Special Report: 30 Years of Reform & Opening Up      

    BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's village-based democracy has developed rapidly since the start of reform and opening up more than 30 years ago, according to experts from the China Rural Issues Research Center.

    More than 400 million farmers in 17 provinces took part in villagers' committee re-elections during 2008, said Xu Yong, director of the center based at the Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, central Hubei Province.

    Xu said most of China's 6 million villages had held villagers' committee elections at least seven times as of the end of 2008.

    More than 98 percent of villages had drawn up villagers' self-governance memorandums and township agreements, and more than 90 percent were making village affairs public, he said.

    Tang Ming, a professor at the center who served as an election observer in Hubei Province, said that elections, held every three years, had become a regular part of life in rural areas.

    Democratic elections, the publicizing of village affairs and democratic management of administrative power through public scrutiny, Xu said, had become trends in the countryside.

    Xu said that, since the 1998 implementation of the Organic Law of Villagers' Committees, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government had taken vigorous measures to promote village democracy.

    In 2007, the Report of the 17th National Congress of the CPC established grassroots autonomy as one of the four institutions of the socialist democratic polity.

    The Decision on Major Issues Concerning the Advancement of Rural Reform and Development, approved by the Third Plenary Session of the 17th CPC Central Committee, set the "perfection of villagers' autonomy" and "safeguarding the democratic rights of farmers" as basic target tasks of rural reform and development in the new era.

    However, problems persisted in village-based democracy, such as illegal election practices, Xu said. Bribery and violence also occurred. In some villages, village officials become the sole decision-makers.

    Xu said these conditions reflected the relatively short history of village-based democracy, compared with a feudal history of more than 2,000 years.

    Tang said the root of these problems lay in lagging rural development and urban-rural disparities.

    Liu Yiqiang, a member of the center, said discrepancies between actual democratic institutions and popular expectations helped account for these problems, but this situation could be improved in stages.

    Tang said one feature of village-based democracy was innovation. In the 2008 village elections, the trial of "election without nomination," which reduced the cost of polling, was adopted by 16 provinces.

    Some provinces adopted a practice of affiliating the villagers' committee election with the election of the village Party branch. Tang said other creative practices such as referendums on important affairs, democratic voting on officials' salaries, village affairs management by contracts, transparent financing and new systems of democratic supervision were also found in some rural areas.

    This year, a program aimed at "hard nut villages," where democratic reform had been slow to make progress, will be launched to improve the democratic situation in these villages, Xu said.