The End of Village Democracy in China

Abstract

Even the world’s largest autocracy is no stranger to democratic elections, at least on the local level: Beginning in the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began promoting the direct election of village leaders across China’s nearly 700,000 administrative villages. Villages range in size from a few-hundred to a few-thousand people, and today accommodate 37 percent of China’s population. They are, per the constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), autonomous, self-governing mass organizations in rural areas. Following the end of collective, state-run agriculture in the countryside in the early 1980s, the party hoped that elections would produce leaders capable of implementing its new economic-reform program, and fill a power vacuum created as the state retreated from economic management Show more