Create a uniform system for village polls, says Jimmy Carter

Former US president Jimmy Carter has called for standardised procedures to elect village heads across China.

Fewer than half the village elections around the nation were able to fulfil the spirit of the five-year-old election law, Mr Carter said, and uniform procedures were necessary.

'It is time now for the 1998 law to be expanded to establish complete and uniform procedures for the entire nation,' he said yesterday at the opening of a Beijing conference on village elections.

The Carter Centre, a non-governmental organisation formed by the ex-US president, runs several projects in co-operation with the Ministry of Civil Affairs to improve procedures for village committee elections.

Only 40 per cent of the polls in 700,000 villages lived up to the spirit of the election law. It was only 'mediocre' in a further 40 per cent and the rest did not comply with the law at all, he said.

But he praised co-operation between the Carter Centre and the ministry as bringing the 'great advances of personal democracy to the people of the small villages of China'.

Mr Carter met President Hu Jintao yesterday. Mr Hu said stable relations between China and the United States were in the fundamental interests of both nations. He noted that Sino-US relations had progressed significantly since the two countries normalised diplomatic ties in 1979 when Mr Carter was president.