Hezhai Village in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, jump-started "grassroots democracy" in whole of China when it first founded a villagers' committee elected directly by rural farmers in the village in the early 1980s.

With the endorsement and support from the central and local governments, the practice has since spread to more than 80 percent of China's rural villages and is going to spread to towns, townships and a large number of urban areas.

As China's national legislature is holding its annual session in Beijing, residents in Yanyue Hutong in its downtown Wangfujing business center went to the ballot boxes to directly elect their community officials.

By June, according to reliable sources with the city authorities, more than 10 neighborhood communities in Beijing will have direct elections.

Earlier, more than 20 neighborhood communities in the southern Guangxi autonomous region and Beijing municipality have resorted to the means of direct election to choose community officials after the end of 2000.

Mao Guifen, a woman deputy head of the Dongcheng (Eastern) District in the Chinese capital, witnessed a direct voting for community officials in her district in August last year.

"Local residents stayed on at the voting site after their ballot casting, anxious to know the voting result and, when they heard the expecting outcome announced, they smiled, laughed and cheered," said Mao.

"But a few outsiders still doubted about our urban residents' enthusiasm for democratic elections. Well, they'll have to change their mind once they see 95 percent of the residents cast their votes this time," said Mao.

Acknowledging that the voting in China is of far-reaching significance, Mao said, "since the election, local residents have been confident about their role in the community and they pooled ideas and suggestions concerning its construction and environment improvement. The voting also encourages neighborhood community managers and officials to keep improving their work style."

"The election, still at its primary phase, is possibly immature and but people in the country's grassroots units are not deprived of the voting rights," said Dang Guoying, a noted researcher with the Rural Development Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

The nation's top legislators have taken notice of a host of problems and challenges and started working to tackle them.

A deputy to the First Session of the National People's Congress (NPC), the country's top legislature, Luo Yifeng noted that there still exist a number of contradictions and problems in the current village elections.

Scores of fellow deputies have submitted a motion to the ongoing annual NPC session in Beijing about enacting a law with regard to the election of villagers' committees.

"A specific law is in urgent need of guiding the healthy operation of the grassroots election," said Luo, deputy head of the Economic Information Research Institute of the Beijing Chemical Industrial Group Corp

According to Luo, the motion urged simplified methods of filling ballots to be introduced in view of the cultural levels of most farmers and asked eminent figures from society at large go to help with local farmers' election in villages.

(Xinhua News Agency March 16, 2003)