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Independent Candidates in China’s Local People’s Congress Elections

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Abstract

In the Chinese political system, according to the constitution, the people’s congresses at the primary level are the only institution which the voters can directly elect. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the “direct elections” and takes every measure in the elections to prevent grassroots power from entering even the primary-level people’s congresses. In recent years, grassroots power has kept struggling for its legal rights in the “direct elections” held in a few localities. The conflicts between the grassroots power and the authoritarian party in the “direct elections” have become an interesting political phenomenon, a subject deserves close observation and research. This paper studies the background of the independent candidates, their motivations and behaviour in elections. The paper also examines the party’s control in the elections and thus exposes the true nature of China’s people’s congress “direct” elections. The paper argues that independent candidates can have little impacts on China’s political structure at the current stage because of the party’s tight control, but their political participation has the most democratic value, compared with the “reforms” instigated and carried out by the CCP.

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Notes

  1. According to Article 2 of The Electoral Law of the National People's Congress and Local People's Congress of the PRC, “Deputies to the people's congresses of cities not divided into districts, municipal districts, counties, autonomous counties, townships, nationality townships, and towns shall be elected directly by their constituencies” [10].

  2. I interviewed some informants in China during January and February in 2009 and in December 2009 but their names and other identifying characteristics are not disclosed in the paper because of concerns for their safety.

  3. Some candidates in this category might be nominated by other political parties 民主党派 rather than the CCP or some people’s organisations人民团体. Here, organisation 组织refers to a bureaucratic system in a range wider than the CCP but the CCP holds the absolute power in the system.

  4. A few student independent candidates in Beijing later became famous democratic activists.

  5. Zeng Jianyu, according to an informant, is a reputable grassroots hero, influential independent candidate and brave social activist. The power holders resented him and were afraid of his activities of “protecting rights”. They then created the crime of “fraud” for him and put him in prison from 2001 to 2002 and from 2006 to now.

  6. Yao Lifa has now become the most well-known social activist in China struggling for freedom in local elections. Although he has not been arrested and put into prison, he continuously suffers the authority’s persecution, such as being monitored 24 h a day, being frequently subjected to house searches and having possessions confiscated, and being frequently detained or house arrested. On March 18, 2010 when this paper is being written, VOA revealed the news that Yao’s environment was worsening and he had been out of contact with his friends for some time. http://www1.voanews.com/chinese/news/china/CHINA-HUBEI-20100318-88392757.html

  7. Qianjiang, a small county-level city in Hubei Province became a focus in the 2003 elections. Motivated and guided by the famous independent candidate Yao Lifa, forty-one people competed in the elections for congress seats as independent candidates [2].

  8. The article by Gou Ye [5] published in Nanfangdushi Bao南方都市报 on 22 April 2003 was believed the first one of the massive media reports on the independent candidates in the elections of 2003. According to an informant, the reporter got the hint for his article from a press conference organised by a district people’s congress in Shenzhen, in which the congress officers introduced an independent candidate’s campaign activity in his electorate and highly commended it as evidence of the citizens’ enthusiasm for elections. Making such positive comments, the congress officers perhaps did not expect that the grassroots power would grow so rapidly and would possibly threaten the party’s control over the elections.

  9. The two books The Memoir of the Elections in Shenzhen in 2003 [14] and The Memoir of the District and County People’s Congress Elections in Beijing in 2003 [24] constitute nearly all research on independent candidates Chinese researchers have conducted up to now. The researchers cautiously avoided using the word “independent candidate” in both book names and contents to reduce the sensitivity of the books.

  10. http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/4514649.html

  11. A researcher pointed out that many independent candidates at various localities got to know each other from the relevant media reports and research papers. They inquired from the journalists and researchers about the contact details of each other and then they could become connected during and after elections. According to the researcher, this was probably one of the reasons why the party prohibited news reports and academic research on this subject. On the other hand, when the party felt the potential threat the independent candidates made to their authoritarian rule, they had to control the influence of these people and had to prevent more people from following their path.

  12. Another informant confirmed the existence of the party’s furtive manipulation and he estimated that the party’s prohibitive order was made and transmitted in the middle of 2006. He made this estimation because the last journalistic report in mainstream media on this subject [20] appeared in late March 2006 and there were almost no such reports thereafter. Neither of these two informants, however, could provide direct evidence for the party’s prohibition. Some words in an official propaganda article might be able to suggest the party’s real attitudes, “[the media should] fully understand the spirit of the notice from the central party [referring to the central CCP’s No.12 document of 2006, which is a party’s internal document regarding the organisation work of the local people’s congress elections in 2006 and 2007]…, absolutely control the guiding opinion of journalism…, ensure that all reports will have no negative effects…” [6]. In addition, an expert in Chinese media studies told me that the central party’s publicity department often transmits through the party’s mechanisms these orders that the press media should be quiet on certain topics. The party and governmental publicity departments at various levels and the party mechanisms established inside the public media units will take immediate actions to carry out the order. The media researcher also said such orders are normally not written into any official documents in order to avoid being leaked and being used as evidence of the party’s control over the mass media. This information is in agreement with the above statement that the party could secretly and suddenly keep all media and academia quiet on independent candidate issues.

  13. In my opinion, there are two possible reasons for the unavailability of the statistics of independent candidates in China. First, a survey was prohibited by the party. Second, as a researcher said in an interview, independent candidates, especially self-nominated/informal candidates, could emerge or disappear during any procedural step in an election. This makes calculating their total numbers very difficult.

  14. This estimated figure seems much higher than expected, so it remains questionable.

  15. I have collected the cases in these provinces except for Sichuan, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. The information that there were independent candidates in these three places was obtained from some researchers but they could not or would not provide the candidate names and other details.

  16. The cases I collected and studied were only a very small part of all cases in the 2003 and 2006–2007 elections and they can certainly not represent the whole. However, by categorising the independent candidates from the collected cases and summarising some common features of each category, I hope this part of the paper can help readers to understand the independent candidates and their motivations more easily.

  17. A mass protest movement may reflect the lawyers’ dissatisfaction with authority. In order to maintain their legal rights, on 26 August 2008 three lawyers in Beijing published a letter appealing for a direct election for the chiefs of the Beijing lawyer’s association, which were actually organised and controlled by a government department, the Justice Bureau of Beijing [13]. Very soon thirty five other lawyers expressed their support by signing the letter and more than seventy lawyers and perhaps eighty-two lawyers signed the letter by October ([17]; [19]). The party-controlled lawyer’s association over-reacted to the letter. On 5 September 2008, they published a statement which was in the “red terror” style, criticising these lawyers as “negating the current political system” [15]. The party took drastic measures to dissuade the lawyers from supporting the appeal. Some lawyers were summoned to the justice bureau to make explanations [17]. The justice department of a district government forced the nineteen lawyers in that district who had signed the document to write reports about their “intentions”. Three lawyers had their work contracts terminated because of signing the document [19].

  18. In the field research on the elections for property owner’s committees, some property owner representatives and their lawyers provided me with some detailed information about the conflicts between the property owners and the real estate management firms. Briefly, some huge profits (tens of millions of yuan for a medium size resident community) are generated from the property management fee paid by the property owners and from leasing the public spaces as business premises, parking spaces etc. The elected property owner’s committee, fully on behalf of all owners in the community, has the right to audit how the money is used. However, the government-controlled community offices, allied with the estate management firms, make every effort to invalidate or control the election results. Without any effective inspection from the property owner’s committee, the real estate management firms are quite free when using the money. They can easily bribe the officers for their previous and future support.

  19. The Union of Chinese Nationalists is a political dissenting organisation which was active in the local congress elections in 2006 and 2007. The organisation was established in 2004 by a group of Kuomintang (KMT) supporters in mainland China. The organisation regards the Three Principles of the People 三民主义 as their ideological guideline and it advocates political democratisation in China and the reunification of Mainland China and Taiwan. Even though the union members think they are the “spiritual party members” of the KMT according to the KMT’s party constitution, the KMT negates any relations it has with the union and states it is not responsible for the activities of the union [1]. The CCP announced the union’s illegal status in April of 2007 [21]. The communication between the union members is mainly on the internet. The union is actively involved in the activities of maintaining villagers’ rights and competing in the local congress elections.

  20. The activities of political organisations (except for the “legal” puppet parties) are strictly prohibited in China. The open activities of political organisations in elections will definitely bring severe punishment to the participants. In order to avoid being persecuted, the convenor asked the organisation members to stand for the elections as non-political individuals [3] and the union would not fund their electoral activities ([18]:44).

  21. The union declared on its website that 112 union members would stand for the elections in 2006 and 2007 but only twenty of them were on a published list ([18]:44). The detailed information of the twenty union member independent candidates is available in an article in the magazine Beijng Spring ([22]:12)

  22. A union member expressed in his article that “his comrades could understand, respect each other. They could also support, cooperate with and keep watch for each other in their electoral activities” ([22]:12)

  23. A union member clearly stated in his passage their intention and strategies in the elections [8]. Another member briefed the intentions and strategies in a passage ([22]:12).

  24. Since the union members who suffered these persecutions may have been actively involved in other political activities apart from the congress elections, their participation in elections perhaps was not the only reason for their persecution but it was at least an important one.

  25. Two independent candidates I interviewed, who could be defined as social activists in the third category, were actively engaged in the work of helping the property owners in cities and the villagers in rural areas (possibly the independent candidates of the second category) to maintain their rights.

  26. According to a researcher, some dissenters searched for the news of “rights-infringement” cases and then contacted the victims. They tried to help the victims to maintain their rights through all possible legal ways but normally their efforts were in vain. By that time, the dissenters would clarify to the victims that the main problem was in the nation’s political system. They would try to persuade the victims to be a member of their organisation or at least a supporter of them. The researcher said that it had become an efficient method of these dissenters to strengthen their power or expand their influence, which also explained why the dissenters were interested in maintaining rights activities. The party might have secretly tightened the control over the mass movements of maintaining rights after knowing the dissenters’ intention but there is no published evidence for the party’s attitude and measures except for two reports in China Review News [4] and Takungpao [12].

  27. No exact number of the successful cases can be obtained from both archival and field research. According to some researchers and social activists, the total number of successful independent candidates in the elections of 2003 and 2006–2007 was less than ten.

  28. The summarisation of the suppressive methods was fully based on the analysis of the evidentiary facts derived from certain procedural steps of the collected cases. The detailed facts cannot be provided because of the length of this paper.

  29. According to the Electoral Law, “zoning of electoral districts”, the topic of Articles 24 and 25, is a procedural step before “registration of voters” which is discussed in Articles 26, 27 and 28. Also, Article 26 states that “the registration of voters shall be conducted on the basis of electoral districts”, which confirms this order [10].

  30. The ambiguous expressions in Article 31 of the Electoral Law, which enable election organisers to manipulate this step quite easily, are like “[decide the formal list of candidates] in accordance with the opinion of the majority of voters”, and “If a relative consensus cannot be reached on full candidates for deputies, a preliminary election shall be conducted…” [10].

  31. In the Electoral Law amended in 2010, Article 9 states that “an electoral committee member should resign his/her position in the committee before he/she can become a candidate” [10]. In the future, according to this Article, it will become unlawful for the election organisers to stand for the elections that they organise. The effect of this amendment to Electoral Law still needs to be examined in future elections.

  32. This is only a hypothesis at the current stage and perhaps will be very difficult to become a reality considering the CCP’s tight control.

  33. During a field trip I happened to access some data regarding a local people’s congress election which was held in Shanghai in 2009. Due to a special reason, the combination of two districts and their people’s congresses, this was perhaps the only local people’s congress election held in China between the last election year (2006–2007) and the next election year (2011–2012) and very luckily there was an independent candidate in the election. Therefore, the case was very valuable for the research of any new developments in this area. The analysis of the data leads to a conclusion that the party tightened its control of the election and strengthened the control of independent candidates. The data shows that the party took more drastic measures to stop the independent candidate in nearly all procedural steps discussed in this paper.

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    Zaijun Yuan

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Yuan, Z. Independent Candidates in China’s Local People’s Congress Elections. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 16, 389–405 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-011-9167-x

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