| China wary of 'purple finger fever"... |
The ruling Communist Party of China is carrying out internal party reform to head off the prospect of the one-party state being ditched. Worried about the threat posed by democracy, the government of the world's fastest growing economy is pressing ahead with much-needed internal reforms while playing down calls for an expansion of voting in the electoral system. The western province of Sichuan is about to lead the country in a bold experiment in internal Communist Party democracy that, if successful, could be adopted nationwide. All of Sichuan's township level Communist Party committees are being "required in principle" to hold democratic elections for Party chiefs in December.
In the People's Republic of China there are six levels of government, with village and township being the lowest. Instead of being appointed by a secretive committee, prospective candidates for the position of Party secretary will for the first time need the ballot-box approval of their Party peers.
The move has been welcomed as a crucial injection of responsiveness and accountability into local Party leaderships. The heavy-handedness of local officials has been partly to blame for increases in rural instability that in recent years have seen pitched battles between police and farmers.
Although it is not clear exactly how candidates will be chosen for the December elections, it is expected that it will be more than a mere formality. Trials conducted in other provinces have seen candidates present manifestos and make campaign speeches, though it is rarely as competitive as in the West.
For reformers, it complements the recent news that President Hu Jintao is looking to revive the memory of Hu Yaobang, a reformist leader whose death sparked the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Paying tribute to him was previously seen as taboo as it might spark calls for a re-examination of the massacre.
Wang Yi, a law professor and political commentator, said: "There are two opinions about Hu Jintao. One is that he is a conservative. The other is that he is an opportunist. I believe in the latter and that in the coming year we will continue to see him make positive moves on issues like internal Party reform."
There is speculation, however, that the move to promote internal Party reform is smoke and mirrors designed to placate pro-democracy reformers.
Since the 1980s, the country's 800,000 villages have been regularly electing their own village committee leaders and there have been increasingly vocal demands from within China for this system to be expanded to the townships. Some regions of China, looking for creative ways to improve local governance, have already experimented with the idea. In Boyun township, in Sichuan Province, 16,000 locals were able to cast votes to elect a mayor, who was usually chosen by the Party-controlled township congress.
In part because of this, after the last round of township mayoral elections in 2003, the Central Party Committee in Beijing, which oversees Party affairs, issued a directive reminding provinces that such elections were unconstitutional.
"The problem was that direct elections of the mayor at township level were challenging the legitimacy of the township Party secretary. If the mayor is elected by all the voters, he commands a stronger power base," said a source at the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MOCA).
Though conducted without approval from Beijing, such experiments have long been a feature of the Chinese political system, as lower-level bureaucrats try to find creative ways of boosting economic growth or improving social stability in the hope of being noticed by higher officials.
At village level too, MOCA, which oversees the elections, has recorded hundreds of cases of friction between village Party officials and the elected village committee representatives over who calls the shots.
However, Beijing's decision to allow Sichuan Province to hold intra-Party elections raises the question as to whether China is designing its own one-party system of democracy.