ABSTRACT

It cannot be denied that China has made great progress in democratic practice since the beginning of reform and opening up. Local democracy has been developed through bold and proactive explorations, including experiments in the direct election of the township heads or party secretaries in some places, and intra-party reform in other places. However, democratic practice in China is now facing great diffi culty, for it has reached a bottleneck. This is mainly refl ected in the diffi culty we have in incorporating the direct election of township heads into the existing institutional arrangement. Some people even believe that, if allowed to go unchecked, this practice will pose a threat to the ruling party’s authority and the power structure. Therefore, without democratic innovation, grassroots democratic experiments, however numerous they might be, cannot make a breakthrough, nor can they be institutionalized. In this chapter, we will conduct a case study of the direct election of the head of Shiping Township in Yunnan Province from the perspective of cooperative-harmonious democracy.