Voting as a Rite
豆瓣
A History of Elections in Modern China
Joshua Hill
简介
For over a century, voting has been a surprisingly common political activity in China. Voting as a Rite examines China’s experiments with elections from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history. Rather than arguing that such exercises were either successful or failed attempts at political democracy, the book instead focuses on a previously unasked question: how did those who participated in Chinese elections define success or failure for themselves? Answering this question reveals why Chinese elites originally became enamored of elections at the end of the nineteenth century, why critics complained about elections that featured real competition in the early twentieth century, and why elections continued to be held after the mid-twentieth century even though outcomes were predetermined by the state. While no mainland Chinese government has ever felt that its rule required validation at the ballot box, the discourses that surrounded elections reveal much about important tensions within modern Chinese political thought. What is the best means to identify talent? Can the state trust the people to act responsibly as citizens? As Joshua Hill shows, elections are vital, not peripheral, to understanding these concerns fully.
目录
List of Tables and Figures*
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Rectifying Names: Inventing Terms for Elections, 1840–1898
2. Transmission and Re-Creation: Writing Laws for Voting, 1898–1908
3. The First Elections and the Last Emperor: Voting and Campaigning, 1909–1911
4. Free Elections and the First Republic: Parties and the Press, 1911–1913
5. Warlord Democracy: Coercion and Coordination, 1913–1921
6. Elections as Education: Political Tutelage, 1921–1987
7. Voting without a Choice: Elections in the People’s Republic, 1949–2018
Conclusion: Democratization and the Discourse of Elections in China
Character List
Notes
Bibliography
Index
* Tables and Figures
Tables
1. Primary-Stage Voting and Revoting in Wu County, 1909
Figures
1. Frequency of terms gong ju and xuanju to mean “election/voting” in Shenbao headlines, 1872–1901
2. Frequency of terms gong ju and xuanju to mean “election/voting” in Shenbao headlines, 1905–1911
3. Frequency of terms gong ju and xuanju to mean “election/voting” in headlines of forty-one Chinese periodicals, 1872–1911
4. Relative frequency of the use of the term yundong to mean “election campaigning” during the 1909 provincial assembly elections
5. “Yuzhong xuanju yundong [Election Campaigning in the Rain]”
6. “Xuanju yundong [Election Campaigning]”
7. “Xuanju yundong er [Election Campaigning 2]”
8. A model ballot for the 1912 parliamentary election
9. “Miss Mei Votes in China’s First General Election”
10. “Women you xuanjuquan he bei xuanjuquan” [We Have the Right to Vote and to Be Elected] (1953)
11. “Use your democratic rights in accordance with the law/Cast a sacred ballot.” Propaganda slogan for the 2016 local People’s Congress election in Changsha, Hunan
12. The former provincial legislature building in Changsha, Hunan