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Politics

Rural residents get same voting power as urbanites

Updated: 2011-05-09 07:43

By Wang Jingqiong (China Daily)

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BEIJING - China's rural residents are enjoying the same voting rights as urban dwellers for the first time in ongoing elections for lawmakers at the county and township levels.

The new round of elections was launched when a two-day training session on elections started in Beijing on Friday.

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During the elections, which are held every five years, more than 2 million lawmakers at the county and township levels are elected in more than 2,000 counties and 30,000 townships, according to China's top legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee.

The latest elections are the first since the adoption of the new Electoral Law in March 2010. The law requires "both rural and urban areas have the same ratio of deputies to the represented population in elections for people's congress deputies".

The amendment to the electoral law was regarded as part of China's efforts to narrow the urban-rural gap by ensuring both segments of society have the same voting rights.

Statistics show that more than 900 million people will vote for lawmakers at the county level and more than 600 million will vote at the township level.

The top legislature is requiring election organizers to ensure "each deputy represents roughly the same number of people in a constituency".

Efforts should be made to ensure the candidates broadly represent the population and attention should be given to increasing the ratio of workers, farmers, professionals, technicians and women among lawmakers. In addition, the number of lawmakers from ethnic minorities should also be representative.

Organizers should also safeguard the electoral rights of the country's 200 million migrant workers, either by giving them the chance to register and vote in their hometowns or the cities they have migrated to.

The top legislature has also called for a reduction in the number of Communist Party members and government officials who are elected lawmakers.

The changes will make China's elections for lawmakers more balanced and better ensure rural peoples' rights, said Han Dayuan, a Constitution law professor from Renmin University of China.

"With more deputies coming from different parts of society, these new elections will expand the democratic basis of our NPC system, strengthen the role of the NPC as supervisors and ensure more voices are heard and taken into consideration when political decisions are made," said Han.

The previous electoral law stipulated that each rural deputy would represent a population that had four times the number of people in an urban constituency. That system was seen as one that gave rural residents one-quarter of the suffrage of their urban counterparts.

The revisions were made according to the country's urbanization and population transfer, said Xu Anbiao, director of the State Law Office under the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee.

According to the 1953 national census, the urban population comprised 13 percent of China's population. Cities were given a voice that was disproportionate to the size of their populations so the NPC was not dominated by rural deputies.

With rapid urbanization and rural economic development, the number of people living in cities stood at 46.6 percent of the population in 2009, when the call for equal voting rights for both urban and rural residents was drafted into an amendment that was adopted in 2010.

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