When I met would-be politician Xu Chunliu four months ago, I was impressed by the 31-year-old’s courage, even more so by his optimism.
Mr. Xu was one of over 100 Chinese citizens who stepped forward this year to run as independent candidates for their local “people’s congresses” – almost powerless sub-municipal bodies (think of city council, without budget-setting or law-making powers) that are nonetheless the only government posts in this country chosen by popular vote.
The local elections China has held every three to five years since the 1980s are often held up by the Communist Party and its fans as proof that the country is indeed democratizing, just at its own pace and in its own way. Critics scoff and say even these elections are rigged to ensure that only those who pass muster with the Party are allowed onto the ballot.
For years, Mr. Xu, a journalist, had wondered why so few Chinese put the system to the test by stepping forward as candidates for the only elections the country has. As the 2011 vote approached, he decided to stop urging others to be courageous and to do it himself.
“If they really want to prove that China is becoming more open and more democratic, we are happy to help them prove that,” he told me over lunch in Beijing’s historic Dongcheng district, where he has lived since 2004 and where he had hoped to represent his neighbours’ concerns.
Like many of the other independent candidates, Mr. Xu hoped that the Internet and social media would allow him to get around the state’s tight control on the mainstream press to communicate with voters, perhaps even allowing him to pull off an upset win. (Mr. Xu has just shy of 20,000 followers on Sina Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-style microblogging service, plus a Tumblr account.)
He won’t get a chance. On Monday, eight days before Beijing’s elections, the local Communist Party committee barred Mr. Xu and three other candidates from running in Dongcheng. Mr. Xu was told that because he works in another part of Beijing, he was not a “pure resident” of Dongcheng, and thus couldn’t stand as a candidate.
“They non-transparently turned six candidates into two. We can only choose [Mr. Xu] by filling in the blank marked “others,” one disillusioned supporter posted on his Sina Weibo page.
Mr. Xu’s case was sadly far from unique. All around China, most of those who decided to put China’s limited democracy to the test were bounced out on convenient (and often improbable) technicalities. Local elections are underway around the country, but the Communist Party apparatus has ensured voters have little in the way of real choice.
Twenty-three-year-old model Cheng Yuting, who was running in another district of Beijing – and aiming to become China’s first celebrity politician – was disqualified on the grounds that the 10 people who signed her nomination paper hadn’t done so in front of neighbourhood committee members (a regulation that doesn’t appear to exist).
In the central city of Lanzhou, high-profile candidate Yu Nan was briefly allowed onto the list of official candidates, only to be disqualified eight days later after the 37-year-old posted something resembling a campaign platform on his own microblog.
Among the promises Mr. Yu made were: he would be accessible to voters at all times, take public transportation to work and not waste public money. “China is most in need of transparency now,” he wrote. Basic stuff, but apparently too radical for someone’s liking.
“We really thought we could succeed, that the government would play by the rules of the game,” said Chi Weitian, an idealistic 22-year-old I met in the southern city of Guangzhou. “But we found out there wasn’t even a game and the government doesn’t play by its own rules.”
Like the others, Mr. Chi was barred from standing as an official candidate, but nonetheless garnered 82 write-in votes in Guangzhou’s September local elections, as word of his disqualification spread around the campus of Jinan University where he studies.
While many would-be independent candidates kept in touch with each other online, drawing inspiration and learning from each other’s experiences, they were not organized movement or anything close to a political party. But even such scattered public opposition was clearly too much for China’s rulers to accept.
In many ways, the way the independent candidates movement ended is less surprising than the fact so many Chinese put their hands up in the first place. The signals were always there that the elections would be a tightly controlled affair.
As far back as May, the Communist Party-affiliated Global Times newspaper printed an editorial warning that “so-called independent candidates” could “could destroy the current system by soliciting votes on the Internet.” That, clearly, wasn’t going to be allowed to happen.
It hasn’t been a complete whitewash for the independent candidates movement. In the southern city of Foshan, two independents shocked the Party establishment and won seats after promising to fight for the rights of locals being forced off their land by property developers. With different voting dates for different cities and districts, there are other races yet to be run.
Guo Huojia, one of Foshan’s new local committee members, told The Daily Telegraph newspaper what he planned to do now that he was an elected official. The agenda he laid out could only sound dangerous to those who have no plans to reform the authoritarian system they rule over: “The villagers put me forward for the seat, so I will do my best to solve their problems.”
