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Elections and Power: The Locus of Decision-Making in Chinese Villages*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
While the election process is important, the significance of the Organic Law on Villagers' Committees rests with what happens after a village election. The existence of the law reveals little about the actual distribution of power and decision-making in China's villages. Even free and fair elections cannot be assumed to bring meaningful change to the contours of rural power where there is a dual authority structure – Party and government – in every village. The villagers' committee is now elected, but the Party secretary is still appointed by the higher levels of the CCP. Which is the locus of power?
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- Elections and Democracy in Greater China
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References
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11. Ibid. p. 4.
12. Ibid. p. 116.
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14. Ibid. p. 114.
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43. Although we treat villages as though they fit neatly into these four cells, in reality most fall somewhere in between.
44. There is another important linkage between the structure of income in a village and the dynamics of local politics, namely the extent to which local political institutions are able to influence the distribution and use of the resources that generate different types of income (henceforth the “degree of political insulation”). This is discussed later in this section. The additional explanatory factor is assigned a secondary role in this article, not because it is any less important but mainly because our data set precludes us from offering any concrete empirical evidence on its importance. By omitting the degree of political insulation from our empirical work we are taking the risk of confounding our results, and as a result caution should be used in the interpretations that we derive from the data.
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48. The reasons why villagers allow this institutional arrangement to emerge, of course, also need to be considered, but further in-depth examination of this institution is beyond the scope of this article.
49. CI 82394.
50. Rozelle interview 079702.
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52. The Report on the Villagers Representative Assemblies and Study on the Election of Villagers Committees.
53. See Oi, Jean C. and Rozelle, Scott, “Democracy and markets: the link between participatory decision-making and development in China's rural reforms,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, 13–16 03 1997.Google Scholar
54. Article 4, Organic Law.
55. Leaders in highly industrialized villages had two responses when asked in open-ended questioning about their views on elections. Some said they had insulated themselves from elections. Others said that the enterprises had already provided so much for villagers that they not only did not fear elections, they welcomed them as a sort of additional legitimization of their power.
56. We cannot rule out, however, the possibility that these villages may be the ones that the upper levels are targeting to implement elections in an effort to rebuild village government and resources. Such villages may have individual rich households, but the villages as a collective are often poor.
57. Endogeneity in this case means the concern that 1995 income and 1995 village elections may be simultaneously determined. That is, elections may be leading to greater incomes, as well as the reverse. If so, we may not be measuring the true causal relationship between income and elections. To avoid this problem we need to adopt an “instrumental variable” effect. This statistical method relies on finding a measure that is related to income in 1995, but is not “caused by” elections in 1995. One such measure that is both available and has this property is village income in 1988. To the extent that income in a village in 1995 and 1988 are correlated and to the extent that there is no way that village elections in 1995 could have affected income in 1988, this measure is an acceptable instrument that we can use in our analysis.
58. CI 82494.
59. See Oi, Jean C., “Economic development, stability and democratic village self-governance,” in Brosseau, Maurice, Pepper, Suzanne and Tsang, Shu-ki (eds.), China Review 1996 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996), pp. 125–144.Google Scholar
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