committee is now competent to appeal to the Standing Committee, or through it
to the NPC, to annul the local regulation.
17
Amendments to the electoral law
This section will address the amendments to Chinese electoral law. The Electoral
Law (Act) of the NPC and Local People’s Congresses of the PRC (Electoral Law)
was revised in March 2010 by the eleventh NPC with the purpose of expanding
democracy. For the first time, China realised that the representatives at people’s
congresses should be elected based on the same population ratios in both urban
and rural areas. Chinese peasants now enjoy the same and equal electoral rights as
urban residents according to the new amendments.
Pursuant to the Electoral Law, which was made in 1979 and revised in 1982 , 1986 ,
1995 and 2004 , votes of Chinese rural residents carried severely less weight than
those of urban residents. The statutory basis was founded by the following provisions:
Article 13 : ‘In municipalities directly under the Central Government,
cities and municipal districts, the number of people represented by a
rural deputy shall be greater than the number of people represented by
an urban deputy’.
Article 14 : ‘The number of deputies to the people’s congresses of
provinces or autonomous regions shall be allocated by the standing
committees of the people’s congresses at the corresponding levels, in
accordance with the principle that the number of people represented
by each rural deputy is four times the number of people represented by
each urban deputy’.
Article 16 : ‘The number of deputies to the National People’s Congress to
be elected by the provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities
directly under the Central Government shall be allocated by the Stand-
ing Committee of the National People’s Congress in accordance with
the principle that the number of people represented by each rural deputy
is four times the number of people represented by each urban deputy’.
This set of provisions had been conceptualised by scholars as the ‘ 1 / 4 article’, which
means a rural vote merely weighs a quarter of its urban counterpart in Chinese
elections. The debated inequality of the representative quota between rural and
urban areas has been underpinned by the dominant ideology. Marxists contend
that agriculture is a disadvantageous productive means, which has to be outstripped
(^17) The Procedure to Record and Review Administrative Regulation, Local People’s Congress
Regulation, Autonomous and Special Regulation of Ethnic Autonomous Region, and
Regulation of Economic Special Zone (Xingzheng fagui, difangxing fagui, zizhi tiaoli
he danxing tiaoli, jingji tequ fagui beian shencha gongzuo chengxu), enacted by the
Standing Committee of the NPC on 16 October 2010.