Residents of thousands of Chinese villages are about to go to
the polls to elect their local committees, but officials and
experts say there are some gaping loopholes in the law governing
villagers' committees.
For more than half of the country's rural areas, where the
village autonomy system has been in place for almost two decades,
this is an election year.
Rural people in more than 300,000 villages across 18 provinces,
municipalities and autonomous regions, including Zhejiang,
Jiangsu and Anhui, will elect new village committees beginning this
month.
In 1998, the Standing Committee of the National People's
Congress (NPC) ratified the final version of the Organic Law of
Villagers' Committees, which had been in pilot enforcement since
1988.
The law grants villagers the right to directly elect their local
committees, which are responsible for village management and
administration. It sets out basic principles of democracy at the
local level, and states that any villager aged 18 years or over has
the right to vote and stand as a candidate.
Committees may have from three to seven members, but in practice
most have five. Members are elected every three years by qualified
villagers, with election results announced immediately after
balloting.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs reports that most of the 680,000
villages in China have adopted a direct election system.
Twenty-six provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have
laid out their own election statutes, and 27 have completed five
rounds of elections since 1988.
"But 20 years of practice has shown there are a lot of loopholes
in the law," said Wang Jinghua, a senior official from the Ministry
of Civil Affairs.
Topping the list of concerns is bribery.
The cause of the problem is the lack of a clear legal definition
of bribery and the absence of enforcement provisions, according to
Wang.
Bribery is rife in many poverty-stricken areas, according to Ji
Jianqiang, Party secretary of Shuangbei Village in Shuanggou
County, central China's Hubei
Province.
In some villages, candidates are even directly appointed by
higher authorities at the county level, according to some experts.
Yet the only way villagers can report infringements of their rights
is to lodge complaints with the higher authorities.
Early this year, the civil affairs ministry released a circular
emphasizing the difference between bribery and "general public
relations."
But Professor Shi Weimin of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences pointed out that the circular is still deficient in terms
of dealing with specific cases because "there are huge differences
from village to village in terms of customs."?
Some experts say the recent moves to rescind or reduce the
agricultural tax could help solve the problem of bribery as the
financial power of village officials has to some extent been
weakened.
But Shi disagrees, arguing that the authority to distribute land
and allocate project funds is still a source of substantial
power.
Another problem lies in the voter registration system, which has
been put under pressure by widespread rural emigration in recent
years.
"Poor villages find it hard to summon voters working far away
while rich villages worry about whether migrants qualify as
voters," Wang said.
The ministry has suggested that the NPC, China's legislature,
begin drafting a revised version of the law this year.
"Although a lot of problems need to be addressed, the basic task
is to clarify the relationship between the village committee and
the Party branch, in which I think the latter should play the role
of regulator while the former must run village affairs," Shi
said.
China has no specific national law regulating village committee
elections.
(China Daily March 21, 2005)