There have been two related developments in China's halting steps towards "democracy" in recent times. The first concerns a small village called Taishi. The excellent ESWN blog has a full chronology of events at Taishi. In essence, this village attempted to organise a recall vote after allegations of corruption emerged about the village head. This process has occurred more than 50 times in other parts of China. This time, however, provincial authorities assisted the village head in clamping down on the villagers and prevented the recall election. The events at the village was getting widespread coverage amongst Chinese netizens and beyond.

Next we entered the farce phase of this tragedy. A young journalist from The Guardian went with a noted pro-democracy activist to visit Taishi. As is the way, hired goons proceeded to prevent their entry into the town and manhandled the activist (the journalist remained safely ensconsed in his car). Losing sight of the activist, the journalist, Jonathan Joffe-Walt, filed a breathless account of what he thought he had witnessed, headlined "They beat him until he was lifeless". In fact the activist turned up with some cuts and scratches back in his home town two days later. This sparked a further storm over the irresponsibility of the journalist, the potential damage to the Western media and to the cause of Chinese democracy, not to mention the implications of Taishi itself for the wider cause. I have a category of posts covering all these events at Taishi, with links to other commentary and opinions on the events at this Guangdong village.

Then just yesterday the official Chinese press announced (with a straight face) the release of a new white paper by the Chinese State Council, titled the Building of Political Democracy in China. Using the term "socialist political democracy" some commentators have pointed out that beyond the lip service to the idea of democracy are some telling points in the Communist Party's (CCP) attempt to create a democracy with Chinese charateristics. Effectively it looks like the CCP see a future polity closely mirrored on Singapore's elected authoritarianism. As is typical, mired within a bland sounding paper are some potentially ground-breaking ideas and shifts in CCP thinking. And it is shifting.

Why does all this matter? The recent Plenum of the CCP announced a five year plan with a significant shift in China's intended development. There is to be a greater emphasis on redistribution, on making sure the poorer rural majority are afforded more time, money and attention to close the gap with their richer urban breathren. In addition, the plan intends to further clamp down on corruption and, at least in theory, develop further the "grass-roots democracy" movement at village level.

The key challenge for the leadership in Beijing is reconciling these high ideals with the reality on the ground. The leadership is savvy enough to know the CCP is Communist in name only, having dropped any economic or even political attachment to the cause years ago. What the leadership grapples with is how the CCP can retain it's grip on power into the future instead of imploding in its sea of contradictions and corruption. The answer used to be break-neck economic growth. The answer is now turning towards spreading that wealth more evenly, and ironically becoming more socialist in nature.

Last April Joe had an excellent post on China's stresses, goals, military buildups...and futures. This post is building on that, to demonstrate the internal pressures and reality in China. For those of us who hope for a prosperous, peaceful and democratic China, these are proving interesting times.

In a related post, Pundita discusses China's democratic "developemnt": Fu Manchu electronics and Accountocracy.

For those interested I do a daily linklets post covering news and views from across the blogosphere and beyond on China and East Asian affairs at my blog, Simon World.