[MUSIC] So now, let's go into detail about some of the modes of participation. And as I mentioned, the first mode I think that's the most important, is to try and become a leader, to join the Communist Party. As I mentioned also, join a mass campaign, that was very important in the 1950s and the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, if you wanted to become a leader, you would become what was then called a revolutionary rebel, where you would try and overthrow the people who were in power in your organization, in your factory. And, in fact, one of the members of the Gang of Four, a guy named Wang Hongwen, had been a security guard in a factory, or I think maybe in an office building in Shanghai. And he had been able to rise up, he had caught the attention of some of the other leaders, the more leftist leaders in Shanghai, and they brought him in, he was a very good looking guy and at one point he really had a chance. He ranked number three in the party hierarchy. But interestingly, if you go back and look at the political elites, that map that I had or that game board, the snakes and ladders that I had shown you a couple weeks ago. On that, there was 1983, there was a campaign to get rid of what were called beaters, looters, and smashers. And so all the people who got to power using force or violence during the Cultural Revolution were actually removed from their posts. And in another important way would be taking the civil service exam as a government official, and many young people in college in China actually take that government exam. They prepare for political courses in the universities and then sit for the civil service exam in the hope that they will be accepted into the government, and that will give them a good career chance. Now here is some data from 2007 and 2008. I don't think that the data have changed all that much, though the numbers of people trying to enter the party may have gone down somewhat because of the anti-corruption campaign. And my understanding is that the number of college students taking the civil service exam has also gone down because you can't get rich anymore by joining the government. The anti-corruption campaign is just, it's going to catch you. So you could join the party and take the civil service exam if you were really committed to working hard for China. But if you're just committed to try and use that opportunity for self-enrichment, then those people will be less likely to join the party, but here you can see some of the key differences. Women make up 36.5% of the new members in 2008, pretty similar, a little bit higher than in 2007. Ethnic minorities are pretty small, only 187,000. People below the age of 35, 81% of the new members of the Communist Party in 2008 were under 35, and that very much reflects the importance of college as a recruiting location, particularly in the top universities, Peking University, Shanghai University, People's University. Very high percentage of college students get recruited into the party at that time. Another way that people could participate in politics, talked a little bit about it in the political culture, but elections, right? The elections for the Village Director. Sometimes there's elections for the party secretary within the village, but by and large, now we've seen that there are becoming more and more regular elections for the director of the village committee. I was working in the countryside back in 1980-81, doing research for my dissertation. And I discovered that in one village where I was working, one of the local officials who had been in office wanted to run again, and he had not been reelected. He lost terrible face. It was very clear that the peasants didn't like the job he was doing, and that they bounced him out. And that was a very difficult thing for him to face. Now, beginning in the late 1980s, we have seen elections for the Village Director, and these are elections organized by the government, by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. And part of the argument was that if villagers felt that, farmers felt that the leader actually was representing their interests, they would be more willing to spend money on rural projects, more willing to give some money, some of their wealth, to the collective for roads, for that kind of work. And that so it was seen that the electing officials would be good. Now what we do find though is that again across country we get variations. And in some locations you can get much more open electoral process. In some parts of rural China for these village elections there's campaigning, where the two candidates or three candidates could be talking publicly. In other places, they can't. Secret ballot in, I think, about 80% of localities actually used a secret ballot, and we estimate that in about 1999, 2000 when I did my survey, that about 40% of the elections were truly competitive. So here is a table going back to that 1999 survey that I did in rural China, and it asks questions people were allowed to report to us the extent to which they got involved. And so here, one of the surprising things is nomination process. Lot of people tried to nominate candidates, which suggests that the system was pretty open, that almost 21% of people actively tried to make sure that people voted, so there was a big push that gives you this sense of mobilization. Maybe less democratic, but a sense of mobilization to work for an election and try and get people to participate and they were pretty successful. About 80% of people voted for the Village Committee leader and then less participation down here. But again, very small percentage of people who never participated in any kind of election. So that was quite interesting, how active people have been. Now one of the more important things that elections are supposed to do is, you remember when I listed the things of participation, one was to change leaders. And that's a real measure, an important measure of democracy. As it says here, the true indication of democracy is to vote people out of office. And this is data from only the province of Anhui, as it says from Anhui, it's not from Heilongjiang Province, but it's 60 villages. And these were the results of the election in 1999, three years after the election in Heilongjiang. And here you can see that the previous director ran for office, but they kicked him out. And to me, that really says that there's a democratic process, there was a democratic process going on, and even 18% decided not to run for office, that may be because they thought they were going to lose. Maybe they just decided that it was tiring. They didn't get much benefit from that. But in any case, they felt that they didn't want to run for office again. Now the history of these elections is actually somewhat interesting. And the relationship between the Communist Party and its own policy of promoting elections for the Village Director is actually quite interesting. In 1999, which is, I think, the high tide I would say. That's the most open period in village elections in the history of village elections in China since the reform era. They had introduced a policy that they called selection from the sea, and this meant that the citizens could recommend people to run for office. Let's say the village recommended ten people, those ten people would run for office, and then the top five of those people would then run a second round. This is sort of like a western idea of some kind of campaigning, or some kind of meetings to try and pick out who are the best candidates. And then you might get it down to two people, and then they would have the final run for office. But in truth, what you could see was that these people were very often independent candidates. And in 1999 the Communist Party did not let the local Party Secretary who was at the same level of administration, the village level, he or she was not allowed to run for office. Which meant that the Village Director, who was elected, he could have been a party member, but he was not necessarily the person who already, I mean, he wasn't the person who really held power in the village. But he was an alternative person who could then run for office. But, and this is one of the reasons that I say maybe 1999 was the most liberal period, the most open and fair and democratic period, what started to happen in rural China is that these elections for the Village Director started to have teeth. They started to bite. And people started to look to these village directors as quite legitimate, because they were people that they had elected. And so if they had a problem, they would go to those people. Those were a much more reliable person than the Party Secretary. And so there started to become disputes. You really had what the Communist Party would call two centers of power. The Communist Party started to worry about two centers of power, the Village Director and the Party Secretary. The Village Director was elected, the Party Secretary was selected. And with the former, the Village Director, gaining more greater legitimacy, conflicts started to emerge. And so, beginning around the mid 2000s, the Communist Party decided to let the Party Secretary run again for Village Director, which really means that they combined the power and the post of the Village Director and the Party Secretary which just meant much less democratic. Now there are other ways, other times where we've seen elections being pretty important. In 1980, Deng made a speech calling for greater democracy, Deng Xiaoping made this speech, and what we found was that there were open elections taking place in different parts of China. One place that we know of a very interesting election was in the district of Haidian, which is where Peking University and Tsinghua University in the northwest of Beijing. And there was a fellow who ran for office in 1981, and he ran on a ticket which was against the Communist Party. And in fact he won, but he was never allowed to take office. And the person who he defeated, one young man he defeated, was actually then appointed as the official representative for that district. And I know that guy and that guy has gone on to his own interesting political and economic career. Now in 1986, elections were very tricky for the Provincial People's Congress. What happened was that in 1986, in the city of Hefei in Anhui Province, at the Chinese University of Science and Technology, the students wanted to have a greater say in who would be elected from their university for the provincial assembly. And there was a professor at that time in the university, a man named Fang Lizhi, who was a famous astrophysicist. And he in his classes, rather than necessarily teaching about astrophysicism or astrophysics, started teaching about democracy, and he called on the students to vote and to participate on their own and to elect their own candidates. The Communist Party got very nervous about that, and so the party sent down one of its top leaders who had this big debate with Fang Lizhi in front of all the students in the University of Science and Technology. And then the students were not allowed to vote in the local election, and they took to the streets, and they took to the streets in Hefei. Then students in Shanghai heard about this, they took to the streets. Then students in Beijing heard about it, and they took to the streets. And in late December 1986, the students in Beijing marched from the northwest section, from the Haidian district, they marched towards downtown, they marched towards Tiananmen Square. This is three years before the protest, three and a half years before the major protest in Tiananmen Square. And they were told that if they insisted on marching and if they went on to Tiananmen Square, they would be arrested. And so, in fact, they continued to go into the Square, a group of them were arrested. And then Hu Yaobang, who was this liberal General Secretary of the Communist Party, was kicked out of office because many people argued that he just did not try to control the students in the way that really was necessary.
