Opinion | China's rebel village is not a failure, says activist

A Guangdong rebel village’s unprecedented venture into democracy has not failed, one Beijing scholar who advised villagers on holding elections said on Friday. Wukan just needed to fix its miniature political system.

Last month marked the first anniversary of Wukan’s free elections. At the anniversary, villagers expressed their frustration that their new freely elected village representatives had not been able to negotiate the return of most of the land that had been sold by the previous corrupt leaders.

“We intellectuals are responsible for these high expectations," said Xiong Wei, a grassroots legal activist who was speaking in Hong Kong on Friday.

‘“Villagers expected a solution to their land dispute,” he said, “but the current system set in place is not able to negotiate agreements on the land dispute.”

The village needed to establish a representative body that finds a middle ground between the current village representatives that were too dominant to want consensus and the village assembly that was too large to come to a consensus, he said.

"I don’t think they have made many mistakes," said Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, a political scientist at City University. "Their struggle just requires a tremendous long-term commitment. People might get tired."