RED STARS OVER CHINA

This week we will likely witness a landmark event in China's re-emergence as a great power: the country's first mannual docking of one spacecraft with another.

That does not sound terribly exciting, but the ability to transport a crew safely to and from an unmanned vessel is crucial to China's plan to create its own permanent space station, which in turn is vital for acquiring the scientific understanding to do more exciting things - like sending probes to the moon, or even a man to Mars.

Here is a BBC News report on Saturday's launch of the Shenzhou-9 in the Gobi Desert:

When complete, the manned docking of the craft with the Tiangong-1 ("Heavenly Vessel") - a model for the building-blocks of a space station - will put China in the exclusive club of three nations capable of carrying out this technically complex procedure - the other two being the USA and Russia. Shenzhou-9 is also carrying China's first female taikonaut, Liu Yang.

Here is an illustrated guide to the docking procedure:



Much of the coverage has acknowledged it as a great achievement, particularly for a country with still-developing per capita wealth. But China's space program is still far behind the rest of the club - it's roughly where the U.S. was in the mid-1960s, with its Gemini program.

The mission is a source of considerable national pride in China. And although some of that has to do with a government publicity campaign, the troubled history of China's space program gives good reasons to suppose that much of the enthusiasm is genuinely felt.

FIRST TRANSMISSION

By the fall of 1944, the Nazi war effort was increasingly desperate. Hitler ordered his top scientists to make a new type of terror-weapon that could be launched on a rocket at civilian populations - the result was the explosive V-2 rocket, which caused great fear when it was targeted at London and Antwerp.

The invention was made possible by Germany's large community of amateur rocketeers - the man in charge of the project, a Prussian aristocrat named Wernher von Braun, was a member of the popular Society for Space Travel.

But V-2 was introduced too late to change German fortunes. Sensing the game was up, Von Braun turned himself over to American troops. The V-2 factory was located in East Berlin, which the Allies had agreed would be a Soviet-occupied zone - so Americans rushed to get there first and shipped out 341 trucks' worth of hardware. Under 'Operation Paperclip', the Americans invited many of the German rocket scientists to come back to the U.S. to contribute their skills, and foremost among them was Von Braun.

Among the U.S. rocket researchers who benefited from this injection of talent was a brilliant Chinese-born and American-educated scientist named Qian Xuesen. A former U.S. army officer, Qian had been at the forefront of the wartime effort at the California Institute of Technology to respond to the invention of the V-2.

Qian interviewed Von Braun extensively and was greatly inspired by his research. Around this time, he began making ambitious plans for an intercontinental space plane, and in some respects he was ahead of his time in foreshadowing features of the future U.S. Space Shuttle. He wrote a book called Interplanetary Flight and, later in life, he focussed on studying connections between extra-sensory perception (EST) and the traditional Chinese practices of qigong.

Below is a picture of Qian who was, according to a senior scientist on China's lunar program, "the father of China's space industry."

In 1949 Qian's talents were recognised when he was chosen to be the first director of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Centre. Less than a year later, however, he was thrust under the incriminating glare of America's 'Red Scare', and his future - and that of the Chinese space program - was changed forever.

THE RED PLANET

In 1950 Qian's application for American citizenship was rejected, because the FBI had found American Communist Party documents from the 1930s that featured his name. It was the era of McCarthy, and paranoid anti-communist witch-hunts that ranged across the U.S. government.

One of the more brazen manifestations of McCarthyism was a 1952 film called Red Planet Mars, in which scientists discover that the inhabitants of Mars are all communists, and the utopian example this sets leads to chaos on earth as various lobby groups plot to bring about the Martian way of life. Except that it all turns out to be a plot by Nazis. The obvious solution is to start a revolution in the USSR that will replace the government there with a priestly monarchy.

The Radio Times Film Guide describes it as: "one of the oddest sci-fi movies ever made, and worth sitting through just to feel your jaw drop at various junctures."

When he tried to leave for China, Qian was arrested and detained, then kept under strict surveillance for five years, during which time the U.S. government decided whether to deport him to the PRC. At last, he was returned to his place of birth, a decision that the then Undersecretary of the U.S. Navy described as "the stupidest thing this country ever did."

Shortly after Qian returned to China, the Soviet Union stunned the world by becoming the first country to put a satellite into space. In 1957, the bleep-bleep emitted by Sputnik-1 was heard around the world. In the Cold War context of superpower rivalry, it was a public humiliation for the U.S. - the first heat of the 'space race' was won by communists.

It was also a wake-up call for the PRC leadership, who had bristled with irritation when Khruschev delivered his 'secret speech' in 1956 denouncing Stalin's cult of personality - and, supposedly by implication, those who had looked up to him, like Mao. When Mao visited Moscow soon after the Sputnik triumph, Mao was awed by Soviet technology, and in the early years of the PRC he'd tried to catch up with them by inviting in masses of Soviet technicians and manufacturers. A year later, Mao declared to a meeting of the Eighth Party Congress:

"Whatever happens, we must have Sputniks. [...] If we're going to throw one up there then throw a big one, one that weighs two tons. Of course we start throwing small, but with one that is at least two tons. We won't do ones the size of chicken eggs like America's."

Mao saw Sputnik as proof that the USSR had achieved parity with the U.S., and drew the conclusion that China was thus freed from any need to exercise diplomatic restraint. If the two super-powers had reached a hostile but stable equilibrium, then it didn't matter what China said or did, because neither super-power would dare to intervene for fear of retaliation by the other. China's relative weakness was a geopolitical advantage. Accordingly, Mao began denouncing the Soviets - initially via proxies - for abandoning the cause of global revolution in order to pursue "peaceful coexistence" with the U.S.

One of the first victims of the Sino-Soviet split was China's newborn space program, which was an extension of its ballistic missile program. In Oct. 1956, Qian had helped found the Fifth Academy of the National Defence Ministry, which requisitioned China's first laboratories dedicated to space research (codenamed 'Group 581'). The government announced a Twelve-Year Plan for Chinese Aerospace, and in 1958 China's first missile-testing base was established. But by the time the Chinese Academy of Sciences had made developing satellites its top priority, the Soviets were reconsidering their role in China and the volatile politics of the 'Great Leap Forward' were underway.


Qian Xuesen and Zhou Enlai toast the Fifth Academy

 In the period of the Great Leap Forward, Party and government officials raced to outdo eachother in setting themselves ever greater and more utopian targets to achieve. They did this because they had limited information about what was happening in other parts of the country, which were reported by the central government as having made miraculous achievements. Local officials made exaggerated claims, the centre then demanded even more, and the process repeated itself in a farcical spiral that became a tragedy.

The members of Group 581 were no different from the other branches of government when it came to feeding this tide of excessive optimism, and they promised Mao they would be ready to launch a satellite into space in just 15 months, in time for the tenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949. Yet they realised this was an impossible task; they had only managed to produce a short-range ballistic missile by reverse-engineering a Russian model (a modified V-2 the Soviets had seized from Von Braun's factory). In 1958 a nervous CAS delegation visited the USSR to ask for help with Project 581. Unsurprisingly, Moscow turned them away, and in 1960 the Soviets withdrew all their advisors from China.

THE MUSIC BOX

In the aftermath of the Great Leap debacle, Mao was sidelined in the leadership and the CPC "moderates", like Deng Xiaoping, tried to restore a semblance of political stability and realism in decisionmaking.


Dongfeng-1



When China's first satellite failed to materialise on the heels of the American Explorer-1, Deng ordered the CAS to learn how to walk before it tried to run again. They should focus on building sub-orbital sounding rockets to probe the atmosphere first, and turn to satellites only after that had been achieved - and after the economy had recovered (Qian's first research institute only had one telephone). As Mao lamented that China could not even put a potato in space, Yang Guoning, assistant director of the 7th Machinery Bureau recalls:

"The country was broke! Human spaceflight requires frighteningly large sums of money. Zhou Enlai confessed in exasperation that he was taking money from one pocket to put in the other. Even Qian didn't have the nerve to plead with Premier Zhou for money."  

In the long-run, this slow-and-steady approach reaped dividends, and by 1960 China had launched its first indigenously-designed liquid-fuelled rocket, the T-7M. This rapid turnaround in concrete achievement came in spite of the shoestring budget on which the space scientists operated in the first half of the '60s - key engine parts were handmade, and the T-7M was fuelled using a bicycle pump. The launch site lacked even basic communications equipment - the commander could only issue instructions to the team by calling and making gestures.


Zhao Jiuzhang

In 1964 China successfully tested its first medium-range Dongfeng ballistic missile and its first recoverable sounding rocket. Until this time, though subject to the demands and objectives of the People's Liberation Army, the CAS had been formally distinct, researching satellites parallel to the PLA's research into rockets for nuclear missiles. Now, emboldended by the PLA's impressive progress, the satellite and missile programs were effectively merged. A prominent advocate of the merger was a CAS scientist named Zhao Jiuzhang. Pooling the resources of both institutions and research projects would, he argued, "hit two birds with one stone."

Another, and perhaps a more fundamental, motivation lied behind this amalgamation of effort - a sense in the early 1960s that political stability had truly been restored, and that the chaotic and murderous political campaigns of the 1950s had been left behind. In 1963 Premier Zhou Enlai announced the policy of the 'Four Modernisations' - in agriculture, industry, national defence and science - signalling that the government had decided to prioritise practical objectives over ideology.


Zhou Enlai announcing the 'Four Modernisations'

It seemed like a political environment more conducive to free experimentation and risk-taking, without the subjection of scientific reason to the demands of Party power-struggles. Only in such a context did the immediate gains of increased funding outweigh the risks that the science might get imbroiled in political infighting again.

But with the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution', politics brought the early progress of China's space program to a halt once more. The years from 1966-76 were years of shattered hopes. At the same time as America and Russia were sending men (and women) into space, China was in the grip of a political movement that accorded authority on the basis of "redness" over that of "expertise."

At first, it seemed as if the connections between the space program and China's nuclear weapons development would keep the scientists safely quarantined from any political campaigns - it was assumed the government accorded these defence capabilities too high a priority to play politics with them, and initially that assumption was valid. In fact, the space program made important progress in the first phases of the Cultural Revolution. In 1968 overlapping agencies were consolidated into CAST - the Chinese Academy of Space Technology - and Premier Zhou ordered PLA units to guard the space research centres.



Dong Fang Hong-1

 However, the increased funding and security came with political strings. In 1966 Qian was given the go-ahead to construct a working satellite, but only on the condition that it be more advanced than the first Russian and American satellites. As the launch date of 1970 drew closer, the degree of political interference in every aspect of the satellite's design became all-pervasive. It became so full of 'Mao badges' that scientists warned they were jeopardising the entire mission.

Initially conceived of as the first in a series of sophisticated devices, the Dong Fang Hong was eventually stripped down to a crude orbital loudspeaker for propaganda. The government now decided its sole purpose was publicity, which it expressed in a 12-character slogan: "get it up, follow it around, make it seen, make it heard" (unfortunately, it was launched into unclear skies to coincide with a political timetable). In keeping with Mao's original vision, it was the heaviest first satellite placed in orbit, exceeding the combined mass of the other four.

And, once in orbit, all it could actually do was play the first few bars of The East is Red (02:05):

The launch of China's first satellite was nonetheless a crucial achievement. This success, and the Apollo-11 moon landing, galvanised Qian to set a more ambitious goal - to put a man in space by 1973.

In 1968 the Central Military Commission ordered the Chinese Air Force to screen its top pilots. At the start of 1971 the best in the country were summoned to a hotel in the suburbs of Beijing, where they were told they had been chosen for a secret mission: it was China's first manned spaceflight programme (codenamed 'Dawn'). In the city of Xichang, in China's mountainous far west, a secret 'space city' was built to train 88 elite pilots selected for the mission - 'Base 27.'

The fledgling 'Dawn' program, and some details about its rather chaotic organisation, is detailed in the first part of this Discovery documentary (from 02:30):





Marshal Lin Biao



Ultimately, it proved impossible to keep the space program in safe isolation from the factional conflicts raging around it, and the decision to work more closely with the military came back to haunt the space researchers. 

The man at the pinnacle of the PLA was Marshal Lin Biao. Lin was also Mao's anointed successor and he had compiled the 'Little Red Book' of Mao's quotations. But in 1971 Lin was implicated in a plot to assassinate Mao and seize power in a coup, and both he and his family were killed when their plane crashed in Mongolia whilst trying to flee from the authorities.



Wreckage of Lin Biao's plane


In the wake of Lin's death, the CPC carried out a purge of his close associates and colleagues, including those in the PLA, the Air Force, and the aeronautics and space research institutes. One of those deposed for his supposed ties to Lin was Zhao Jiuzhang, who was relegated to obscurity and later committed suicide.

The 'Dawn' program never recovered from the shock. Although many of Qian's generation of scientists were safeguarded from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the same was not true of the next generation - China's Higher Education sector was thrown into chaos. Mao suspended the manned spaceflight program, reasoning that, "We should take care of affairs here on earth first, and deal with extraterrestrial matters a little later." It was formally wound-down by Deng Xiaoping on his return to power in 1978.

"A CLASSROOM OF UNLIMITED SIZE"

The post-Mao leadership inherited a country exhausted by political campaigns. They chose to focus on realistic objectives that would improve living standards - and re-launched Zhou's 'Four Modernisations.' Throwing money at trying to put a man into space did not seem a high priority - not even on grounds of national prestige (Deng famously opined that China should "bide its time").

But developments in the early 1980s convinced Deng that China could not afford to postpone staking its claim in space. The turning-point was President Reagan's 'Star Wars' speech in 1983 - what Gregory Kulacki (co-author of a history of the Chinese space program, A Place For One's Mat) has called China's "Sputnik moment."

For more about the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) that Reagan launched in this speech, here is a clip from the excellent PBS Cold War series:

After the speech, top scientists persuaded Deng that SDI was just the beginning of a comprehensive U.S. plan to dominate space with their advanced technology, and that they were on the brink of re-launching their Apollo program. Deng declared that China must "focus our energies on urgently needed practical satellite applications", particularly 'hit-to-kill' technology needed to accurately shoot down high-altitude objects that might pose a threat.

Recovering a satellite, late 1970s

However, having these ground-based capabilities would not be enough - to secure its strategic interests, China needed a physical presence in space. This was because the international law governing countries' rights to occupy stretches of the earth's orbit - which is, ultimately, a finite space at any given level of satellite technology - allocated these rights on a 'first come, first serve' basis. In other words, if China waited too long to start sending up lots of useful satellites, it might find its options to be more constrained than if it acted sooner.

As described by Gregory Kulacki, the Chinese leadership sensed there was an international race to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit. Moreover, Deng believed that China's satellite technology had reached a level of development where they could serve purposes beyond security - in a memorable phrase, he said that by broadcasting lectures to televisions across the country, they could create "a classroom of unlimited size."


Ren Xinmin



There was a problem with this plan: in 1979, after experiencing delays developing their own advanced satellites, the Chinese tried to purchase satellites from the Americans - but they couldn't afford to buy a single one.

Once again, though, it was probably in China's best long-term interest that it was forced by necessity to invent its own satellite technology - since there was a pressing need for quantity, besides quality, it made more sense to acquire the know-how to make their own, which they could then do at a lower per-unit cost than buying them from overseas.


In 1984 China achieved its next breakthrough when it launched its first modern communications satellite. As detailed by Joan Johnson-Freese in her book The Chinese Space Program, the project proceeded through trial-and-error, overseen by a space scientist named Ren Xinmin, who became the project's chief firefighter. At the 11th hour, when it became clear that key parts of the satellite were not ready to be launched, the press re-labelled it an "experimental" launch so that it could be reported as a complete success.



A Long March rocket launch



The satellite program would play a key part in resuscitating the manned spaceflight projects, as the two fields of technology were complementary. There was a vigorous debate within the CPC leadership at the time about whether China ought to be diverting resources into space when there was so much to be done on earth. The final verdict was that to not respond to SDI would be to take too great a risk; as Premier Li Peng reportedly told Ren, "It can't be said that going ahead with the human spaceflight program is a wise decision, but it is a decision that must be taken."

Until they were in a position to seriously pursue manned spaceflight, the government's focus was on lucrative commercial opportunities. After the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA had temporarily ceased its space launches. As a result, there was a global shortage of launch sites relative to demand. In the late-1980s, China opened up its launch sites to foreign governments and companies to launch their satellites on Chinese rockets, and designed expendable rockets for this purpose - the 'Long March' series.Within ten years, China controlled a 10% share of world launch services.

But to the U.S. government, this was a murky enterprise from the start. Due to the close ties between the Chinese scientific establishment and the PLA, the U.S. government worried that co-operation between space scientists in both countries, even if only as part of a commercial exchange, would result in a loss of military secrets through "dual-purpose" technology; for this reason, they rejected China's bid to participate in the 16-nation International Space Station (ISS).

In the mid-1990s, a series of tragic launch failures seemed to prove them right.

The Chinese set up a team to investigate what had caused the 1996 LM-2 disaster, but the international insurance industry - which had to compensate foreign investors for China's launch failures - insisted that an independent external panel review China's own investigation. The review panel was chaired by a representative of Loral, one of the companies that had a lost a satellite.

This all took place in the aftermath of the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square, when diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the PRC had cooled (in his 1992 campaign for the Presidency, Bill Clinton had lambasted George Bush Snr. for being soft on the "butchers of Beijing"). Although the Cold War was finished, American fears of China were not, and in 1998 a Congressional Committee was set up to investigate the rocket failures.

It published its findings in the Cox Report. It alleged that American corporations had violated U.S. controls on technology transfer by assisting the Chinese investigation in identifying flaws in their rocket design. Although the Committee conceded that this specific knowledge did not have immediate military applications, it claimed the vague export regulations had been violated in a more roundabout way - by showing the Chinese how to conduct a proper, rigorous investigation, the corporations had helped them to speed-up their space program - and, perhaps, their missiles.

DOING THE HARD THING

In the same year that the Cox Report was published, China successfully launched its first (empty) manned space vehicle - three decades after Qian had proposed his first design for such a craft. A series of breakthroughs followed: a manned spaceflight in 2003; a lunar orbiter in 2007; a space walk in 2008; and an unmanned space docking in 2011. Qian lived long enough to witness China's first space walk.

In recent years, the Chinese space program has made slow but steady progress. Although still excluded from the ISS, China has co-operated with Russia on plans to send probes to Mars, and with French scientists on satellites to study the sun's surface. Xinhua reported that China plans to make more than 20 manned space voyages in the next decade. Mike Griffin, a NASA administrator, has said that, "The Chinese have a carefully thought-out human space-flight program that will take them up to parity with the U.S. and Russia. They're investing to make China a strategic world power."

According to The Economist, China's political and economic model has turned into a competitive advantage, allowing it to plan for longer-term goals:

"Unlike the gung-ho days of the Soviet/American space race, China’s manned space programme is proceeding with cautious deliberation. Four missions in four years is not exactly boldly going where no man has gone before. This slow and steady approach might, however, win the space race’s undeclared re-run, to return human beings to the moon. Russia has no contemplated system for doing so, and America’s is, to put it politely, a paper spacecraft. As in most things, the Chinese government is playing its cards close to its chest. But do not be surprised if the next human to walk on the moon is Chinese."

Kulacki has argued that the international community still harbours flawed assumptions about China's space program - most notably, assumptions that China has only progressed by stealing technology from abroad, and that their program was wholly a reaction to the U.S. demonstration of technological power in the First Gulf War. The history reveals both to be false: key stages of development were indigenous because of China's international isolation, and China's space scientists had predicted current technologies back in the 1970s.

I will give the final word to Ren Xinmin, who was quoted as saying that the most important reason why the Chinese space program moved forward at a glacial pace for most of its history was that the scientists lacked the "freedom to fail" due to political imperatives. Although much has changed since those early days, there are still symptoms of this deficiency - the launch date of Shenzhou-9 was only made public briefly beforehand, and television broadcasts of the launch were delayed by a half-hour.

Perhaps this is the dillemma for those at the cutting-edge of science in a one-party state - in one sense you might be granted more "freedom to fail" with more secure funding and long-term planning, but in another sense, once a project is made public, technical failure becomes political failure, which cannot be tolerated.

THE RISE OF THE BALLOT-CASTING MACHINES

In an apparent green shoot of democracy, the Chinese went to the polls earlier this year to reject their discredited leaders and elect new ones.

This was only a local election, campaigning and electioneering was strictly limited and only one political party was allowed to field candidates.

Nevertheless the election in March of a new Village Committee in Wukan was widely seen as a step towards accountable and representative government in China, and a blow to the authority of the Communist Party.

Here is a map showing the location of Wukan in the relatively liberal Guangdong province:

This report on RTHK covers the background to the election - protests last year over illegal land seizures by the previous Village Committee, violent clashes with armed police sent in from outside, and fresh elections as part of the concessions made by the provincial Party chief in order to restore order:

Much of the debate in the international media seems to have centred around the extent to which Wukan will set a precedent for other parts of China. But for what exactly is it supposed to have established a precedent?

On closer inspection, the relevance of events in Wukan to wider debates about democracy are somewhat murkier. The villagers' revolt was not so much a protest against CPC rule, nor was it a movement for multi-party democracy at the national level. Instead, they demanded that the central government intervene to remove unpopular local rulers, who had won power in a manipulated election, and to re-run the election in accordance with the government's official election regulations.

In other words, it was limited to asking the government to enforce its own rules for village elections - and to the extent that the Wukan election in March was reportedly one of the freest and cleanest in China to date, it succeeded. But this begs the question: would honest and fair (albeit one-party) elections in every one of China's villages be a major advance towards China becoming a multiparty democracy?

I would argue that the jury is still out. Fortunately for our purposes, this question has been fought over many times in China's recent past. By revisiting earlier debates about whether and under what conditions elections can promote - and even obstruct - democracy, we may be able to think beyond the confines of our own time.

"THE TIGERS AND WOLVES ARE INNUMERABLE"

In the last years of the Qing dynasty, the governor of Shanxi province believed that the electoral process could be used to unify the country without the need for China to adopt comprehensive democracy.

His name was Zhao Erxun.

Zhao was responsible for restoring social order in Shanxi after thousands of Chinese Christians and foreigners were killed there in the Boxer Uprising. He became convinced that this explosion of violence was the result of an overly centralised national government being kept ignorant about social discontent by opportunistic and power-hungry local leaders.

In 1902 he proposed a solution - to allow local property-holding villagers to nominate, through a formal ballot, a slate of candidates for their district chief, from which centrally-appointed county magistrates would then select one. It was village democracy with stabilisers: if the public voted for the wrong candidate, their educated superiors could nudge them back onto the right path. Above all, the semi-elected local official would remain detached from the official governmental apparatus - officially, the county magistrate remained the lowest-ranking branch of the government, so as to deter anyone from thinking that having an electoral mandate gave them inherent legitimacy to rule.

Initially nothing came of Zhao's plan. But within a few years his vision for a kind of Confucian-inspired "tutelary democracy" was co-opted by other imperial reformers seeking historical precedents for reform. Zhao inspired the establishment of "schools for self-government" in various parts of China. These schools encouraged literate local leaders to run for election, and educated them about how elections were run in other countries. Some older officials were skeptical; one wrote:

"The plan is that capable persons will be elected to serve on councils, but this rarely happens. The cunning gentry and evil supervisors continue to treat their areas wrongly. The tigers and wolves in the mountains are innumerable."

Originally conceived as a conduit of information to the central government and subsequently seen as a training-ground for future citizens of a democratic state (different franchise qualifications applied for local and provincial elections - in some provinces, the latter electorate was three times as large as the former), under the Kuomintang the fragmentation of political authority was reflected in the realm of ideas with various political experiments.



Liang Shuming

Chiang Kai-shek inherited a three-stage plan for bottom-up democratisation (from elections in the counties, to the provinces, to the nation) but postponed the later stages. Thompson writes of "a divorce in the constitutionalism of the 1930s, with a programme of self-government for localities promulgated by the Nationalist government that was unrelated to the writing of a constituon orchestrated by national elites." The wider democratising potential of local elections was neutered: "local self-government, far from encompassing a political revolution in thought about the connection between state and society, became limited to mundane and petty local administration."



Reformers disillusioned by the KMT's use of limited local self-government for non-democratic "state-building" travelled in numerous directions. Some joined the Communists, and began fomenting revolution in the countryside. Others, like Liang Shuming, formed the Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM).

The movement rejected both the KMT's centralising interference in local affairs and the CPC's insistence on the need for class warfare to achieve democracy. Instead, in the 1920s-30s, Liang and other idealistic activists set up hundreds of research institutes and experimental zones to promote awareness amongst villagers of their democratic rights.

Their aim was to reverse what they perceived as a century of decline in the importance of the village as a political unit in Chinese society. Before the decline had set in, China had been stable as assertive village communities (structured around large patriarchal lineages) had each acted a check on the regional ambitions of the other, ensuring a rough balance of power. The effectiveness of the lineage system as a power-balancer was undermined by intrusive powers centralised in the levels of government above the villages, and the concurrent elections - the combination of both these trends turned the competition between rival lineages and their respective natural villages into a winner-takes-all contest.

At the academy he established in Zouping county Liang promoted science, socialism and democracy, which he believed would flourish once China was a unified country again - and he believed the creation of group unity would begin at the grassroots level, by using the process of elections to revive the collective identity of the villages vis-a-vis the higher echelons of government. Thompson writes of: "a clear commitment to empowering local people... Citizens of a constitutional state would be created through the process of Western-style elections...Electioneering was their weapon."

The question these reformers had to confront was whether "the ballot box was powerful enough to thwart intimidation by local power-holders". If villagers were just going to be bribed or intimidated to vote so as to uphold the status quo, then elections seemed pointless; if something like Zhao's 1902 proposal was adopted in order to undercut "local bullies", then all effort and political ambitions would be re-directed from the village to the county government, and the project of 'reconstructing' the villages would be undermined.

THE ROOTS OF ULTRA-DEMOCRACY

"In the local organisations, inner-Party democracy is meant to strengthen discipline and increase combat effectiveness, not to weaken them."
-- Mao Zedong, 'The Role of the CPC in the National War', Oct. 1938.

At the same time as Liang and the RRM were trying to foster a democratic consciousness in areas under KMT control, in the base area of Yan'an the Communists were also experimenting with village democracy.

In what would serve as a precedent for re-introducing village elections four decades later, the CPC practised decentralisation in the 'liberated' areas and organised semi-free elections (the so-called 'bean-counters') at the level of villages, cantons, districts and regions. Everyone over the age of 18 could vote, but the choice of candidates they could vote for was screened by the Party - Communists, leftists and liberal democrats would each receive a third of the total number of representatives.

The theory behind these elections was laid out by Mao Zedong in his book 'On New Democracy' (1940). He saw the purpose of elections as being to consolidate the power of the CPC by learning from other parties how to win the trust of local residents - and only insofar as elections served that objective did he deem them acceptable.


Yan'an Academy

 This ideological context is crucial to understanding why the CPC tolerated multiparty elections (and why some of that tolerance towards rival political views survived into the early PRC - albeit under the assumed leadership of the CPC). As Dr. Kerry Brown describes it in 'Ballot Box China', the theory of 'New Democracy' was designed to address the obvious problem that communism presupposed an industrial working-class, whereas most of China was still mired in poverty and underdevelopment. The Communists were playing for time - their aim was to use political power to change their society's culture until they had acquired the material basis for authentic communism. By tolerating some alternative opinions and suppressing others, they encouraged people to censor and police themselves; it was a highly effective diversionary tactic that distracted and divided potential opposition to the Party's rule.

By allowing a little political freedom, the CPC could observe closely the various groups in society and who they regarded as their friends and their enemies; they would later use this understanding of resentment to create a society in which everyone was assigned labels based on their most politically-convenient group identity. In doing this, Mao argued they were "destroying the roots of ultra-democracy" (what we would call 'democracy').

The New Democracy Mao envisioned was like a giant hall of mirrors in which something superficially resembling the real thing was reflected in every surface. In contrast to the KMT's relatively narrow state-building focus, local elections for the CPC would be a tool for social mobilisation - the goal was mass participation in the Party's violent political campaigns in order to distribute culpability throughout society, blur lines of responsibiltiy and encourage opponents of the Party to turn inwards, or against one another.

Ominously, the CPC re-centralised power in Yan'an in 1942 and launched the Rectification Campaign, a purge of heterodox views within the Party. At the same time Mao became national chairman of the Party, and the first signs of a cult of personality centred around him started to appear - what would become a further exercise in mass distraction.

I AM NOT A BALLOT-CASTING MACHINE

In 1957 Mao launched the 'Hundred Flowers Campaign' - an apparent appeal to all sections of society outside of the Party to speak their minds, and offer constructive criticism of the government's failings.

Prof. Jonathan D. Spence describes the complaint of an unnamed professor of accounting at Hankou University. Politically, the PRC consists of two parallel hierarchies, with the Party hierarchy appointed at each level by its immediate superiors, and the officially separate government hierarchy elected at each stage by the level beneath it. This professor was incensed about the hypocritical use of elections for candidates imposed upon him, without any meaningful opportunities for him to form an opinion about their suitability for their position: Spence writes: "The voting system of ratifying Party slates was a farce. [According to the professor of accounting]: "Today we do not even know the height or size of a person we elect, let alone his character or ability. We have simply become ballot-casting machines."

I have chosen this quote because I think it taps into a very real suspicion of elections in the setting of authoritarian regimes: it is the fear that elections, rather than being a small, necessary but insufficient step towards democracy, may in fact be worse than nothing. It is the idea that allowing a modicum of political choice, without having the choice of peacefully changing the overall system, will not - as we are perhaps inclined to believe - give people a 'taste' for democracy, or an awareness of their fundamental rights, that they will then automatically generalise to the system as a whole; it might instead divert their energy and attention away from systemic change towards a constrained set of false choices and imbue them with a narrow, calculating - "machine"-like - mindset.

Machines that are more pliant, and do not think outside of the confines of the information that they receive as inputs - is this the corrosive effect of what Andrew Nathan has called "participation without influence"? Rather than questioning, and rising up against, their constraints, might people living under a dictatorship with democratic appurtenances come to fetishise these constraints, to see their rights as rooted in their citizenship rather than their humanity, and to focus their efforts on fighting others over the meagre scraps of freedom on offer?

I am not asking these questions because I am deeply pessimistic about human nature and the ability of the man on the street to govern himself; far from it. The point I am trying to make here is that, for rights to be meaningful, they have to be fought for by people themselves, rather than handed down from on high. My hope is that, as limited as they may be, village elections in China will be one part of a movement for democracy, by unintentionally increasing freedom at the margins to debate and to criticise.

History may be a tragedy and not a melodrama, but since our culture seems to make a virtue of having a short memory, the short-term really does matter. And the fundamental question I am exploring in this post is whether limited elections accelerate or obstruct the development of democracy, in the short-term (however so defined).

[Incidentally, I don't think this is just a question for dictatorships - in democracies such as the UK, where ever-increasing numbers of officials are now chosen by election, at all levels of government and in the public services, there is also an argument that the proliferation of elections has blurred lines of accountability through the system, making it harder for ordinary people to know who is supposed to be held responsible for what, and to coordinate their efforts to get justice.]

THE PHANTOM COLLECTIVES

A fact about village elections in China that is crucial to understanding their present-day significance is that they were introduced by the CPC as a practical solution to a sudden power vacuum.
 With the de-collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1980s, the communes that were the basic administrative unit of collective farming were also dismantled, leaving no official management structure in the countryside. At the same time, the CPC was suffering a severe legitimacy deficit as a result of corrupt cadres fleecing the rural population.


How to vote: a government poster



The system of communes under Mao effectively transcended village boundaries - each commune comprised 10-20 villages, whilst each village was subdivided into production teams. In 1986 the communes became administrative townships (xiang), but there was no obvious structure to replace the web of production teams.

The 1982 State Constitution the CPC adopted directly-elected Village Committees - not out of a principled belief in democracy, or else elections would since have been extended upwards. Elections were chosen to recruit well-connected and competent people into the Party, to check regional strongmen and to reduce the obvious friction between rural cadres and locals in a part of the system that had hardest borne the brunt of Mao's misrule.

I have posted a PBS documentary below (the section on village elections starts 34mins in) that questions whether the elections present the voters with a political choice at all, since candidates are not allowed to represent particular interests, and some scholars worry that it has sapped the momentum of more ambitious plans for democracy.

Village elections were seen as a way of reducing grassroots resistance to unpopular policies in the 'reform era' - the hope was that villagers who had voted for the officials charged with enforcing those policies would ex post facto try to rationalise what they were doing. This was especially true of selective economic policies that saw rural incomes rise, but rural-urban inequality surge, as the graph below shows.

It was felt that elections would improve the flow of information from the grassroots to the centre, enabling problems to be addressed before they reached crisis-point - the option of having the township Party branch appoint the VC was thus explicitly rejected.


Peng Zhen

 In defence of Jonathan Fenby's contention that they "were certainly not intended to weaken the Party's hold on power", it is worth noting that one of the principal proponents of village elections was the conservative Party hardliner, Peng Zhen. Peng had been victimised during the Cultural Revolution, and he was afraid of lawlessness and anarchy. He thought that elections would act as a check on "local emperors" and incentivise cadres to rely less on coercion to enforce unpopular central directives. For Peng, it was about the division of labour - he asked his colleagues: "Who supervises rural cadres? Can we supervise them? No! Not even if we had 48 hours a day."

Large student protests broke the surface in 1986 and disturbed the CPC leadership. One of the sparks that ignited the protest was the Party's cynical manipulation of elections for committees in the Universities. Prof. Spence writes:

"The meaning of the call for "democracy" was hotly debated by the students: some saw it as a meaningless slogan; others invoked the term in conscious opposition to the government's insistence on running elections from prepared slates of candidates. Students argued that these elections were mockeries of a perfectly valid political idea."

Party leaders were rattled, but rather than responding to these charges of hypocrisy by back-pedalling on elections, they proceeded to institutionalise them more quickly. Their goal in this was what Richard Baum has called "preemptive democratisation" - like Mao's earlier vision of 'New Democracy', Deng became convinced that allowing very limited political freedom would take the wind out of the sails of democracy activists. Deng paid close attention to the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and believed that a similar movement of national unity in China could be prevented by channelling people's frustrations towards their most local cadres.

The policy was fleshed-out in the first Organic Village Election Law (1988): elections would be held every three years, principally by secret ballot; independent candidates could also run if they collected signatures from ten local residents, or received the blessing of a Party-affiliated organisation; and local Party-appointed Election Committees were set up to oversee the process, including vetting candidates.

Since 1998 elections for "an organ of self-governance of villagers" have been mandatory across the country; in the last 20 years over 700m Chinese have voted in over 650,000 villages. This graph charts the forward march of VC elections:

In terms of competitiveness, procedural fairness, turnover and public perceptions of legitimacy, the results have varied widely from place to place. The crux of the matter is the attitude of the Election Committee towards the election, and this in turn depends on the relations between the VC and the local CPC branch and township/county governments. In almost half of all villages the voters have exchanged Party incumbents for non-Party members, but almost all of these independents were Party-backed, and most of them went on to become members. The hope that these elections might provide a platform for voices outside of the Party was somewhat undermined during last year's local People's Congress elections when an official from the Commission for Legislative Affairs declared that: "There is no such thing as an 'independent' candidate. It is not recognised by the law."

Here is an excellent overview by Dr. Qingshan Tan of the China Policy Institute:

The issue of illegal land sales that was so central to the revolt in Wukan remains a legal grey area - the Constitution states that rural land is owned publicly by "collectives", which, since de-collectivisation, are formally represented by the VC. VCs possess key powers in law to disburse public land (all land is formally publicly-owned and leased long-term) and approve new construction projects. They are also empowered to re-allocate land if the residents have been absent for over five years - a worrying loophole in a system where the residency status of temporary migrants is so heavily politicised and manipulable.

Since fiscal reforms centralised control over tax revenue in Beijing, VCs have increasingly sought other sources of revenue, including a plethora of illegal surcharges on residents, and the redistribution of agricultural land to big property developers with only paltry compensation.

As long as the CPC maintains a monopoly over national political leadership, there will be no rule of law in China, only rule by law, and these protests will continue to flare up when aggrieved parties are denied redress through the courts. Yet some experts believe that village elections have served to enhance the Party's control over rural areas by acting as a dynamic smokescreen for unpopular decisions taken higher up in the system.

For example, Mayling Birney has argued:

"The optimal situation for the regime is that the village elections law be implemented to the degree that it helps create stability (by generating weak accountability of poorly-monitored village officials to the public), and no more than that (in order to evade the destabilising effects of strong accountability). [...] China's system allows this balance to be achieved with a fair amount of precision, as it incentivises local officials to adjust village election implementation in order to meet centrally-mandated targets."

In practice, these elections might be showing that it is possible for authoritarian systems to simultaneously legitimise greater demands for accountability and to strengthen loyalty to the regime. Dr. Brown has described the apparent paradox that, in one sense, these elections are too free: since independent candidates are not allowed to organise their own political parties, they lack the usual self-discipline that comes with being responsible for representing a party 'brand', so that opportunists and demagogues are commonplace. Where such candidates can be used to discredit non-Party challengers, they are more likely to be tolerated; where they pose a credible threat, they are eliminated, if necessary by intervention of the township government.

Twenty years ago, there was real hope that village elections would be the first step in an upward spiral of democratisation, much as Sun Yat-sen had envisioned. Instead, the talk today is about stagnation and "trapped transition." Village elections have given a new impetus to "inner-Party democracy" (dangnei minzhu) and policies intended to make the CPC more responsive to society, but this does not necessarily have anything to do with bringing multi-party democracy closer.

Essentially, I think the recurring idea that elections in and of themselves work as incubators of democratic consciousness is flawed because, detatched from the deeper philosophical notion of popular sovereignty and civil liberties, they are reduced to straightfoward calculations of self-interest. If you adhere to Schumpeter's minimalist/proceduralist view that democracy is nothing more than the ability to elect your rulers at periodic intervals, then the idea of "tutelary democracy" might appeal to you.

But if you think that democracy is not just about choosing from a menu of policies, but about the ability to select representatives who will use their reason to expand the boundaries of political possibility, then a whole array of other freedoms, including institutional mechanisms to make governments accountable, are part of that. Unfortunately, I cannot see a reason to believe that village elections are logically a first step in that direction, especially since even the VCs themselves lack effective Village Assemblies to hold them to account.

Sorry to end on such a downer.