Waging Peace: China

Monitoring Elections

The Chinese government began direct village elections in 1988 to help maintain social and political order in the context of unprecedented economic reforms. Today, village elections occur in some 700,000 villages across China, reaching 75 percent of the nation's more than 1.3 billion people.

In a groundbreaking agreement, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China granted The Carter Center permission in 1997 to observe village election procedures; provide assistance in gathering election data, educating voters, and training election officials; and host Chinese officials to observe U.S. elections. After the Center's completion in 1999 of a successful pilot project, The Carter Center and the ministry signed a three-year cooperation agreement. Upon invitation, the Center also began observations of township elections – elections above the village level – in conjunction with the National People's Congress in 1999.  In mid-December 2002, the Center observed elections at the county level for the first time. In March 2010, The Carter Center sent its largest delegation ever to assess two villager committee elections in Zhaotong city, Yunnan province.

Since November 2002, the Center has also organized delegations of Chinese officials and scholars to observe U.S. general and midterm elections every two years.

The project achieved impressive results, including:

• Developing a data information system with 600 computers at the county, municipal, and provincial civil affairs offices in the Hunan, Fujian, Jilin, Shaanxi, Qinghai, and Chongqing provinces and training 650 computer operators
• Hosting a national seminar in 2000 to revise the National Procedures on Villager Committee Elections, following which 50,000 copies of the handbook were printed and distributed
• Training 1,200 local election officials to foster better understanding of election procedures and to compare experiences across the provinces
• Training 500 elected chairs of villager committees in the Shandong province on villager self-government procedures, including managing village finances, organizing villager assemblies, and resolving conflict
• Printing 40,000 posters on electoral procedures for use in villages
• Sponsoring the National Information Network on Villager Self-government (www.chinarural.org) to facilitate the national and global exchange of information on grassroots democracy
• Sponsoring publication of 22 books on contemporary China's rural governance and election observation
• Sharing information with the International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, European Union, and the U. N. Development Program
• Organizing three random surveys of the status of villager committee elections in Hunan, Jilin, and Shaanxi
• Exchanging more than 16 delegations between Ministry of Civil Affairs officials and Center experts.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter traveled to China in September 2001 to open the International Symposium on Villager Self-government, an unprecedented conference between 120 Chinese officials and scholars from around the world. For three days, participants talked face to face about election issues. President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, observed a village election in the Quanwang village in Jiangsu province and met with top Chinese leaders, officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the National People's Congress. During his visit, President Carter asked Chinese officials to move open and direct elections above the village level.