Taking A Stand
	A new breed of activists is emerging, eager to test the limits of what can—and cannot—be changed in today's China
	By Matthew Forney Beijing

	MARK LEONG/REDUX PICTURES FOR TIME ROCK THE VOTE: Li Fan helps organize elections in China while inspiring others to run for office

Posted Monday, March 1, 2004; 21:00 HKT
"Congratulations!" Li Fan shouts into the receiver. On the other end of the line is a villager in Shandong province, birthplace of Confucius, who just won a popular election to become village chief by promising to protect fellow peasants from land developers. But local officials, unimpressed by this political interloper, have refused to hand over to him the official seals of his office. Without them, says the presumptive village chief, he can do nothing. As the nation's leading democracy activist, Li has been in daily contact from his small, Beijing office, covering a coffee table with yellow Post-it notes as he helps plot a strategy to create a high-profile election success in Shandong. He consults a square of paper and suggests the man, a Communist Party member, form a new Party branch that could demand the stamps from higher-level Party officials. "I can be there in two days to add some pressure," Li offers. No, comes the reply: it's too sensitive. Li promises to visit in the spring and hangs up. "One village at a time," he says.

Li Fan is mainland China's missionary of democracy. The 55-year-old former radical Red Guard loads books about suffrage into his battered suitcase and drags them across the country's hinterland. Far from Beijing, he advises local officials on how to hijack kangaroo elections—which the Party has long sponsored—and convert them into meaningful exercises. Where his schemes have taken root, he has watched peasants vote for the first time in their lives. Where they haven't, he has seen supporters arrested. Li himself has stood accused by opponents of his work of running an "anti-Party clique" and says he's just come through a frightening three-month investigation by the secret police for organizing too brazen an election. Regardless of the pressure, Li plans to spend the next year building links to private groups around the country that can help promote more free balloting. His goal: a directly elected President by 2020. "Ten years ago, if I'd done this work," he says, "I'd have been arrested as a counterrevolutionary. Now I can state my case in speeches."

Li is typical of China's new breed of activists. Unlike old-style dissidents who sacrificed their freedom to demand sweeping political rights, they don't see themselves as saviors locked in a struggle of good versus evil. Rather, they believe they are accelerating a political-reform process that lags behind the economic changes already remaking China. Conscious of repression, they work to change the system from within. It's not always easy. Just last week, Human Rights in China, the New York City-based watchdog, reported that more than 200 activists have faced police harassment as the nation prepares for an annual parliamentary meeting. Yet Li Fan and the growing number of people like him are, for the first time, affecting mainland policy. When the National People's Congress (NPC) gathers for its yearly meeting this week, it will be adding clauses to the constitution protecting human rights and private property—something the country's legal reformers have spent years quietly working to attain. The NPC also has a five-year plan to draft a law revoking the right of police to send tens of thousands of people to labor camps for up to three years without trial. Last year saw other advances: petition drives demanding the release of detained Internet activists, outspoken criticism of the government for its handling of the SARS epidemic, and a landmark campaign to end arbitrary police detentions. To mark the momentum, the year-end cover story in the mass-market China Newsweek declared 2003 "The Year of the New Civil Rights Movement."

Many behind the movement draw encouragement from President Hu Jintao, who has presented himself as a man of the people since assuming power from Jiang Zemin last March. Unlike his more aloof predecessor, Hu has visited bedridden SARS patients, ended imperial send-offs for traveling leaders, celebrated Lunar New Year with peasants by stuffing dumplings, and has generally shown himself to be more accessible than any Chinese leader of the modern era. The common touch is vital in a nation where citizens are sick of pervasive corruption and feel disconnected from their communist overlords. With Hu leading the Party's withdrawal from daily life, a swelling number of people and organizations are trying to hasten the retreat. "What's new is people inside the establishment—teachers, entrepreneurs, the middle class—are taking part in pressing for civil rights, and that's very positive," says Liu Junning, a liberal author in Beijing who is now planning his own think tank.

To Li, Beijing's willingness to hold elections—or accept other trappings of a democratic society—is less a signal of any grand idealism than of political pragmatism. China introduced village polls in the late 1980s after disaffected peasants, outraged by graft and illegal fees, stopped cooperating with local governments in huge swaths of the hinterland. Give peasants some say in choosing their leaders, the thinking went, and they're less likely to take pitchforks to city hall. For the same reason, the central government is now expanding elections into neighborhood committees, the lowest level of city government. Officials often invite Li to help run these maiden projects. Two years ago, he persuaded leaders in impoverished Guangxi province to make voters line up to cast ballots one by one instead of crowding around the ballot box together. "Sometimes I agitate, but I'd rather help," he explains. The elections for neighborhood committee leaders that followed have become a model for the rest of the country.

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