I feel like I shouldn't be ignorant about stuff like that when they are playing more and more of a role on the world stage and the US is ramping up hostilities.
I feel like I shouldn't be ignorant about stuff like that when they are playing more and more of a role on the world stage and the US is ramping up hostilities.
Thanks for researching and making a big summary!
Asking questions for whoever knows the answers.
What are the bounds on this? If someone built a party around a different communist idea, like more emphasis on workplace democracy (syndies) or more emphasis on computerized planning (cybersyn), would that be within the legal bounds?
(I checked the existing secondary parties but it seems to be mostly the leftover dregs of historical splitter movements, so I didn't learn anything about present practice.)
What sort of election processes do these use? FPTP? Party list? Consensus?
I didn't understand this bit, could you clarify?
For the last part, I'm pretty sure this means that if ten seats are up for election, 13-15 people can run.
The CPC runs things at the national level pretty much unopposed but down at the lower levels one might be able to try out some different stuff. The only trade union allowed in China is the ACFTU which has 302 million members and is kind of a state organization so you wouldn't see a syndicalist party. As far as I'm aware, a lot of the economic policy is done at the provincial level with the national government setting quotas and things like that and those are also largely controlled by the CPC. That being said, the CPC is not some immobile bureaucracy that can't evolve like the late USSR was.
As for your second question, here is the 1979 law on elections which I believe is still the current one.
For your third question, iridaniotter's answer is correct as far as I'm aware however chapter 8 of that law is on nomination of candidates so you can read that if you want more info
Thanks!
So, summarizing: An election is for multiple candidates to fill N interchangeable seats. Voters can vote for up to N candidates. The top N candidates who received at least 50% of the vote get seats. If fewer than N candidates meet the 50% threshold, a runoff election is run with the leftovers until all seats are filled.
It sounds like it should have a roughly equivalent result to approval voting, though it's a lot more work to get that result. Approval voting is very good though.
The 10:13-10:15 ratio rule is still weird to me. I wonder what that's for.
The 10:13-15 thing is just so that there is a candidate pool to choose from and there is some competition. Competitive elections are usually considered important for democratic society (whatever that means). If you have 150 candidates to fill 100 seats, you have competition (even if the ideological difference isn't that significant), and ideally the Chinese government would like to see between 130 and 150 candidates for that 100 seat election, that way its not just the party picking candidates in candidate selection, the people have some choice.
There really isn't a great translation to US politics because of how representation works here, but it would be kind of like the federal government mandating there be at least two candidates in an election for a city council seat.
Oh, the low end of the limit is great. I guess I'm more surprised by the high end being only 1.5x the number of seats. My local elections usually have five candidates per position (of course they're FPTP so only two matter).