Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China’s President Hu Jintao had sent a message of congratulation to Hollande, who has vowed to slow the pace of Sarkozy’s public spending cuts ….

Asian markets and the euro slumped on Monday amid concerns that victories for Hollande in France and for opposition parties in Greece marked a backlash against austerity measures designed to contain the eurozone crisis.

Both Japan and China hold huge amounts of euro-denominated debt and Tokyo has said it will monitor Hollande’s economic policies closely.

Europe is China’s top export market, and the current eurozone crisis — which has seen a wave of credit-rating downgrades and brought Greece to the brink of default — has caused major concern in Beijing.

Accordingly, instead of celebrating the first election of a Socialist French president in 24 years, Global Times saw the result as a sign of Western democracies’ lack of direction. Democratic systems, it said, were creating an increasing number of problems, with politicians pandering to public whims and indulging in “celebrity-style performances”.

An administration change cannot generate the strong will needed to kick-start public debt reform in France. The change has to come from reflection of a wider scope. But protests against austerity measures from Greece to France have suggested that this much-needed reflection is far from coming. Statesmen are busy pleasing voters, not leading reflection ….

From neighboring Japan to faraway France, China has witnessed the power of democracy, and also the damage it can do if it goes to extremes ….

The French election saga, eye-catching as it is, looks like a waste of the French people’s political passion. In countries with a weaker social governance base, political games can incur broad social disaster.

A commentary at Xinhua was more diplomatic, stressing the “highly expected” continuation of a fruitful partnership between the two countries:

Now at the helm of his country and in the cockpit of Europe, the president-elect faces an uphill task to drive France out of the current economic quagmire and help steer Europe out of its still raging debt maelstrom.

In his endeavors, the new host of Elysee Palace will find in China a trustworthy partner both in improving bilateral and broader Europe-China relations and in tackling major challenges and pursuing common development.

China is a long-time cooperation partner of France, with bilateral ties having been witnessing steady progress. As has been amply proved, a closer China-France partnership carries a benefit and significance well beyond their borders.

Thus it is highly expected that the new French leadership will act in concert with its Chinese counterpart to further explore their cooperation potential and push bilateral relations further forward.

For analysis of the challenges facing the new president, see Xinhua and The Economist.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: democracy, elections, euro, european debt crisis, France, France relations, Global Times, Greece, Japan, socialism, Xinhua
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Xue Chang, former Party chief of Wukan, and Chen Shunyi, former head of the village committee, were also ordered to hand over illegal gains of 189,200 yuan (30,031 U.S. dollars) and 86,000 yuan respectively, said Zeng Qingrong, deputy head of the supervision department of Guangdong Province.

Wukan grabbed international headlines last year when the small village’s residents staged three waves of large-scale rallies in four months to protest against village officials’ alleged illegal land grabs, corruption and violations of financing and election rules.

In December, after a senior provincial official held direct talks with villagers, order was restored. Re-elections were held earlier this year while the investigation into the villagers’ complaints continued.

Zeng said after three months of investigation, authorities found that Wukan’s former officials were involved in illegal transfers of land use rights, embezzling collective properties, accepting bribes and rigging village elections.

Businessweek reports that 20 officials in total have been disciplined:

Six other former village officials and a dozen higher-level officials were also punished, Xinhua said, but did not provide details.

[...] Xinhua said authorities found that the village’s former officials had been involved in illegal transfers of land use rights, embezzling property that was collectively owned, accepting bribes and rigging village elections.

In March, two of the protest leaders were elected to run the village in a much-watched election that reformers hoped would promote democracy as a way to settle many of the myriad disputes besetting China.

Many experts, however, said it’s far too soon to say if political leaders will summon the will to replicate Wukan’s experience elsewhere.

Radio Free Asia also reports on plans by the new officials to return at least some of the ill-gotten public land, which was the cause of the initial protests:

Zhu had told the committee that “a portion” of the lost farmland would be returned to the village—which grabbed international media attention late last year with its feisty defense of its territory against thousands of armed police and its highly organized protests and rallies—by May 1, he added.

Villagers present at the meeting had applauded the announcement, taking it to be evidence of sincerity among provincial officials, Zhuang said.

He said members of the newly elected committee, none of whom have previous government experience, had their work cut out for them since being elected last month.

Read much more about Wukan via CDT.

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Post tags: corruption, elections, land disputes, land rights, Wukan
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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.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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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