movement suggests, the '100 days reforms' were short-lived. Only violent upheaval and revolution would finally remove the old elite and bring in new rulers. In 1912, China had its first and so far only national election (see 'China's first election' below). But it was to end quickly. By the end of the decade China had split into a number of competing territories where all-powerful warlords competed against each other and the central government exercised hardly any control.
One of the largely forgotten democratic legacies was provincial elections held in the 1930 s. Frank Dikötter has uncovered these in his study of the period before Mao. The Republican period, he states, was 'politically more democratic than many comparable regimes in Europe at the time or than the People's Republic has been'. The City Council in foreign-controlled Shanghai in the first decades of the twentieth century was democratic, with a division between executive and legislative branches. By as early as 1907, anyone resident in the city for over five years was entitled to vote. By 1912, 40 million people were able to select members of the National Assembly and the House of Representatives (see box). Provincial elections in 1918 involved over 36 million people. Provinces like Hunan and Zhejiang in the 1910s and 1920s introduced voting rights across society, with the establishment of the Democratic League in 1941, and organisations to protect civil and legal rights. From 1929 onwards the Nationalist government also introduced village elections, something the Communists would wait for three decades to do after 1949.
In other parts of the country, from Manchuria to Nanjing, varied forms of universal-suffrage elections were held for local assemblies. Further elections were held for the National Assembly in May 1936. Carl Crow, the US businessman based long-term in Shanghai, stated that by 1944 China had become 'a nation which will carry the light of democracy to the millions of East Asia'. This was connected to the rich, complex movements of a free press, and to civil society groups in Nationalist China. Civil society groups in particular had a vigorous life, especially those connected with trade, religion and social movements. 'Associations and institutions that engaged in political, social or cultural activities outside of state control had deep roots prior to the establishment of the PRC in 1949', writes Qiusha Ma in a study of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in China. She looks in particular at Chambers of Commerce and intellectual associations which started to exist in the final period of the Qing era but then came into their own from the May 4th Movement in 1919 onwards (see box below). The statistics she provides are impressive. By 1915 there were 1,242 Chambers of Commerce. In 1911 there were 500 newspapers nationwide, with a readership of 42 million, approximately 10 per cent of China's population at this time. 'The new institutions demonstrated a certain degree of democratic and voluntary nature' with leaders of Chambers of Commerce elected. The Red Cross and other international civil society groups were all eventually represented in Republican China.
Meltdown
As Marx famously commented, history is written by the victors. This is part of the reason why the Chinese Republican era gets a very bad press. Blamed for venality, corruption and the final implosion of China, Chiang Kai-shek and his army fled to the island of Taiwan, where in 1949 they established the Republic of China on Taiwan, which exists to this day. The victorious Communists were able to set about rubbishing their almost fifty-year-long record of rule on the mainland, producing strong denunciations and dismissals of all that they had done. Only in the last two decades has there been a more measured attempt among PRC scholars to judge the Republican period. Biographies in particular of Chiang Kai-shek have appeared in mainland bookshops, and he has been represented as a leader who, at least in his early period, stood up for the Chinese national interest.
Whatever the nascent infrastructure of democratic institutions and processes, at national and local level, along with civil society and media, these were to be brutally swept away as a result of the Sino–Japanese war. From 1931 China was to be the object of increasingly aggressive behaviour by the Japanese. By 1937 this had become all-out conflict. The poets W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood recorded their journey into China at about this time. Preoccupied with their first encounter with a strange and different culture, much of their account, published afterwards, is about their meetings with exotic, interesting people, and their frustrations in travelling into a country with which they were unfamiliar, and the language and customs of which they did not know. But the escalating war encroaches into their good-humoured account, so that they can record at the end that 'In this city [Hong Kong], conquered, yet unoccupied by its conquerors, the mechanism of the old life is still ticking, but seems doomed to stop, like a watch dropped in the desert.' The same year of their visit, Nanjing was attacked, and many thousands murdered and raped by Japanese troops. While Western journalists present in the city recorded the devastation (one, Till Durdin, wrote in the New York Times that 'wholesale looting, the violation of women, the murder of civilians, the eviction of Chinese from their homes, mass execution of war prisoners' were some of the evils perpetuated over the weeks of the carnage), Japanese journalists present began a long history of denying that anything had happened at all. To this day, a strong constituency in Japan continues to dispute the Nanjing massacre, causing much bad feeling between Japan and China. The rest of the war was to have an indisputable impact, leading to 20 million Chinese dead and over 70 million displaced. In order to counter the invasion and occupation, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party, founded in 1921 and slowly emerging as one of the key political forces of rural China (somewhat ironic, in view of orthodox Marxism's insistence that revolution needed to be first waged in the cities), formed a United Front, pooling their military capacity and fighting the Japanese across the war front running approximately straight down the middle of the country.
The Japanese were defeated but at fearsome cost. And the China that emerged had most of its industrial infrastructure blown away, with its cities and economy left in a ruinous state. A further three years of civil war between the KMT and the Communists, as a result of their failure to reach a political settlement at the end of the 1945 ceasefire, only left things more ruinous. In 1949, the KMT, whose armies after all had done most to win the battles against the Japanese (the CCP contribution was crucial in certain sectors, but still less than that of the KMT), were facing raging inflation, powerful public anger at corruption, and failure in military encounters with the Communists. The PRC was founded on 1 October 1949.
It is one of history's great 'what ifs' to speculate what might have happened to the governance of China had the Japanese not invaded, and the country been left to travel a more peaceful path. Would the signs of more democratic governance have been allowed to flourish, and to create the sort of institutions and systems that came to exist eventually in other developing countries in the region, like South Korea, India and Japan? So profound was the influence of the war on destroying the old world, and creating a new, more polarised one, that it is hard to imagine how things would have developed without it. But the economic record of the Nationalists at least up to 1937 was improving, and there were signs that reforms would have happened both in the area of governance and in society. Even the dominant leader of the Communists from 1938 onwards, Mao Zedong, had low expectations of them ever being anything more than a minority political force in society, right up to the eve of eventual victory over the Nationalists in 1949. In 1972, he was to thank the first visiting prime minister of Japan to Beijing since 1949 for helping to radicalise the Chinese people and push more of them to supporting the CCP's cause.
Mao, the Communists and democracy
With the ascendancy of the Communists within China, a whole new understanding of political processes and of democracy was introduced into the country. Inevitably this became dominant after 1949. There were many areas in which the Communists did not introduce widespread changes as had been expected. Their policy, for instance, on national minority issues, on Tibet, Xinjiang and other border areas, was, despite earlier promises, almost exactly the same as that of the Nationalists. Plans to create a 'federated China' in the 1940s were replaced by the more loaded notion of 'liberating' areas like Tibet once the CCP had come to power. In this area,
despite the party's persistent claim that its revolution would destroy the 'old China' and create a 'new' one, in terms of how to define China, its leadership's way of thinking demonstrated a remarkable continuity with that of the Nationalists, the political reigning force of the 'old China' that the Party had strived to overthrow.
In social policy, they did clear up some of the 'bad forces' that had existed under the Nationalists, with huge campaigns against landowners, mafia groups and pimps. Their main target was capitalist forces, who were blamed for the profound inequalities that had developed in China in the last century, with responsibility being pinned on foreign exploitation and internal corruption.
In addition to creating a form of Marxism-Leninism that was suitable for China's largely agricultural economy, Mao had been working since the early 1930s on the correct labelling of class forces in society and on the sort of political structures that would strengthen and liberate China. 'A lively atmosphere has prevailed throughout the country ever since the War of Resistance began', Mao wrote in 1940 from his isolated base in North China, in an essay entitled 'On New Democracy': 'There is a general feeling that a way out of the impasse has been found, and people no longer knit their brows in despair.' Referring to the need to 'seek truth from facts', Mao then sketched out what the new democracy in China would look like.
Mao's great genius was to relate generic communist ideology to the specific conditions prevailing in rural China, where almost 90 per cent of Chinese still lived. To these people talk of constructing an industrial-based proletariat made no sense. If this were ever to happen it would be decades in the future (only in 2010 did Chinese rural and urban populations finally equal out). Revolutionary change was needed now. The question was how:
For many years we Communists have struggled for a cultural revolution as well as for a political and economic revolution, and our aim is to build a new society and a new state for the Chinese nation. That new society and new state will have not only a new politics and a new economy but a new culture. In other words, not only do we want to change a China that is politically oppressed and economically exploited into a China that is politically free and economically prosperous, we also want to change the China which is being kept ignorant and backward under the sway of the old culture into an enlightened and progressive China under the sway of a new culture. In short, we want to build a new China. Our aim in the cultural sphere is to build a new Chinese national culture.
New democracy in Mao's vision was linked to China's historic circumstances of feudalism and deep inequality, the global revolution which was being waged via the Communist Party and the International Comintern of the Soviet Union, and the unity between newly emerging social forces in China – the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and other sections of the petty bourgeoisie:
The Chinese democratic republic which we desire to establish now must be a democratic republic under the joint dictatorship of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal people led by the proletariat, that is, a new-democratic republic, a republic of the genuinely revolutionary new Three People's Principles with their Three Great Policies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ballot Box China by Kerry Brown. Copyright © 2011 Kerry Brown. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1 A brief history of elections, democracy and civil society in modern China
2 Democracy... with Chinese characteristics
3 The village election process
4 The great debate: where is Chinese village democracy going?
5 The big picture: elections as part of the dynamics of a society in change
Last words