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Ed Zhang

The world's press reported Wednesday's free vote for an election committee in Wukan - the Guangdong fishing community where villagers were involved in a stand-off with the authorities for months over shady land deals - as a sign of progress.
Many Wukan residents alleged that village officials had misused their land rights since 2006 and embezzled more than 700 million yuan (HK$860 million) in public funds. From September to December, they staged petition drives and demonstrations, which turned into violent clashes with local police and reached a critical point when a protest leader died in police custody. 
A dramatic turn came before Christmas, when the Guangdong provincial government adopted a conciliatory approach to the villagers, sending an investigative committee to look into their case and agreeing to restore village governance through a free election. 
Wukan has also earned quite a few commentaries in the domestic press since then. Here are two examples: 
An analysis in the Legal Daily in Beijing drew three major lessons from the provincial government's intervention in Wukan. 
First, it said, grass-roots corruption is often the direct cause of public resentment because it happens right beside the masses. More than 30 years after the beginning of China's reform and opening up, the analysis said, there are still 'a considerable number of places and government institutions' that are ignored by the fight against official corruption. 
Second, when a crisis occurs, officials cannot solve the problem without winning sympathy and support from the masses. It is important to avoid confrontation with them in the first place and to  steer clear of treating them as hostile forces. 
The Guangdong authorities, the analysis said, had been wise and open-minded in handling the 'Wukan incident', although it said at the same time that the provincial government should have intervened sooner. 
Third, the Legal Daily analysis said, 'for too long and in too many places', the actual Chinese practice is, as Karl Marx once complained,  to 'use hierarchy to replace general election'. 
Even at the village level, elections for representative committees are still decided by higher authorities. 
So the showcase elections are just pompous and wasteful, failing not only to convey the opinions of the masses  but to be taken seriously by them. 
The Legal Daily analysis also said that for more than three decades, China has built many special zones for experimenting with economic reform, but has yet to build one for any aspect of political reform. It's a task that the country cannot afford to delay for too long, it said. 
In contrast, the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times  published an editorial on Friday saying that Wukan's election was, basically, no big deal. 
Democratic elections at the village level had been going on for well over a decade, it said. 
It was strange, therefore, that the Western press could have attached  so much significance to Wukan when  'villagers' self-management has already been a way of life everywhere in the Chinese countryside'. 
The editorial went on to say:  'As a matter of fact, the degree of freedom in China's village-level elections is very high, and is subjected to no control by any higher-level organisations. They are so free as to have attracted criticism that the election results are sometimes seriously hampered by illegal money, and clannish and factional influences. 
'The latest election in Wukan village succeeded precisely because outside forces, most notably the government, upheld the principle of fairness through their supervision, so that buying votes, a phenomenon seen in the village's previous election, could be effectively stopped.' 
Then the editorial turned its spearhead to the Western press, alleging that Western reporters highlighted Wukan's election only because they wanted to use the event to debase all the past efforts that China had made in building democracy. 
Comparing the two articles, both of which appeared in supposedly serious media affiliated to the same government, one gets the feeling that they were talking about two completely different countries.



Wukan's poll - pompous and wasteful or upholding fairness?