China plans to expand the number of local elections to neighbourhood committees in urban areas as part of a commitment to greater democracy, officials said, as rights groups continue to accuse the ruling of Communist Party of failing to meet expectations for improvements.
"Generally speaking the level of democracy is lagging behind in urban areas," said Wang Jinhua of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. "Only 22 percent of the neighbourhood committees are directly elected and if we want to turn the other 78 percent into direct elections there is a long way to go," Wang said.
Wang said his ministry had an intitial target of raising the proportion of direct elections to the committees to 50 percent, but he did not give any time scale.
The committees work closely with local Communist Party officials, supervising communities and providing some social services. Many committee members are retired state employees. In rural areas, China allows direct elections to village committees and for village heads.
"As for the rural areas, direct elections are already extensive enough," Wang said. "Our next goal is to improve the quality of those elections," he said.
Wang admitted that problems of corruption and vote buying affected a "small number" of elections, estimating the number skewed by vote buying at 3 percent or less.
"However, they do produce a very bad social impact," he said of the fraudulent village elections. After conducting research in the south-eastern city of Wenzhou, Wang said he found that many villagers were too frightened to give evidence in cases of election fraud and that punishments were too light to deter corrupt officials and business people from illegally influencing the elections.
"Those who have offered or received bribes don't want to give evidence," he said.
Communist Party members occupy 56 percent of the seats on village committees and 48 percent of those on the urban committees, Wang said. Xu Anbiao, an official from the National People's Congress (NPC), said the internet was also playing an important role in the development of an awareness of legal and civil rights in China, especially through the following of "high-profile cases".
"I think this shows that people have greater legal awarness than they had before," Xu said. "With the level of social development in China, there has been remarkable improvement in people's democratic awareness, and they have become more eager to defend their legitimate rights and interests," he said. The NPC is China's nominal state parliament, which meets just once a year to discuss and approve policies and legislation presented by the Communist Party. Chinese leaders claim that their commitment to grassroot elections, greater openness in governance, and more democracy within the party show that the nation is making progress.
State media praised state and party leader Hu Jintao for using the word democracy more than 60 times in his speech at the opening of the five-yearly party congress in October 2007. Hu said China was "in the primary stage of socialism and will remain so for a long time to come."
He said China's modernisation drive under the party would need "unremitting efforts by several, a dozen or even dozens of generations." Other leaders have suggested several times in recent months that the "socialist modernisation" stage - and therefore the absence of multi-party democracy - would last about 100 years.
China would continue to develop its system of direct elections for village heads, and could expand it to township and even provincial level in the future, Premier Wen Jiabao said in 2006. "The conditions are not yet ripe for conducting direct elections at higher levels of government," Wen said.
"Democracy and direct elections in particular, should develop in an orderly way in keeping with the particular conditions of a country," he said. About 73 million of China's 1.3 billion people are Communist Party members.