Political Reform in China's Cities: Introducing Community Elections

This paper examines the importance of local initiatives in China’s slow-moving process of political reform. Since 1999, free and open “direct elections” for community residents’
committees have emerged in a number of Chinese urban communities. These include open nominations of candidates and secret ballots for all citizens. Why have such democratizing reforms emerged within some communities but not others, when all communities are tightly embedded in a Leninist political system in which the dominance of the ruling Communist Party remains an indisputable principle?

First, this variability indicates that local factors can play a critical role in China’s process of gradual political reform, where local conditions in some areas are conducive to establishing electoral reform “test-sites” while in others they are not. Based on field work in communities in three Chinese cities, evidence points to a number of structural factors which facilitate such reforms, including social stability and cohesion and lack of vested institutional interests

Second, it is argued that these institutional reforms proceed gradually through the ordinary policy process, in which policy entrepreneurs (sometimes outside the party-state nexus)
committed to participatory reforms are able to invoke state ideology to convince key decisionmakers to implement electoral reforms.