Liaoning vote-buying scandal points to rot in China’s system
Dan Hough says Chinese lawmakers are left in a curious position where the exchange of money for political favours is seen as integral to the power ‘game’ but those involved leave themselves open to corruption crackdowns
Mainland China is not the type of place where you’d necessarily expect to find too many incidences of electoral fraud. It doesn’t, after all, have popular elections. It does, nonetheless, see behind-the-scenes manoeuvring for nominations to prestigious public positions.
Status, power, connections ... what’s behind the unprecedented voting fraud in electing China’s most powerful organ?
In other words, many representatives of China’s 2,852 counties want to move on and become part of one of the bodies that nominally run the affairs of the country’s 334 prefectures. Those active at prefecture-level may well have their eye on a place in the bodies that run one of the 34 province-level legislatures. To make that jump, representatives at each level are tasked with electing some of their own to the level above. This pyramid structure works right from bottom to the top of the Chinese governance structure. On paper, all clear enough.
In practice, there are two real issues with how the system works. First, there are exceptions to this process and people regularly get parachuted in to these bodies.
