Chinese Village Democracy and the Organic Law of 1987

Introduction: Origins of the Organic Law

The Organic Law on Village Elections was passed by the National People's Congress in China in December 1987. Western and Chinese observers and specialists in political science and sociology still debate the reasons the Chinese government had for adopting a measure intended to sustain democracy in rural life. A closer look at village life throughout the country prior to the implementation of the Organic Law reveals some of the factors that may have prompted the regime to adopt such measures — measures that ran against its deepest convictions according to socialist ideology.

According to some observers, such as Anne F. Thurston, the process of reducing collective farming until it was completely eliminated from the rural map of China — a process that began in the mid-1970s — created a power vacuum that increased the potential for chaos. Villages became susceptible to falling under the control of opportunists: people interested only in their own welfare and that of their close circles, the so-called cliques.

Consequently, the Chinese government may have adopted the Organic Law — designed to reform economic and social life in rural areas by allowing villagers to elect their village leaders directly in open, free, and fair elections — in order to reestablish order, regain control, and find new resources to successfully implement state policies such as taxation, birth control, and other unpopular measures. According to the new law, Villagers Committees were to be directly elected by villagers and were to function as entities separate from the Township Government.

Until 1990, the law was poorly implemented — the Tiananmen events in particular delayed any measures intended to reinforce democracy through its two powerful dimensions: the distinction between state and society, and the right to self-governance. The enormous economic changes in China during the preceding two decades produced significant shifts at the societal level and inevitably gave rise to social groups with different interests, tilting the balance toward a more pluralistic society. The degree of separation between society and state proposed by many Chinese scholars in the late 1980s was put into practice in the form of grassroots politics in China's 800,000 villages in the early 1990s, and there are significant indicators that the reform would eventually reach the next level — urban life.

Economic Reform and the Conditions for Village Self-Government

The degree to which the Organic Law succeeded or failed in "teaching democracy to the peasants" — as some prominent figures in the regime had hoped — is yet to be fully determined. According to numerous surveys, studies, case studies, and books by Chinese and Western scientists and specialists in politics, sociology, and anthropology, the law's effects were significant and should not be underestimated in the context of political reform.

According to Yijiang Ding, at the beginning of the 1980s the regime — which counted Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang among its leaders — acted in the spirit of reform by challenging the principle of centralism. Ding sees the shift in views on socialist ideology as driven by a change in the functions of the state. Under Leninist doctrine, the state's interests — which were equated with those of society — were directed toward fighting the enemy class. Once the regime officially declared that no enemy class remained, its primary role had to change. Ideological debates among scholars were accompanied by the economic reform begun in 1979. The state began to work more toward managing society's affairs and less in the spirit of dictatorship.

The economic changes brought by the gradual withdrawal of the state from economic life were also felt in the rural economy. Before the early 1980s, every decision in village life was made at the centre. Villagers were told what to plant based on what the leadership decided was best, regardless of whether those leaders were even aware of local climatic conditions and real needs in the fields. Once the economic reform began, decision-making was left in the hands of those closer to peasants and their actual needs. As Ding writes: "a realm of social and economic life that is not directly controlled by the state has developed, which in turn has created conditions for the development of autonomous grassroots communities and horizontal social groupings." (Ding, p. 12)

The complexity of social life in rural China is enormous. After villages had been consolidated into larger units, there were approximately 800,000 villages with an average of 1,000 residents by the late 1980s. The implementation of the Organic Law for village self-government varies greatly from one region to another and even from one village to the next.

The process of self-governance and the formation of grassroots politics did not emerge from nothing, nor did they result from the regime's desire to experiment on hundreds of millions of villagers regardless of their real interests. The economic reform took place not only in China's industrial regions but also in the countryside. Collective farming disappeared by the late 1970s, and state directives on rural economic policies disappeared along with it. Yet in 1985, local governments continued to appoint village leaders. Peng Zhen, one of the regime's most prominent leaders, was a key figure in the implementation of the Organic Law that gave China's villages the right to self-governance and the opportunity to build grassroots democracy.

Chinese culture, tradition, and the political system of the time made democracy sound somewhat different from its Western meaning. Since the beginning of socialism in China, the regime had promoted the idea that democracy was an intrinsic part of the Chinese state and thus enjoyed by Chinese civil society. An inclination toward what Aristotle meant by "democracy," however, only appeared when the Organic Law was passed.

Evidence of Democratic Participation: Survey Findings

According to surveys conducted by John James Kennedy in 34 villages in Shaanxi Province between October and November 2000, the degree of villagers' satisfaction with electoral outcomes depended first and foremost on the methods used to nominate candidates. Kennedy identified three methods: direct nomination by villagers, nomination by local party representatives, and nomination by the township government (Kennedy, 2001, p. 465). The largest share of farmers — 35% — reported having had candidates nominated by villagers directly, followed by 26% who reported candidates appointed by the township government and 21% whose candidates were selected by party locals (Kennedy, 2001, p. 466).

Among Kennedy's conclusions, based on the principle that "the more open the nomination process, the higher the level of uncertainty," was that voter satisfaction was directly dependent on the openness of the elections — indicating a meaningful degree of political awareness. Kennedy's overall conclusion, after a complex survey linking the political process to variables such as economic development, party membership, the presence of clans, and land ownership, was that: "villagers in this sample display a high level of voter sophistication. They can identify the difference between real and cosmetic elections. Moreover, villagers are able to separate economic factors from political institutions and evaluate each on their own merits." (Kennedy, 2001, p. 482)

Kennedy's findings support the view that the experiment the Chinese regime launched in the late 1980s was approaching one of its declared goals — teaching peasants the lesson of democracy. Starting from O'Brien's argument that political efficacy made rural voters aware of their power to change leaders who failed to act in the community's interest, Lianjiang Li wrote an article entitled "The Empowering Effect of Village Elections in China" after conducting interviews and a survey of 400 people from 20 villages in T. county of Jiangxi Province (Li, 2003, p. 652). The results supported his view that open elections motivate people to engage in the electoral process in order to articulate their interests and replace leaders who had previously failed them: "we may expect that as free village elections continue and spread, more villagers will become more active in village policies." (Li, 2003, p. 660)

After conducting research across 56 villages in 1990, Melanie Manion reached the conclusion that "the democracy that is slowly growing in Chinese villages is likely to have implications as profound as the changes in economic organization that created the demand for it." (Manion, 1996, p. 745)

Conclusion: Prospects for Grassroots Democracy in China

Regardless of the intentions the Chinese state had when it decided to pass the Organic Law and then, ten years later, to revise it and move from experimentation to legitimacy of the villagers' committees, it must be clear that direct access to the effects of a real democratic system meant that Pandora's box was opened and the process became irreversible. It is impossible to predict precisely how long it will take or what form the movements driving systemic change will take, but significant portions of that change are likely to come from the peasants who have spent nearly three decades experimenting with democracy — and who may have important lessons to teach not only urban residents but the central government itself.

There is little reason to conclude that most Chinese peasants are entirely unaware of their rights regarding the election of their village leaders and village committees. The degree of that knowledge may vary widely, but a country that has experienced such sweeping economic transformation since the death of Mao could not have remained unchanged in social and political terms. The political structure may still resemble that of the 1970s, but national think tanks are increasingly oriented toward challenging Leninist ideology in favor of a Marxist conception of socialism — and it seems ever more likely that Marxist ideology is being used as a vehicle for ideas that often contradict socialism's emphasis on unity and centralism.

The rapid industrialization, the tremendous economic changes, the influx of foreign investment, and the demonstrated capacity of one enormous nation to reinvent itself are all factors that could point toward a China moving toward democracy on its own terms and within the framework of its own cultural heritage. In the light of the evolution of politics in the Chinese countryside after the adoption of the Organic Law, some observers conclude that the solution the regime found most convenient at a moment of potential chaos — stemming from the power vacuum left by the dissolution of collective farming — has so far proved effective for most of China's rural areas. As Ding concludes, citing Peng Zhen's declared intention: "put the concept of democracy in everyone's mind." (Ding, 2002, p. 80)

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