A slate of independent candidates for Beijing’s district-level People’s Congress have announced that they are suspending their grassroots campaign due to fears for their personal safety in the wake of police threats and...
Land prices in China have risen steadily since the economic reforms of the late 70s and 80s, but...
The second of two Wukan village leaders who warned this month of a resurgence by the...
Following a gradual erosion of faith in Wukan’s democratic experiment, South China Morning...
To evade government interference, a new group of educated middle-class grassroots activists are...
Al Jazeera English premiers a four-part documentary series, Wukan: After the Uprising, taking an in-depth look at the village’s experience of grassroots democracy following protests over illegal government land grabs in...
Following widespread protests in 2011 in Wukan, Guangdong over a government land-grab, the provincial government agreed to elections to nominate new village leaders. Despite initial enthusiasm over what was perceived as a...
McClatchy Newspapers’ Tom Lasseter tells the story of a July 2010 uprising in the suburban Beijing village of Raolefu, where angry villagers disputed the shady re-election of a corrupt leader and where a court later...
The growing number of mass incidents around China might show people’s impatience with the slow pace of top-down political reforms, but the bottom-up approach is not progressing smoothly either. At Reuters, John Ruwitch and...
The Global Times interviews Shu Kexin, who shares his thoughts on incipient democracy in homeowners’ associations: GT: How is the current situation of homeowners’ associations in Beijing? Shu: I think around 30...
From China Daily: China is one step closer to outlining an improved law that will crackdown on vote-rigging in village elections, a civil affairs official said Sunday. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has now completed its revision...
From China Elections and Governance: … After a preliminary study, I feel that the 17th CPC political report possesses several new and important features in regards to the issue of grassroots democracy. First, grassroots democracy is given more prominent emphasis: The emphasis is given in three areas. First of all, fostering the development of grassroots […]
From Sydney Morning Herald: In the fiscal debauchery of a modern Australian election campaign it can be hard to imagine that democracy causes governments to spend taxpayer money more wisely. But that’s because Australians have never known anything else. In China’s 800,000 villages, local officials spend 44 per cent of their budgets on themselves, including […]
From China Elections and Governance: Why should we develop grassroots democracy? If we carefully observe changes taking places in China’s grassroots society, especially of the new pattern emerging in the grassroots organizations, we should be able to see that developing grassroots democracy is actually a practical requirement resulting from the profound transformations of the grassroots […]
From The Sydney Morning Herald: The ageing cadres of revolutionary China are not happy that their country has progressed from being one of the worlds most egalitarian nations to one of the least, in just one generation. Income inequality in Communist China now outstrips that in libertarian America and kleptocratic Russia. The rich-poor gap is […]
From The Time Magazine: What struck me most about the four farmers who showed up at TIME’s Beijing bureau back in 2001 was that they were wearing new shirts. With callused hands and dirt under their fingernails, these men were trying to blend in with the well-dressed crowds in China’s capital. But one look and […]
From Time.com: Liang Yumin killed himself, after village-level bureaucrats made his life hell. His offense? Being democratically elected to replace them What I remember most about the four farmers who showed up at TIME’s Beijing bureau back in 2001 was the new shirts they wore. These men were trying their best to blend in to […]
What’s really puzzling, at least on the surface, in some villages around some Chinese cities or towns is political candidates are offering significant cash gifts to buy votes. In one village in Inner Mongolia, villagers are receiving cash deliveries ranging from 500 to 1,000 yuan per ballot from each candidate. But as the land appreciates […]
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