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| Grassroots democracy quells rural unrest |
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In a study tour of Tibet, Wang Jinhong, a Chinese professor keen on grassroots democracy, was amazed to find that elections in remote villages had proceeded smoothly and efficiently.
"In voter registration, the nomination of candidates, election speeches and ballot counting, the principles of equality, fairness and openness have been fully observed," said Prof. Wang with South China Normal University, in south China's Guangdong Province.
He learnt that the election organizers had been trained in a China-European Union cooperative program on village governance.
In May 2001, China and the EU launched a five-year inter-governmental project, aiming to promote basic level democracy in rural China.
Eight training centers -- a national base under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and seven in Jiangxi, Yunnan, Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Shandong, Henan and Gansu provinces -- have been piloted under the scheme, serving an area with a population of 400 million.
European experts, however, say the project has been challenging.
"Many trainees have never seen such training before," said Jurgen Ritter, academic team leader of the program. "But the vast majority are diligent and we talk about problems they encounter every day."
China's rural residents have been allowed to run their own villages for almost two decades, after the Organic Law of Village Committees was piloted in June 1988. Ten years later, the law formally granted farmers the right to directly elect or vote out village heads and members of committees.
Last year, approximately 300,000 villages had committee elections.
Grassroots democracy has helped to solve problems in the countryside.
In June 2000, Shuixin villagers in east China's Wenzhou city challenged their committee on housing allocation, rental of collectively-owned properties, and faulty investment of village assets.
A crowd of 300 burst into the committee offices asking for a clear explanation and a public audit of village accounts. The two sides argued before parting with animosity.
Subsequently, villagers petitioned higher authorities seeking a solution, but failed to receive a satisfactory response. Then the villagers organized a petition for the recall of four of the five committee members.
After a year, the recall referendum was held under the auspices of the seven-member village representative assembly. A majority voted for the recall motion to huge applause.
"Chinese farmers have no experience of resolving their problems through democratic means," said Wang Jinhong, adding that even today, most farmer peasants would rather seek solutions through petition or protest against their government, sometimes even causing social unrest.
"If villagers find solutions through publicly elected committees, a host of rural social problems could be resolved peacefully," he said. "This is also a major goal for China's grassroots democracy."
Earlier this year, "democratic management" was listed as one of the standards of building a "new socialist countryside" in China's five-year development blueprint.
The program made resolving rural problems the "uppermost priority", as education and healthcare have been turned into a serious problem, coupled with a growing gap between rich and poor.
But democracy can not be built on a single day. "We expect our training to have a sustainable impact, and not just be a flash in the pan," Ritter said.
Source: Xinhua
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