Province springs surprises to eliminate election fraud
Print Edition
NORTH China’s Shanxi Province has launched a new way of selecting candidates for local elections in a bid to clean up the political environment after a spate of corruption cases.
The township-level leadership transition ended in early May and the county-level election is underway in Shanxi’s Luliang, the first prefecture-level city in the province to try the new system.
This year, there will be elections in over 2,850 county-level regions and more than 32,000 townships.
In Shanxi, more than 300 positions were left vacant after a large number of officials were implicated in graft, including seven provincial-level officials.
Under such circumstances, the way in which officials are selected and promoted has become a thorny issue, said Wang Rulin, secretary of the Communist Party’s Shanxi committee.
To prepare for the elections once every five years, the province last year examined all of its 70,000 officials, resulting in more than 5,000 being penalized for violating Party codes of conduct.
To date, six documents have been issued to stop “problematic” officials from being promoted.
“We have to learn a lesson,” said Wang.
When Li Hongzuo, vice president of the Party school in Luliang, rushed to an emergency meeting, he was told he was one of 38 officials to be assigned the role of inspector, tasked with interviewing all of the city’s candidates for official positions.
The inspectors had all communication with the outside world cut.
Almost at the same time, Li Ruigang, a township-level official in the city’s management center for government services, was told he had to attend “training” at the Party school. This turned out to be a surprise interview designed to determine who would be nominated for the coming county-level election.
“I thought it was a course on Party rules and leadership instructions,” he said.
Li Ruigang was given seven minutes to prepare a speech on how he would use his power if he was elected a county-level official.
One of the highest scores
“I have thought about what causes corruption and ways we can eradicate it — so the topic was not difficult for me,” he said. He was given a score of 90, one of the highest, from the inspectors.
Li Ruigang was one of 13 to stand out as suitable for a county-level position. Two candidates did not even show up.
“If they had known the event affected their future, they would not have dared miss it,” said Li Ruigang.
He had held his position for 13 years and never expected promotion. “I was told by a colleague that I was lucky to be given a chance for promotion — I am not local, and I am not well connected.”
Wu Zhenjie, an official supervising local elections in the Shanxi provincial government, said the surprise interview was arranged to prevent interviewees seeking connections or offering bribes to interviewers.
“Instead of being chosen by higher leaders, candidates must compete. This has eliminated corruption and prompted cadres to improve their workstyles.”
Ma Jinbiao, an official with the provincial committee’s organization department, said a candidate faces more than 10 steps before being promoted, including public recommendations, a check on qualifications, deliberation by related authorities, public notification and voting by local lawmakers.
Inspectors will now supervise the elections in cities, counties and townships across the province, and public tip-offs are encouraged.
As of mid May, authorities in Luliang had revoked the election qualification of a man whose father-in-law, a local senior lawmaker, had lobbied for him by sending text messages to voters.
During the township-level elections in the district, Zhang Nengqiang was finally elected director of the Fengshan Subdistrict Office at the age of 43. In China, a township-level official usually will not be promoted if he or she is older than 45.
“I’m very grateful I was elected without offering any bribes,” he said.
The cleaner political air has also eased the financial burden on local companies, as few officials dare to request election “sponsorship.”
Niu Zhiming, a tourism entrepreneur in Luliang, said he and his peers had not been asked to back any candidates, without disclosing how much he donated last time.
In a 2013 electoral fraud case in Hengyang, a city in south China’s Hunan Province, 56 provincial legislators were found to have offered bribes totalling 110 million yuan (US$16.7 million) to nearly 600 city’s lawmakers and members of staff.
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