Democracy from the Margin: China’s Local Legislatures in Transition

This project is to study and to promote the reform of local legislatures in the People’s Republic of China.  The People’s  Republic of China is no longer the communist country that we used to know. In addition to the enormous economic growth in the last 25 years, tremendous political changes have also taken place because politics and economics cannot be separated in any rigid way.  Unlike the economic changes, however, these political changes are less visible.  The most profound political changes have occurred at the margin of the country’s political power.   In terms of institutions, it is the legislature, not the party, where more reforms have taken place; in terms of the hierarchical structure of power, more political changes have taken place at the lower level, such as the villages, towns, districts (divisions within cities), and counties in stead of the central government; in terms of geographic locations, more political changes have taken place outside of the nation’s  major centers of Beijing and Shanghai, in places like Guangdong or Zhejiang. This situation reflects the regime’s general policy orientation in the last twenty-five years: The consideration for stability overrides all other considerations. The current project is aimed at studying and promoting Chinese legislative reform at lower levels, especially those outside of the nation’s major centers.