From the Christian Science Monitor, a report on the harassment of independent candidates running for local People’s Congress positions:
The polls closed at noon and by 2 p.m. Yao Lifa was hunkered down inside a restaurant with a group of first-time candidates, waiting to hear who had been elected to their local assembly.
Mr. Yao phoned another candidate who was supposed to be joining the gathering. Their conversation ended abruptly. Yao looked around the table, his can-do smile down a notch. He explained that they would be one short as the police had detained their colleague for telling voters to write his name on the ballot. “The pressure just gets more and more,” he sighs.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are going to the polls this year to vote for their local assembly, offering a small measure of political choice in a one-party state. But independent candidates are finding their path blocked by local officials that flout election law to favor their own loyalists. The result is a democratic gesture that offers little hope to reformers pushing for bottom-up alternatives to authoritarianism. [Full text]
For more background on the situation, read a statement from Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
