While the election process is important, the significance of the Organic Law on Villagers' Committees rests with what happens after a village election. The existence of the law reveals little about the actual distribution of power and decision-making in China's villages. Even free and fair elections cannot be assumed to bring meaningful change to the contours of rural power where there is a dual authority structure – Party and government – in every village. The villagers' committee is now elected, but the Party secretary is still appointed by the higher levels of the CCP. Which is the locus of power?

When residents of a few Guangxi villages decided to elect their own leaders in late 1980 and early 1981, none of them could have known they were starting a historic reform. What began as a stopgap effort to fill a political vacuum, after much debate and two decades of uneven implementation, is now enshrined in a national law. Procedures for holding elections have been spelled out and implementing regulations are being formulated at all levels. Voting is now mandatory every three years in every village, bar none.

Are the values and attitudes of ordinary people in the People's Republic of China (PRC) compatible with behaviour necessary for a liberal democracy to evolve? Or are they likely to obstruct such evolution? Some surveys conducted in recent years within the PRC asked people of different backgrounds and residential areas if they were interested in politics and governance issues, if they conversed with others about their political interests, and if they believed they had some control over their political life. These and other related questions produced survey findings which are discussed and interpreted below to provide some conjectures about the questions posed above.

Direct elections for village leaders have been conducted in China since 1988, but they remain little known or casually dismissed by urban Chinese and the international community. Those who are aware of China's village elections have sharply divergent views as to their genuineness or effectiveness. Some are sceptical that the Chinese Communist Party would ever permit a competitive election that could threaten its grip on power. Others see the elections as a first stage in the building of democracy in China. In many ways, village elections are a kind of Rorschach test, an ambiguous drawing that is interpreted by people according to their predisposition towards China rather than the quality of the elections.

In October 1952, while addressing the Seventh Congress of the Kuomintang (KMT), the party chairman and president of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek, reminded his audience that “Sun Yat-sen's highest goal was to build a political system in which sovereignty resided with the people [zuchuan zaimin]” Chiang then said that “in order to oppose communism and recover our nation, the primary task of our party is to carry out local elections, build our nation's political system, and establish the solid foundations for our people to practise democracy.”

Electoral democracy has been defined as “a system of government in which the principal positions of effective government power are filled, directly or indirectly, through meaningful, regular, free and fair… elections.” By this criterion, Hong Kong today falls short of being an electoral democracy. There are periodic elections, and there is a 60-seat Legislative Council (LegCo), at least some of whose members are chosen by universal adult suffrage. There are also a number of organized, highly articulate political parties whose legislative members are frequent, outspoken critics of the government and its policies. And there is a system of transparent electoral laws and procedures administered by a professionally neutral civil service, ensuring that elections remain free and fair. Yet for all its manifest electoral virtues, democracy in post-handover Hong Kong is highly constrained and confined, as noted in the previous article by Suzanne Pepper.