A local solution
Li Li

NINGBO City in Zhejiang Province became the first entire city to implement direct community election earlier this year. On January 4, 2008, the Civil Affairs Bureau of Ningbo City announced that more than 730,000 registered voters in the city’s 235 communities had elected a total of 2,266 new members of residents’ committees in newly concluded direct elections. This made Ningbo the first Chinese city to have all residents’ committee members directly elected by residents themselves. “This has been a good opportunity for residents to be educated on enforcing democracy,” Xu Yiping, Vice Director of Civil Affairs Bureau of Ningbo City, told Beijing Review.
Primary-level democracy
In community elections throughout the second half of 2007 in Ningbo, any resident over 18 years old, whether a permanent resident or a migrant worker that had lived in the community for over half a year, could register as a candidate or voter. The inclusion of migrant workers has political significance since usually they can only register to vote in their hometowns. In Ningbo’s election model, a recommendation letter signed by over 10 registered voters can qualify a candidate for membership in a residents’ committee. During the election campaign, candidates could earn voters’ trust by debating with each other on issues directly concerning residents’ interests. They could also visit residents’ homes to understand their needs and to make their own campaign guidelines known to potential voters.
To eliminate any fraud in the elections, the city’s Civil Affairs Bureau designed complicated balloting procedures. This also contributed to the high turnout of voters. The average voting turnout in Ningbo was 92.6 percent, and in Zhenhai District it was a staggering 98 percent. The elected committee members in Ningbo are no longer full-time employees receiving salaries from the local government. They are volunteers who discuss and decide on major issues concerning the interests of their communities. Their decisions will be implemented by full-time community workers who are paid by local government. However, to guarantee the obedience of community workers to residents’ committees, the latter has been given the authority to fire incompetent community workers.
Community reform
Urban residents’ committees have been called “the bound-feet brigade” in cities since the 1980s. This nickname vividly reflects the common demographic of their members back then: sometimes illiterate, mostly female and retired, despite the fact that foot-binding had ended decades ago and most had normal feet. Under a modest stipend from the local government, residents’ committee members undertake a wide range of responsibilities in their communities, usually between 1,000 and 3,000 households. They are security guards that patrol the neighborhood daily in ominous red armbands, mediators of family fights, lecturers on government policies and regulations, door-to-door deliverers of free rat poison bait issued by the government and housekeepers of the neighborhood that monitor its overall tidiness. If the government has given them enough expenses, they set up a leisure center for the elderly to play cards, a public library and a clinic in the community. All in all, they provide the services for residents that are too trivial for the government and too unprofitable for corporations.
According to the Organic Law of Urban Residents’ Committees adopted in 1989, they also have responsibility to cooperate with government branches when their work directly concerns residents. However, fulfilling tasks assigned by various government departments has occupied too much time and energy of residents’ committees, which should be spent on providing services to the neighborhood, said Wang Jinhua, Director of the Department of Basic-Level Governance, Ministry of Civil Affairs. He said that in extreme examples some residents’ committees have rented out that part of their office area provided by the local government and used the rent to do the work assigned by government departments.
“After all, these committees are self-governing bodies of urban residents, but they have been mistakenly regarded as ‘a leg of the government,’” Wang told Beijing Review. “They are not doing what they should do.” The inconsistency between the nature and daily work of residents’ committees will be solved by regulations in the amended Organic Law of Urban Residents’ Committees, currently being drafted. A draft amendment to the law released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs to the public to solicit opinions included new clauses to eliminate government interference into the affairs of residents’ committees. On the relationship between government and residents’ committees, it said, “Government should not interfere into affairs that are under jurisdiction of self-governing community residents.” If the government assigns tasks to residents’ communities, it should also provide them with a budget and create favorable conditions. As for how to implement government tasks, residents’ committees will decide on implementation plans through discussion.
Wang said the adoption of the amended law will help to catalyze the reform of civil society governance in China from a government-based, work unit-based model to a community-based model. Before the economic reform toward building a market economy started in the early 1980s, most urban residents in China were employees of work units or danwei, which often created their own housing, child nurseries, schools, clinics, even shops and post offices for their employees. A danwei, which usually employed people for life, became the center of this cradle-to-grave social welfare system in cities.
The evolution of economic reforms in cities has pushed this work unit-based hiring system to the brink of collapse over the last two decades. Most urban residents in the labor market, especially in the private economic sector and rural immigrants, now rely on the civil society to satisfy their various demands. In response to this new situation, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a document on strengthening the role of communities in city administration in November 2000, encouraging residents’ committees to enhance the life quality of urban residents by intensifying their services in improving the living environment, medical care and leisure facilities. Wang said for the time being services provided by residents’ committees are pretty limited and mainly confined to serving disadvantaged groups.
An independent force
The new arrangement has helped residents’ committees to act as a new independent force in protecting citizens’ interests. A story by newspaper the 21st Century Business Herald in January quoted a recent incident of operations at a construction site in Ningbo that caused cracks in the walls of a residents’ building. When the construction company, a state-owned conglomerate, refused to pay the residents for the damage, the residents’ committee hired a lawyer who went to Beijing to negotiate with the headquarters of the state-owned company. The company eventually agreed to compensate the affected residents.
Ningbo was the first city to implement changes, but other areas will follow. Wang said the Ministry of Civil Affairs has a plan to enlarge the direct election rate of urban residents’ committees around the country to 50 percent by 2010. This is slow compared with civil society governance in rural areas. Almost all Chinese farmers have been able to directly elect their village heads, in many experimental cases their township heads, since the Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees was enforced in 1998. Explaining the gap between cities and rural areas, he said the essential reason was that “many urban residents still have their work units to care for their welfare and well-being and they don’t rely on a wise residents’ committee member to improve their life quality.”
Wang, who had been monitoring the practice of direct elections in rural areas as the top official for six years, believes that steps to promote democracy in China should be taken cautiously. He said people could harvest the blessings of democracy only when its enforcement could be fully supported by a complete legal system, established rule of law and education and training on democracy. “There is nothing mysterious about democracy. You should first design flawless rules of the game that allow nobody to play outside of the court”.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)


The White House race
Jonathan Freedland

FUNNY, isn’t it, how we have come this far in the US election campaign, reaching the milestone of results from 24 states, and still a mystery remains — one that has vexed more than a few readers. Despite all the ink spilled, the pages filled and the airwaves crammed with coverage, they complain, there is something large they still don’t know. What, exactly, do these warring candidates stand for? Partly this is a media mea culpa, to go alongside the, er, misreading of the New Hampshire primary. For what have been the dominant themes so far? Barack Obama’s rhetoric in Iowa, Hillary Clinton’s tears in New Hampshire, the role — asset or liability? — of Bill, the cost or benefit of Obama’s race and of Clinton’s gender. On the Republican side, we’ve had Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, John McCain’s age and Mike Huckabee’s wit. That’s a bit of a caricature, but not so far off. Policy differences have not exactly been centre stage.
And yet, it would be a grave mistake to conclude that somehow this election is nothing more than a personality contest, albeit a gripping one. We could repeat the old cliche — that, under the surface, all these politicians are the same — but too many made that mistake before. In 2000 it was fashionable to say that Al Gore and George W Bush were ideological twins, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of bland centrism. Now we know, to our cost, how wrong that was. So perhaps today, as the presidential campaign enters a new phase, we should take a hard look at what these candidates are about. Start with Obama, the candidate who, more than any other, is accused of being light on detail. It’s true that he offers nothing like the programmatic minutiae of Clinton, but it’s still clear where he stands. During the last month, Obama’s standard stump speech opened with a declaration that “The nation is at war and the planet is in peril”. In that single sentence, he signalled two radical breaks with the last eight years, on Iraq and on climate change.
On Iraq, he cites his own early opposition to the war to draw one of his sharpest dividing lines with Clinton. Back in October 2002, when he was a mere member of the Illinois state senate, he addressed an anti-war rally. At that same moment, Hillary Clinton voted in the US Senate to authorise the use of force in Iraq, a decision she has never renounced. Obama doesn’t quote his own speech but it would be powerful if he did. He condemned “a dumb war, a rash war” in terms that look remarkably prescient now. More than five years on, Obama promises a US withdrawal and “no permanent bases” in Iraq, besides a garrison to protect the US embassy in Baghdad. He would send more troops to Afghanistan. He would then open talks with Iraq’s neighbours, including Iran and Syria, because strong countries “talk to their enemies as well as their friends”.
He would not only end the war in Iraq, he says, but end the “mindset that led to the war in Iraq”. That means an effort to restore America’s standing in the world. Accordingly, he would close Guantanamo and restore habeas corpus rights so that no suspect could be detained without charge. He speaks about the assault on civil liberties entailed by what he does not call the “war on terror”. Related will be his effort to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil, required anyway to make the move towards “green energy”. (Both he and Clinton avoid the language of climate change and global warming, as if preferring to focus on the solution rather than naming the problem.) He suggests setting a new fuel efficiency standard for motor cars.
Domestically, he wants to pay teachers more, to offer help with college bills to young people who do voluntary work and to do the same for returning military veterans. He speaks about financial excesses, citing “the CEOs who earn more in 10 minutes than ordinary people earn all year”. He wants to raise the cap on social security contributions which at present sees Bill Gates pay as much as a worker who brings in $97,000 a year. “Millionaires should pay their fair share,” he says. Clinton touches some of the very same points, even in the same language, though she has wavered on the social security payment question. She, too, is for help with student grants, and keen to forgive the debts of those who become teachers, nurses or police officers. She, too, wants greener energy, favouring micro-generating solutions that would feed electricity back into the grid or that would see solanels on household roofs. She also wants to “end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home”, promising to start withdrawing personnel within 60 days of taking office. Her husband says “we’re going to use diplomacy with friend and foe alike”, a slight shift from her earlier condemnation of Obama as “naive and irresponsible” for suggesting he would talk to the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro.

—Khaleej Times




Lord Ashdown too big for Afghanistan?
Sir Cyril Townsend

LORD Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, which is a village in Somerset, withdrew formally on Jan. 27, from being the top candidate for the new post of United Nations “superenvoy” in Afghanistan. The impression has been given that, after many months of consideration, he is now seen as too powerful a figure for the job. He is best known in the United Kingdom as a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, but subsequently he was a courageous and successful High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia. After Bedford School, a private one, he became an officer in the Royal Marines and commanded their Far East Special Boat Section (similar to the Special Air Service). He then joined the Diplomatic Service. In 1983 he won Yeovil, a former safe West Country Conservative seat, for the Liberals. The writer of several books, he has become a popular public speaker. He is now regarded as a much-respected senior statesman.
Last July he took part in a debate in the House of Lords on Afghanistan. Shortly afterward he repeated his views in an interview with The Obsever (July 15): “The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq. If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off with warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunnis and Shiites right across the Middle East.” He went on: “Mao Zedong (the Chinese ruler) used to refer to the first and second world wars as the European Civil Wars. You can have a regional civil war. That is what you might begin to see. It will be catastrophic for NATO. The damage done to NATO in Afghanistan would be as great as the damage done to the UN in Bosnia.”
Like many other observers of the scene in Afghanistan, Paddy Ashdown feared the NATO International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) was losing the struggle for hearts and minds: “The battle for this is the battle of public opinion. The polls are slipping. Once they go in the slide it is almost impossible to win it back ... There is a very short shelf life for an occupation force.” Iraq supports that last sentence. Before Paddy Ashdown withdrew has name The Times (Jan. 17) described his likely role, which had been carefully considered at the United Nations and elsewhere: “He is expected to be charged with coordinating the Western reconstruction and aid effort, pulling together international agencies, foreign donors, the Afghan government and NATO military forces. The task is unlikely to be easy, as much of the effort is duplicated, ineffective and short term, while ordinary Afghans are increasingly angry that they are seeing so little of the billions of pounds that have been donated to the country.”
By last year reconstruction in Afghanistan is thought to have cost $8 billion! It is all too easy to describe what has been going wrong since the swift removal of the Taleban in 2001. The United States and the United Kingdom looked away — to Iraq in 2003 — and in 2005 the Taleban returned in strength. Today military experts consider there is an extraordinary lack of a unitary system of command on the pro-government side. There have been serious disagreements between the United Nations and the United States, especially over the high number of civilian casualties. On Jan. 14 a Taleban suicide squad attacked Kabul’s one major luxury hotel and eight guests and hotel workers were killed. 32 nations are contributing to Isaf, but many are not pulling their weight. Paddy Ashdown had talks in Kuwait with President Hamid Karzai. The latter has charmed the Western world but is in deep trouble at home. Afghans are disillusioned with his performance, and his writ does not run in large parts of the country.

—Arab News