A Chinese experiment in democracy meets fierce resistance

One villager's fight against corruption results in abuse and arrests.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 3, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 2

Huiguan, China - When Fang Zhaojuan began organizing her neighbors here to impeach village leaders whom she suspected of corruption, she had no idea that the challenge would lead her first to the hospital and then to jail.

She was following the law, after all, and had launched legal petitions signed by a large majority of villagers. They believed they had been cheated of proper compensation when their village council had sold land for industrial development to the government of a nearby township.

Mrs. Fang, her family, and colleagues on a recall committee, however, found themselves plunged into a violent political drama. This, they say, has shown residents of the hamlet just how narrow the boundaries remain for their democratic rights. It has also, they add, hardened their resolve to enforce them.

Huiguan, a nondescript cluster of brick houses outside the port of Tianjin, is like tens of thousands of other Chinese villages, on the verge of being swallowed up by a fast-expanding city. Its farmland has all but disappeared under new factories, and under circumstances that Fang, a 43-year-old widow, found suspicious.

"She never expected this," says her sister, Fang Zhaohui, displaying photographs of Fang's bruised and bloody body taken in the hospital six weeks ago, after thugs had broken into her home and beaten her. "She never expected it would be so difficult and that the government would be so black."

"The township government is abusing its power," complains Li Guangde, a village activist who has so far avoided jail. "They are putting difficulties in our way and a lot of pressure on us. Perhaps some township officials were involved in the land sale and maybe there was corruption. I don't know."

Democratic hopes sputter

Chinese law prescribes direct democratic elections for village councils, and provides for recalls if a majority of villagers lose faith in their leaders. "But that is only the law," cautions Yawei Liu, head of the China Program at Atlanta's Carter Center, which has worked with the Chinese authorities to strengthen village self-rule.

"Once you move into the real world it is very difficult to enforce," he adds.

Ten years ago, when China's definitive law on village elections came into effect, many officials and some foreign scholars touted it as heralding broader democracy nationwide.

Today, such hopes are sputtering. Fang's fate illustrates one key weakness of the experiment: It is very hard for grass-roots democracy to thrive in a vacuum where superior levels of government are undemocratic.

"Unless there are changes higher up, this kind of democracy cannot be sustained," fears Dr. Liu.

"At any point in the process the authoritarian system can come into play" to frustrate villagers' democratic aims, says Kevin O'Brien, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied village governance in China for years. "This story is an example of bottom-up democracy being swamped by undemocratic people who are used to giving orders."

On the other hand, Dr. Liu points out, "the beatings and the jailings are a reflection ... that the villagers are so keenly aware of their rights there is nothing else the government can do."

Recent events in Huiguan show that "when people know they have been given some political rights, they are going to take advantage of this," adds Li Lianjiang, a village elections expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "This is a positive sign of democratic growth."

Roots of dispute

The drama here began last November, when Han Baocai, an 80-year-old farmer, filed a complaint with the Tianjin municipal government about the way in which the Huiguan village council had sold more than 50 acres of commonly held land to the higher-level township government of nearby Xiaozhan.

Villagers claim now that Xiaozhan paid 10,000 RMB per mu ($8,500 per acre), and sold it to developers for 800,000 RMB per mu ($685,000 per acre), alleging that the Xiaozhan and Huiguan authorities shared the profits at the villagers' expense.

Xiaozhan deputy Communist party secretary Liang Hongbin insists that the township paid a fair market price for agricultural land and that villagers were compensated according to the law.

Party Secretary Hao Shumin acknowledges the Xiaozhan government sold the land to developers for nearly twice what it paid for it, because the land's status had changed from village agricultural land to nationally owned industrial-use land, increasing its value. But he says the price was less than a tenth of what the villagers claim.

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page