ABSTRACT

What to make out of village elections in the PRC? After more than a decade in which the direct ballot in the countryside has now been researched with growing intensity in both China and the West, an assessment of the significance of this institutional innovation introduced to China’s political system in the late 1980s in terms of both democratic development and regime legitimation remains ambivalent and controversial. Many different aspects of village elections have come under scrutiny. While questions related to the history and technical implementation of the 1987 Organic Law on Villager Committees (Elklit 1997; Kelliher 1997; Chan 1998; O’Brien and Li 2000; Niou 2002; Horsley 2003, Tan 2004), electoral competition (Shi 1999a, 1999b; Liu 2000; Pastor and Tan 2000; He 2001b), institutional conflicts in the villages – especially between the party branch and the village committee – caused by elections (Guo and Bernstein 2004; Wang 2003; Yuan 2006) and, more generally, the relationship between elections and the local political economy (Oi 1996; Oi and Rozelle 2000; He 2001a) dominated the research agenda in the beginning, the connection between elections and political contention (triggering collective action) in the countryside gained more and more attention over the years (Li 2001; O’Brien 2002; O’Brien and Li 2005, 2006). As it seems, some scholars in the West are now keen to find out more about the changing political awareness of peasants and rural cadres in order to assess the impact of direct village elections on established power arrangements in the countryside, even speculating on the rise of the peasant citizen (O’Brien 2001; O’Brien and Li 2005; Li and O’Brien forthcoming).