Chinese village voting wins praise

QUANWANG, China -- With former President Carter watching, villagers cast ballots Wednesday in a display meant to showcase China's experiment with limited, low-level elections. \nAbout 860 voters gathered in the back lot of a silk factory to choose the five-member Quanwang committee, supposed to run daily affairs in this village near Shanghai. \nAfter hearing brief speeches by just two of the seven candidates, a call for questions elicited only one raised hand. Then voters crowded into outdoor voting booths. Volunteers stood ready to help older villagers who couldn't read the candidates' names. \nThe results were hand-counted in 10 minutes. The biggest winner was Zhao Xiaomao, elected to his sixth straight term as committee leader. \nThe large number of higher-level officials and police present suggested the vote was carefully managed for Carter and accompanying journalists. But the former president, whose Atlanta-based Carter Center has monitored Chinese elections for five years, said the vote appeared to be "a completely democratic process." \nHe called it proof that democracy was spreading, albeit slowly, through China's grass roots. \n"These villagers have much more authority over their own lives and their villages than they had before," Carter said. "In my opinion, that's a situation impossible to reverse." \nSince the first such vote in 1987, some two-thirds of China's 930,000 villages have held elections, Carter said. That means about 800 million of China's 1.26 billion people have had some experience with democracy, he said. \nThe elections are limited to villages, the lowest level of government. But Beijing has been promoting them as a way to curb rampant official corruption, and to make governments more responsive in the countryside, where violent protests have broken out against taxes and official indifference. \nThe central government has pressed forward with reforms, including a 1998 law prohibiting Communist Party interference in elections and guaranteeing direct nomination of candidates by voters and secret balloting. \nBut experts say only about a third of elections are fair and open. Others continue to be marred by fraud, often by local officials who control nominations or outright buy votes. \n"In some villages, the elections are completely controlled by the rich and powerful. It is easy to bribe poor farmers," said Dang Guoying, an expert on village elections at the China Academy of Social Sciences. \nAnother problem is the Communist Party's ban on independent political organizations, which makes forming parties or even loose coalitions illegal. \nThe party has also been reluctant to hand real powers to the elected committees. In March, 56 elected village leaders in Shandong province resigned en masse to protest what they called party control over village politics. \nBeijing has decreed that village Communist Party secretaries still outrank the elected committees. And the party keeps a firm grip on higher levels of government, where more important decisions about taxes or spending are made. \n"Chinese leaders may decide to move elections up to higher levels, which I'd like to see," Carter said. \nIn Quanwang, a village of about 1,100 in Jiangsu province noted for its canals and graceful bridges, candidates did not campaign. Voters said they had no idea about differences in their ideas or platforms. \nChen Bugen, a 53-year-old rice farmer, said he enjoyed voting. But he couldn't tell any difference in the government's responsiveness or policies since the first village's election. \n"The government's the same as it was before 1987," he said.