Voting as a Rite: A History of Elections in Modern China

Harvard East Asian Monographs #417

by Joshua Hill

For over a century, voting has been a surprisingly common political activity in China. Voting as a Rite examines China’s experiments with elections from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history. Rather than arguing that such exercises were either successful or failed attempts at political democracy, the book instead focuses on a previously unasked how did those who participated in Chinese elections define success or failure for themselves? Answering this question reveals why Chinese elites originally became enamored of elections at the end of the nineteenth century, why critics complained about elections that featured real competition in the early twentieth century, and why elections continued to be held after the mid-twentieth century even though outcomes were predetermined by the state. While no mainland Chinese government has ever felt that its rule required validation at the ballot box, the discourses that surrounded elections reveal much about important tensions within modern Chinese political thought. What is the best means to identify talent? Can the state trust the people to act responsibly as citizens? As Joshua Hill shows, elections are vital, not peripheral, to understanding these concerns fully.

Genres: Politics, History

316 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2019

Reviews

[Nikhil · Rating 4 out of 5]

China is often held up as a part of the world which has lacked traditions of elections and popular political participation. Though there has never been an elected constitutional government with clean elections in that country, there has been a century-long tradition of elections with a meaningful political and social role.

Joshua Hill follows the development of electoral law, discourses about the holding of elections, the actual conduct of Chinese elections, and the relationship between elections as well as wider political and social ideals. It is a worthwhile narrative that helps fill many common holes in the bigger story of political development in 20th century China. I was particularly interested to learn about the vibrant constitutional experimentation that took place in the early Republican era, with a number of different provinces setting forth different proposals and ideas about the holding of elections. While these experiments were doomed to failure due to the military and political limitations of their proponents, their legal precedents and arguments had some carry-over to future eras in the Chinese past.

According to Hill, a common thread in China's history has been the notion that elections serve a state-strengthening and educative purpose. By holding elections, the people are bound to the government and they are taught to be better citizens in this line of thinking. I thought this was notable. While such arguments were highly influential in other parts of the world for the introduction of representative government to certain classes (see J. S. Mill), the extension of suffrage to the wider adult population was usually justified simply as the empowerment of the masses who had a long-overdue right to determine their own destiny. In China, it seems that the extension of suffrage was justified more as a means to mobilize an ever larger proportion of the population behind single-party states. "Radical democratic" or even Deweyan justifications for universal voting rights seem to have not had so much of a role. It certainly challenges the common assumption in the power of elections to introduce political competition and democratic pluralism.