A little place called China

So I'm leaving for China tomorrow - it should be pretty exciting. I'll be there for almost two months attempting to understanding village elections, governance, and whether democracy even matters in the villages - and if it does matter, why it matters, and if not, why it doesn't. I'm really excited for it, and I hope that I'm able to get something out of it. Many people aren't aware that China has been holding democratic elections at the village level since 1988, assuming that since China is a "Communist" country that all government positions are controlled by the Communist party. A whole bunch of studies have been done on China's rural democratic reforms (often using democratic reforms as the dependent variable), but not many have really examined the impact of village elections. Those that have actually find that elections don't make that much of a difference in village governance - a result that seems strange and counterintuitive to me. It may be the case, but I don't understand why elections wouldn't matter - it could be a matter of time, and that it takes awhile for individuals to develop a democratic mindset, but that doesn't seem super plausible to me. I'm hoping to find an institutional reason behind it. In any case, the experience of going off to the countryside and attempting to engage in field research will be greatly worthwhile to me. I'll update this blog when I have a chance detailing where I'm at and what I've been up to (assuming, of course that I am able to log onto it - sometimes certain internet sites are "difficult" to load up in China. For example, when I was in China last time, I remember that I could only log onto myfamily.com about 5% of the time, because most of the time it was blocked). So, with interesting travel updates, I think the blog will be a bit more interesting for the next couple of months.

I fly into Shanghai, and my research plan is to look at two "most-similar" cases. At the "highest" level, elections are run by the provinces, but sometimes by county or even township governments. An article I read mentioned that Fujian is well-known for having extremely well-implemented village elections, so the first place I plan to visit will be two villages that are close to each other, but in separate provinces. My hope is that this will help me to be able to compare institutional variation in two villages that are similar on every point except the how well-implemented are elections (i.e. secret balloting, one person one vote, etc.). Admittedly, this won't be easy because I will have to hold other variables constant, such as lineage structures. The best would be to find "one-surname" villages, so that that aspect is controlled. So I am going to visit Zixi County in Jiangxi Province, and Guangze County in Fujian Province. After this, I will go up to northern China to villages near Qinhuangdao, Hebei and Huludao, Lianoing. We'll see how it goes.........