Chapter 56 55. Direct Elections in Pyeongchang: Democracy in the Cloud

In 2006, Pingchang County won the "Third China Local Government Innovation Award" for the project of "public recommendation and direct election of township party committee leaders". Pingchang has become a window for domestic and foreign scholars and politicians to observe China's political reform.Pingchang County is a small county seat in the northeast of Sichuan and at the southern foot of Micang Mountain. The county covers an area of ​​2,229 square kilometers and has a total population of 970,906, including 795,446 agricultural population.It is a key county in the national poverty alleviation and development work, and it is also a designated assistance county by the Ministry of Justice, Sichuan Provincial Development and Reform Commission and Sichuan Provincial Road and Bridge Group.Pingchang's economy is not developed, but the experiment of directly electing township party committee secretaries started in 2001, which made Pingchang the focus of people's attention. Some media even called Pingchang the Xiaogang village of China's political reform.

It takes more than five hours to drive along winding mountain roads from Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province, to Pingchang, an agricultural county with a population of 970,000, in the southwestern province's northeast county.As the British author Mark Leonrd observed, "terraced fields were reclaimed from hillsides to grow crops. The road appeared and disappeared in the mist, tracing the outlines of a town perched on a cliff. Exaggerated concrete houses suddenly loomed in front of them." , like a slap to a visitor." When the Englishman reached Pyeongchang, he found himself surrounded by morose peasants, voicing all kinds of troubles and hoping that he would help them out, or at least be able to deliver their complaints.These troubles include: the income from the land is declining; the cost of medical care and education is rising; the children do not have enough adult male role models; and how lonely they are left behind.The villages here are the same as most inland villages in China. Most of the young and able-bodied people take the initiative to make a living in the city, leaving some old people and children to guard the still growing fields. $900 on the land," an elderly woman told Mark Leonrd.It’s just that all these people who complained to him didn’t expect, “My friends in Beijing sent me here to study Pingchang as a model for China’s future”.

If Pyeongchang can attract many tourists, it must not be because of its beautiful scenery or a successful model of economic development, although these two are the reasons why a place in China has become an iconic area and attracted countless tourists or pilgrims element.The attraction of Pingchang is that it is the first county-level city in mainland China to implement public nomination and direct election of leading members of township-level party committees: when the township was changed in 2001, the Pingchang County Party Committee conducted a pilot project of public nomination and direct election of party committee leaders in Lingshan Township. , Xinhua News Agency reporters Jiang Zuoping and Li Yin said in their report that this is "the first attempt in the history of the CCP to directly elect the leadership of the party committee by party members."Liu Qianxiang, secretary of the county party committee of Pingchang County, told Mark Leonrd, who conducted a survey in Pingchang in 2006, that the political experiment of direct elections through open referrals made this small place that was originally inconspicuous on the map of China begin to attract attention from all over the world. “Our economic Not as developed, but we are a step ahead politically."

Liu Qianxiang, secretary of the Pingchang County Party Committee, published an article in the "Study Times", listing the background of the direct election experiment in Pingchang that the top leader of the local Communist Party believes: "First, the rural social organization structure and interest relations have undergone profound changes. The forms of rural organizations are diversified, the subjects of interest are diversified, and the relationship between interests is complicated. The relationship between social organizations and members has changed from administrative affiliation to interest affiliation, and behavior has changed from political promotion to interest-driven. The second is the differentiation and transfer of power in rural grassroots organizations. The majority of farmers The dependence on the party organization gradually shifted to the dependence on the market and economic organizations, the power of the party and government organizations gradually shifted to the market and economic organizations, autonomous organizations, policies and laws, and mass media, and the cohesion and appeal of grassroots organizations declined. The third is traditional The contradictions and problems brought about by the cadre selection and appointment system have become increasingly acute. For a long time, the traditional organizational appointment method has led to frequent changes in cadres. Fourth, the conditions for speeding up the construction of inner-Party democracy at the grassroots level are maturing."

Other researchers are much more blunt. Wang Shuxian of the Comparative Politics and Economics Research Center of the Central Compilation Bureau stated in her article on the direct election of township party secretaries that such reforms “are mainly aimed at alleviating and responding to the ruling party’s legitimacy crisis".For example, the researcher said that in 1998, the government of Hanshui Township, Pingchang County, Sichuan Province, delayed repaying the debts owed to the villagers. The tension between groups has reached a rather intense level. Villagers’ disapproval of township leaders has made it difficult for the township party and government to carry out work in the countryside. The county party committee is trying to ease the legitimacy crisis of the township party and government through public nomination and direct election of the township party secretary.” Wang Shuxian Say.

Zheng Kaiping, head of the Organization Department of Pingchang County at the time, recalled: "There is no regulation in the party constitution for direct elections through public referral, and we asked the higher-level organization department for instructions, but there was no written reply. It was indeed a risky approach for us to experiment in a township, so the publicity was very low-key. We didn’t dare to report the material before and after we did it, but we firmly believed that what we did was correct.” Liu Qianxiang later recalled his thoughts at the time, “I was very detached from power itself, and I didn’t take it so seriously”; “For Pingchang The county is proud and honored to promote the direct election of township party committees and the reform and innovation of expanding inner-party democracy. If there is any risk in doing so, I will not be the secretary of the county party committee in the future, and I will continue to carry out direct elections through public referral.” Journalists and scholars who visited Pingchang repeatedly told a metaphor that choosing the secretary of a township party committee is like looking for a partner for a son or daughter. It's the other half they chose. If something goes wrong, they can't complain about their parents.

The first directly elected township party secretary was Chi Chunlin, party secretary of Pingchang Lingshan Township.When the Pingchang County Party Committee decided to conduct a pilot project in Pingchang, it persuaded the secretary of the township Party Committee, who felt that the popularity was not bad, to agree to run for his original position. "I feel that I have done some practical things for the village in the past few years. The party members and the masses still recognize them and feel confident that they will win the election. Why don’t the leaders of the party committee have the courage to campaign for a speech at a party meeting with hundreds of people?” Wang Yongbing, an assistant researcher at the Comparative Politics and Research Center of the Central Compilation Bureau, later described Chi Chunlin’s thoughts in this way.The first directly-elected township party secretary after 1949, he later reported his experience in direct elections to Zeng Qinghong, a senior CCP leader in charge of appointing and dismissing government officials, in Chengdu.It’s just that the party cadres in Pingchang County, including Chi Chunlin, Liu Qianxiang, and Li Kaiping, probably didn’t expect this risky move to be called as revolutionary as Xiaogang Village residents’ household contracting by the media who came later. move.The only difference from Xiaogang is that Xiaogang's reforms spread quickly throughout China, so that some people joked later that Fengyang unified the world twice, once by Zhu Yuanzhang and the other by Xiaogang; To a large extent, it is still an exploration of the Chinese Communist Party's promotion of "inner-party democracy."

In January 2004, Pingchang County extended its trial of public nomination and direct election of townships to nine of the county's 27 townships.Zheng Kaiping later stated in an article that the 2,901 party members who participated in the election accounted for 87% of the total party members, and 116 of them came back from their places of work.Reporters from Xinhua News Agency conducted interviews on the direct election process in all nine townships.A reporter from China’s official news agency said, “This is the first large-scale trial of direct elections for the leadership of the party committee in the history of the party. Media reports and the decision of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee to "gradually expand the scope of direct elections for members of grassroots party organizations' leading groups" began to make Pingchang famous throughout the country and became a famous political experiment field.

Liu Qianxiang summarized Pingchang's "intra-party democracy" experiment as three open, two-vote and three-round elections.3. Publicity refers to the public propaganda calling for all party members to participate in the election, open registration, and public recommendation of candidates.The two-vote system refers to recommendation votes and electoral votes. Candidates must first give speeches and defenses at township party members’ meetings to win votes for themselves and strive to become official candidates; Formal candidates are directly elected, and more than half are elected.Three rounds of elections refer to three rounds of elections in the form of direct elections, backward elections and differential elections.The so-called reverse election refers to the election of the party secretary in the first round, the deputy secretary of the party committee in the second round, and the other members of the party group in the third round.

On January 14, 2006, the "Publicly Nominated and Directly Election of Township Party Committee Leaders" project declared by Pingchang County won the "Third China Local Government Innovation Award".The Local Government Innovation Award is an award established by the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. As the name suggests, its purpose is to encourage local governments to innovate in governance, so as to find a way to break the governance and reform of the entire Chinese central government—for a long time, the central Government reform has always been one of the most sensitive topics, stirring up chatter in any corner of China and the curiosity of the world's most important politicians, intellectuals and media leaders, but for a long time no one It can be clearly seen that in this regard, "What does China think" (What does China think? This is also the name of a book later published by Mark Leonard). It was on the recommendation of his friend from the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau that Mark Leonard came to Pingchang to see the so-called hope of China.

The head of the China Local Government Reform and Innovation Research Group is Yu Keping, deputy director of the Central Compilation Bureau.Yu Keping is the brightest political scholar in China in recent years, known for his speeches on democracy and exploration of inner-party democracy.Of course, what adds to his weight and attention is the rumor that he is the think tank of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Yu Keping's most famous article is "Democracy is a Good Thing" which he published in 2006. As soon as this article came out, Luoyang became expensive. Although Yu Keping himself was under double attack at the same time, some people attacked him for promoting the Western system and being too Westernized; Others have attacked him for whitewashing the current political system.In an interview with Nanfang Daily, Yu Keping denied his identity as a high-level think tank and literary courage, but also admitted that part of his research was "ordered by the official and even the core institutions of the ruling party."He almost goes to bed at one o'clock every night, and starts reading at six o'clock in the morning. He rarely socializes at night and spends most of his time reading, but he also likes watching TV dramas and surfing the Internet.In Yu Keping's view, what China should carry out is a political innovation of "incremental democracy and good governance". Like economic reform, political reform should also carry out incremental reform; with regard to inner-party democracy, "China's 70 million party members themselves is already larger than the population of the United Kingdom." But there are more chaotic discourses about democracy among Chinese intellectuals.Another Chinese intellectual, Pan Wei, said: "The most important topic for Chinese people at present is not who should govern the government, but how the government should govern."Pan Wei's view is that political reform should first solve social problems, rather than starting from Western theories.It has also been argued that the establishment of the rule of law should precede the establishment of democracy.All these theories are pointing in one direction, that is, China should not simply follow the Western path of political democracy, but should develop its own unique governance structure and political system.The first thing that cannot be shaken is the status of the Communist Party of China. Any reform must be carried out under the premise that no general elections can be held. This makes any reform inevitably stop at a "deliberative dictatorship", or the participation in and discussion of state affairs advocated by the Communist Party of China—— But, of course, never govern.Will this be a new form of government organization?Nobody knows.