Melanie Manion

The Electoral Connection in the Chinese Countryside

A 1987 law established popularly elected village committees in the Chinese countryside. This article analyzes a unique set of survey data to describe and explain the connection between village leaders and those who choose them, in terms of orientation to the role of the state in the economy. It compares positions of village leaders with positions of respondents sampled from their selectorates of township-level leaders and electorates of ordinary villagers. Results of multivariate regression analyses indicate that: (1) village leaders are responsive to both old and newly emerging constituencies, as reflected in significant congruence between village leaders and their selectorates above and electorates below; (2) congruence between village leaders and their electorates is not exclusively the result of shared local environment, informal influence, or socialization but is significantly associated with the electoral process; and (3) the causal mechanism underlying the electoral connection in the Chinese countryside is the familiar one of voter choice.

The Cadre Management System, Post-Mao: The Appointment, Promotion, Transfer and Removal of Party and State Leaders

Post-Mao politics in the Peoples Republic of China has been largely the politics of reform. Probably crucial to the success of all other reforms is the major effort to restore and develop the Partys cadre management system. Indeed, this very argument is reflected in the recent official appreciation in China of Stalins dictum “cadres decide everything,” accompanying the recognition that the current modernization drive requires massive qualitative elite transformation and that deficiencies in the cadre system have prevented such a transformation.

Retirement of Revolutionaries in China: Public Policies, Social Norms, Private Interests

In this book Melanie Manion analyzes the largest bloodless circulation of elites in history--the massive retirement of officials in the Peoples Republic of China. Beginning in 1978 and continuing through the 1980s, Chinese leaders in Beijing replaced millions of old cadres, including veterans of the communist revolution, with younger generations of better educated and less generalist officials. How were the elders persuaded to retire? Manion shows how a norm of age-based exit from office, historically novel in the Chinese communist setting, was engineered by top policymakers and aided by younger cadres.Manions research combined a wide variety of sources and methods, many new to the study of Chinese politics. The author examined hundreds of party and government documents, surveyed articles in newspapers and journals, and interviewed officials in charge of supervising cadre retirement policy. She first conducted long exploratory interviews with retired cadres, and then designed questionnaires distributed to hundreds of others for quantitative analysis. Finally, to understand the viewpoints of those with the most to gain, she interviewed younger, employed cadres. The result is a rich portrayal of manipulative leadership in post-Mao China, which reveals the key role of the private interests of all the parties involved.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Democracy, Community, Trust: The Impact of Elections in Rural China

This article systematically investigates the impact of elections in rural China on a basic element of the elite-mass relationship: beliefs of ordinary citizens that their leaders are trustworthy. It analyzes data from two surveys of randomly sampled villagers in the same 57 villages in 1990 and 1996, merged with a set of separately collected data detailing features of elections in these villages during the same period of time. The analyses take advantage of uneven progress in grassroots democratization and ask how variation in democratic electoral quality across villages is associated with variation in changed views about the probity (or venality) of local leaders. Results strongly suggest that formal institutions of electoral democracy matter: Designs that feature contestation and encourage voter participation do better at promoting beliefs that leaders are trustworthy. At the same time, results point to the importance of informal community institutions of lineage relationships.

When Communist Party Candidates Can Lose, Who Wins? Assessing the Role of Local People's Congresses in the Selection of Leaders in China

This article draws on Party and government documents, Chinese-language books and articles, interviews and firsthand observation, and electoral outcome data to contribute to the emerging literature on the changing role of peoples congresses in mainland China. It focuses on the crucially important but neglected relationship between local congresses and local Communist Party committees in the selection of congress and government leaders. It analyses the 1995 reforms to Party regulations and the law, which resulted in electoral losses of more than 17,000 Communist Party candidates in the first set of elections after 1995. It concludes that the reforms created the conditions for local congress delegates to matter – and delegates responded. More broadly, it concludes that congressional assertiveness has significant (although not radical) implications for the relationship between the congresses and Party committees. The winners in the broader (not narrowly electoral) sense of the term are both the congresses and the ruling Communist Party, strengthened as an organization with selection of leaders opened up to more players.

Chinese Democratization in Perspective: Electorates and Selectorates at the Township Level

Progress in democratization is widely judged by how well elections function as instruments allowing ordinary citizens to choose political leaders to represent their preferences. In January 1999, I travelled to villages and towns in Chongqing as a member of a Carter Center delegation invited by the National Peoples Congress (NPC) to observe the electoral processes that produce delegates to peoples congresses, chairmen and deputy chairmen of these congresses, and government leaders at the township level. The Carter Center is an American nongovernment organization associated with Emory University, with an executive board chaired by former President Carter. As part of its mission to enhance freedom and democracy, the Center has observed and reported on Chinese village elections in delegation visits that began in 1996. Ours was the first delegation to observe peoples congress elections, however. Only weeks before we visited Chongqing, voters a hundred miles away, in Sichuans Buyun township, elected a head of township government in an unprecedented exercise of authority vested constitutionally and legally in their peoples congress delegates. Juxtaposing the experience of the Buyun elections with the normal processes by which township leaders emerge offers a useful perspective from which to consider electoral mechanisms of representation in China today. My main conclusion is that these mechanisms are designed to align voter preferences with the preferences of Communist Party committees. Ordinary voters and peoples congress delegates have choices among candidates in elections at the township level, but these choices are normally constrained by Communist Party committee pre-selection of candidates designated for positions of leadership.

Authoritarian Parochialism: Local Congressional Representation in China *

This article draws on evidence from loosely structured interviews and data from original surveys of 5,130 delegates in township, county and municipal congresses to argue that congressional representation unfolds as authoritarian parochialism in China. It makes three new arguments. First, popularly elected local congresses that once only mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, through demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, now work as substantively representative institutions. Chinese local congressmen and women view themselves and act as “delegates,” not Burkean trustees or Leninist party agents. Second, this congressional representation is not commonly expressed in the quintessentially legislative activities familiar in other regime types. Rather, it is an extra-legislative variant of pork-barrel politics: parochial activity by delegates to deliver targeted public goods to the geographic constituency. Third, this authoritarian parochialism is due to institutional arrangements and regime priorities, some common to single-party dictatorships and some distinct to Chinese authoritarianism.

Contemporary Chinese politics : new sources, methods, and field strategies

Introduction Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher and Melanie Manion Part I. Sources: 1. State-generated data and contentious politics in China Xi Chen 2. Why archives? Neil J. Diamant 3. The central committee, past and present: a method of quantifying elite biographies Victor Shih, Wei Shan and Mingxing Liu 4. Experimental methods and psychological measures in the study of Chinese foreign policy Peter Hays Gries 5. Internet resources and the study of Chinese foreign relations: can cyberspace shed new light on Chinas approach to the world? Allen Carslon and Hong Duan 6. Information overload? Collecting, managing, and analyzing Chinese media content Daniela Stockman Part II. Qualitative Methods: 7. The worms-eye view: using ethnography to illuminate labor politics and institutional change in contemporary China Calvin Chen 8. More than an interview, less than Sedaka: studying subtle and hidden politics with site-intensive methods Benjamin L. Read 9. Cases, questions, and comparison in research on contemporary Chinese politics William Hurst Part III. Survey Methods: 10. A survey of survey research on Chinese politics: what have we learned? Melanie Manion 11. Surveying prospects for political change: capturing political and economic variation in empirical research in China Bruce J. Dickson 12. Using clustered spatial data to study diffusion: the case of legal institutions in China Pierre F. Landry 13. Measuring change and stability over a decade in the Beijing area study Mingming Shen and Ming Yang with Melanie Manion 14. Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China Lily L. Tsai Reflections on the evolution of the China field in political science Kenneth Lieberthal Glossary.

Political reform in post-Mao China : democracy and bureaucracy in a Leninist state

List of Illustrations Foreword Jonathan P. Parry Note on Transliteration, Abbreviations, and Names Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Cosmic Sink 2. Fire in the Well 3. The Reformation 4. The Wrong Side of the River 5. Daw& and Duw 6. Death and Nondiscrimination Conclusion Notes Glossary References Index

How to Assess Village Elections in China

In assessing Chinese village elections we must sort and discriminate as we consult the ‘mountain of evidence’ that has accumulated over the past two decades. We can find anecdotal evidence to support practically any claim about village democratization, but from such stories we can learn nothing about the status, trends, or patterns of village democratization. This article evaluates what we can learn and have learned about grassroots democratization in the Chinese countryside from nationally and locally representative sample survey data.