With one week to go, Mr. Qiao’s Renren and Sina Weibo account was blocked, and when he opened additional accounts, they were all blocked, one after another, barring him from communicating with voters online. Personal blogs accusing him of previous immoralities and hypocrisies, and questioning his motives, appeared on Renren.com, reminding me of the essay “Running for Governor” by Mark Twain (a popular satire in China because of its portrayal of the hypocrisy of American democracy). Mr. Qiao’s campaign video also disappeared. Dormitory managers were told not to let him inside.

On Nov. 5, three days before the vote, as I walked past my department building close to midnight, I saw the lights of the teachers’ offices were, strangely, all on. The next day I learned that our “counselor teachers,” who are in charge of student affairs, and other academic officials, had spent the night persuading Qiao’s student volunteers to quit his campaign. A friend told me they were warned, and in some cases, threatened with danger to their future careers if they didn’t back out.

Rumors and conspiracy theories began to circulate that Qiao Mu was backed and protected by the American embassy, sponsored by western media, and that even if he failed, he could escape with his family to the United States, leaving his supporters behind and vulnerable to possible future punishment.

For fear of the invisible power of punishment in one way or another, many students quit. Even more turned silent.

Read more about independent candidates in China. Read more about Politics in China, via CDT.

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Post tags: democracy, elections, independent candidacies, students
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Mr. Guo, who told the authorities he comes from the far west region of Xinjiang, set off from coastal Fujian Province on a flotation device made from bamboo and Styrofoam. Mr. Pu said officials had been tracking his progress by radar.

After his arrest, he told Taiwanese reporters that he was inspired to make the perilous journey by Taiwan’s presidential race, which pits the incumbent Ma Ying-jeou against two opponents. “I want to see your elections, with campaign flags flying all over the place,” he said.

The elections, which take place Jan. 14, have piqued considerable interest in China, which is led by a Communist government keen to dampen the democratic yearnings of its people. After decades of authoritarian rule, Taiwan — considered by Beijing to be a breakaway province — held its first direct presidential elections in 1996.

Taiwan held its first of three presidential debates last week as it prepares to go to the polls in January 2012, with candidates playing it safe with regards to the question of reunification or independence and focusing mostly on economic issues instead. See also additional CDT coverage of cross-Strait relations.

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Post tags: Cross-Strait relations, democracy, elections, Fujian, Taiwan independence, unification, Xinjiang
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Mr. Qiao said authorities did all they could to stymie him, keeping his name off the ballot, threatening his student volunteers, even forcibly collecting the red bookmarks he had printed with the slogan: “I am the master of my ballot.”

“The harassment started from the very beginning,” he said in an interview in his university office, still cluttered with campaign paraphernalia he never got to distribute. “It is a shame, because I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “All we did was follow China’s Constitution and election law.”

His experience demonstrates an underlying political doctrine of today’s China: while Chinese leaders speak in favor of political reform, local authorities routinely deny voters the chance to freely choose a political representative.

Like many of the booming number of independent “citizen candidates” emerging in China this year, Qiao ran an innovative campaign via social media and the Internet but fell victim to manipulation tactics that have plagued a number of his peers.

See also CDT coverage of independent candidacies in China and the challenges facing Chinese citizen candidates.

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Post tags: Beijing, democracy, elections, independent candidacies, people's congress
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This year, like every year since the early 1980s, Chinese villages will hold local elections.

The practice, which began during the country’s period of political and economic reforms, allows anyone over the age of 18 to run, but in many villages the ballot sheet is limited to a single candidate.

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Post tags: democracy, elections, village elections
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“In each case, the candidate pursued very different policies than he advocated during the campaign, and in fact pursued policies than were substantially indistinguishable from those of his predecessor,” says Jeffrey Bader, until recently senior director for East Asian affairs at the U.S. National Security Council and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Romney and his colleagues have many good reasons to ignore this history. For one thing, China looms in the minds of many unhappy voters, particularly in hard-hit Rust Belt states. “If you ask people who is our major economic competitor, they’ll say China,” says Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster at the Benenson Strategy Group. “There’s a broad sense that we’re losing ground to the Chinese, that we’re sending jobs there, and that they undercut us on price while producing inferior products. That is a source of great frustration ….”

Of course, there are legitimate grievances to be addressed: manipulation of the yuan; the theft of intellectual property; the pressure put on American companies doing business in China to transfer technology; a September trade deficit of $28 billion. The trouble is that threatening China won’t resolve any of them. As Clinton likes to say, “When was the last time you got tough on your banker?” And U.S. politicians often exaggerate what confrontation might achieve. For instance, China’s allowing the yuan to float would probably redistribute jobs to other Southeast Asian countries, but it would not return them to Pennsylvania or Ohio.

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Post tags: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, elections, George W. Bush, Jon Huntsman, presidential election, United States
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The positions of people’s representatives are not terribly elite: 4,349 seats for district or county level representatives are up for grabs in Beijing alone, and nearly 2 million nationwide in elections staggered over the course of the year. None of them are picked for the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp legislature. For the most part, the job involves mundane matters such as recycling and pooper-scooper rules for pets.

Notwithstanding the lowly jobs available, , bloggers and activists, writers and academics, factory workers and farmers, entrepreneurs and even a fashion model are queuing up for the posts.

Guo Huojia, a 60-year-old farmer from Foshan, in Guangdong province, is one of the few independents to win an election. Campaigning against land confiscations and home demolitions, he received a stunning 7,000 out of 9,000 votes in his district in a Sept. 28 vote.

He was arrested the following day. He remains under house arrest.

A Shanghai writer dropped his plans to run after being hit by a tax audit. A real estate mogul who wanted to run for mayor of Zhengzhou says he was so harassed by tax authorities that he went into hiding and left politics behind.

CDT has translated numerous posts by and about the independent candidates, including “Independent Candidate Yu Nan’s Candidacy Revoked for No Reason” and “Celebrity Candidate Ineligible for Election Following Interference from Neighborhood Committee.” See also a Globe and Mail report earlier this week titled, “Even in China’s Token Nod to Democracy, Voters Have Little Choice” (via CDT).

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Post tags: democracy, elections, independent candidacies
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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.

Read more about the independent candidate movement in China, including several translations of posts by the candidates themselves, on CDT.

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Post tags: cheng yuting, democracy, elections, independent candidacies
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The ability of candidates to whip up online sentiment for political change appears to be what most worries the authorities. One state security officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly, said regulatory authorities were considering measures to curb microblogging sites partly because of the potential for political networking.

Indeed, Global Times, an offshoot of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, warned in a May editorial that “the independent candidates could destroy the current system by soliciting votes on the Internet.” And propaganda authorities have intervened to suppress news of independent candidates, most recently with a Sept. 26 order from Beijing officials not to mention them, according to an editor for a party-run publication, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to comment to foreign reporters.

See also previous CDT coverage of independent candidacies in China and the use of social media as a campaign platform, including two who recently won elections in Foshan and the failed attempt by a celebrity to contest a People’s Congress election in Beijing.

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Post tags: democracy, elections, Global Times, independent candidacies, microblogs, political reform, social media
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On October 20, a verified Sina Weibo user, @New_Enlightment Xiong Wei (@?????), posted a tweet stating that Cheng’s local neighborhood committee refused to let Cheng take the nomination form with her, which is a crucial step to fulfilling the candidacy requirements. Instead, the committee instructed Cheng to have all of her nominators go to the field office and sign the form at the site, which is a violation of the electoral procedure. [Xiong is an independent candidate himself and is believed to be a personal friend of Cheng. He has been actively supporting Cheng’s candidacy.]

Later that day, Cheng wrote a statement through her microblog claiming that her local neighborhood committee interfered with the self-nomination process:

@Cheng Yuting: Today is the day. I will always remember it. As of noon today, under the shameless interference of the Jiulongnan neighborhood committee, the number of my nominators decreased from 11 to 9. Thus I’m now ineligible for the election. I have sincerely looked forward to the election and have been strictly in accordance with the regulations. However, I didn’t expect that a low-level government agency can be such a scamp! I have rejected numerous interviews offered by both domestic and foreign media to avoid being accused of hyping. Nevertheless, I’m still proud of my courage. I don’t see it as a failure because I have at least tried!

@?????????????????????????????????????????????11??9???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Below is a picture of Cheng’s nomination form posted on her microblog with her statement:

Read more about Cheng Yuting’s campaign and the independent candidate movement in China via CDT.

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Post tags: cheng yuting, democracy, elections, independent candidacies
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In the south, Guo Huojia, 59, and Li Youzhou, 37, won seats in the city of Foshan. Both men have fought the government for the rights of villagers who have had their land grabbed for property developments, a key source of complaint in the Chinese countryside.

Mr Guo, who has taken his local government to court in the past, and who may still be under monitoring by security officials, said he was “very excited” by his success, which saw him beat his Communist party-backed rival by over 2,000 votes.

“I did not think my chances of winning were very high. The villagers put me forward for the seat, so I will do my best to solve their problems,” he added.

The independent candidate movement, which has been broadly suppressed by authorities, has been joined by a young celebrity model in Beijing, whose campaign has been getting a lot of attention online.

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Post tags: democracy, elections, Foshan, independent candidacies
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