Abstract
Elections are a prerequisite for modern democracies, but the occurrence of elections is not a sufficient condition for democracy or democratization. Authoritarian and totalitarian political regimes often make use of them. This phenomenon has been described using the historical cases of the Soviet Union or Prussia, for instance, as well as many contemporary examples, such as Russia, countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, or North Korea. The People's Republic of China, one of the most resilient autocracies of all, does usually not appear on the list, probably because the Communist Party of China has never introduced national-level public elections of party and government leadership – not even fake ones. Nevertheless, what is often forgotten is that China has a long tradition of elections, mostly at sub-national level, and Joshua Hill has produced a fascinating book, taking us through the different phases of this ‘175-year history’ (p. 228). He provides us with the first comprehensive English-language study of the Chinese case that includes analyses of the very early intellectual discourse about elections and initial, often localized, experiments in imperial China, the turbulent expansions and retractions of voting mechanisms in Republican and Mao-era China, and of the elections of local People's Congresses and village committees that are a regular and routine political procedure in the country today.
Hill's approach is different from many other studies of so-called ‘electoral autocracies’ or ‘hybrid regimes’, which focus mainly on the deficiencies of elections when implemented under authoritarian conditions. He is not so much occupied with showing that elections in China were and are not open, free, or fair – although he investigates these principles and can show, for example, how universal suffrage, including passive and active voting rights for women, was actually introduced in the 1920s (pp. 169–173) – and in eventually gauging what this tells us about the degree of democratization in the Chinese political system. His book is basically an intellectual and cultural history, and an analysis of the discourse among leading reformers and advocates for elections in China. On this basis, Hill conceives of elections as a ritual (or ‘rite’, as in the title of the book). While he does not explain his usage of ritual as a concept any further, it becomes clear that, in his view, elections as an institution mattered for the intellectual macro discourse and the legitimation mechanisms of Chinese political rulers, although they never fulfilled any real practical function in China. They were a foreign-developed political procedure, imported by means of studies of ‘Western’ political systems by a handful of reform-oriented intellectuals during the last decades of the Qing dynasty, and constantly adapted to ideological currents and evidence-based considerations ever since.
After tracing the intellectual discussion and political utilization of elections in China from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Hill's central argument is that in spite of many ruptures and regime changes, the basic ideas about elections that inspired their imperial era implementation are still the underpinning voting mechanisms in effect today. Even by the most progressive Chinese reformers, elections were not seen as a tool for political transformation and innovation. They were intended to replace the imperial examination system with a more modern and effective way of identifying the most talented and morally worthy for offices in China's multi-tier public administration. When this selection by public voting did not work out quite as envisioned by the planners, elections soon came to be seen as a means of merely mobilizing the ‘will of the people’ for the public confirmation of preselected candidates for offices, not a competition of diverging ideas and contenders. This open confirmation was still seen as important though. Beyond that, according to Hill's assessment, what inspired advocates of elections in China's past and present, is the notion that elections ‘could foster communication between rulers and ruled … and could be valuable educational opportunity for the state to instruct its citizens’ (p. 213).
Among the many strengths of the book is its obsession with detail and accurate recounts of ideas and events, its intriguing linguistic analyses, and, very simply, its scope, which even comprises a short discussion of the democratization of the Republic of China in Taiwan. What is a little disappointing, however, is the rather superficial and extremely short treatment of the contemporary discourses around Chinese elections. For example, it is hard not to agree with the author's grim assessment of what became of village elections recently, but their history, from the first experiments, their flourishing as a new national institution, to debates about persisting problems (e.g. about the use of proxy voting given the hollowing out of Chinese villages due to work migration) and the recent withering of elected village committees via a strengthening of Party institutions at the grassroots, to name just a few aspects, deserve more attention. Not because we lack studies on Chinese village elections, but because the author's way of conceptualizing voting as a ritual would have added new and interesting perspectives here. Not least, this analysis would have represented a way of testing his hypothesis that elections in China are always only meant to ‘educate’ people and to ‘tie’ them to the political authorities. It could be argued that historical promotion of village elections followed a quite different impulse.
While this and other questions could be debated with Joshua Hill, they in no way detract from the enormous value of his excellent and long-overdue book for all readers interested in the historical evolution of political regimes and their ideological foundations in general, and in modern Chinese political and intellectual history in particular.