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Wukan continues leadership elections after vote-rigging scandals

April 1, 2014, Tuesday | Online Edition

WUKAN Village of south China's Guangdong Province continued public votes to elect its new leadership on Tuesday, with great pains taken to ensure transparency.

With the village subject to a number of vote-rigging and corruption scandals in recent years, a tally of votes cast on Monday has this time been displayed openly on boards around the grounds of the school in which voting is taking place. Further elections for Wukan's new committee are being held there on Tuesday afternoon.

Incumbent committee head Lin Zulian was reelected with 5,019 votes on Monday, and six other seats for the seven-strong committee will be filled after Tuesday's by-election.

Two deputy chiefs will be elected from three candidates including Hong Ruichao, who was detained by police last month on suspicion of bribery. And the four remaining members will be chosen from seven candidates.

Voting began at noon on Tuesday and was scheduled to last till 4 p.m. The results are expected to be announced on Tuesday evening.

They will only be deemed valid if more than half of the village's registered voters cast ballots and each winning candidate secures no less than one-third of all the votes.

Wukan has 13,000 residents, more than 9,000 of whom are of legal age and are therefore entitled to vote.

Monday's ballots have been collected and counted openly, while the results have been noted on red papers on seven notice boards. After their posting on the boards, the results were sent to the election committee to be published to the public and media.

A total of 8,160 ballot papers were claimed at the polling station on Monday.

Wukan was thrown into the international spotlight in 2011 when residents protested for months against the village committee's illegal land grabs, corruption, violations of financing and election rules.

A rerun of the election, deemed a national tryout of self-governance, democracy and the rule of law, was held in March 2012, and Lin Zulian was elected chief of the committee.

However, that did not put an end to the turbulence in Wukan. In April2012, several former officials from the village were expelled from the Communist Party of China over corruption and election-rigging charges.

March of this year saw more corruption scandals. Yang Semao and Hong Ruichao, deputy chiefs of the village committee, were detained by police over allegations that they took bribes for public projects in the village.

Reelected Lin voiced appreciation for villagers' trust and support, acknowledging their higher expectations of the new committee.

"The expectation from populace shall never be betrayed. We will improve democratic decision-making and management of the village committee and strengthen supervision of its members to avoid corruption or inefficiency," said Lin.

Nation


 

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