As the leather-faced old man intently folded his pink ballot and slotted it into the box, I felt a slight lump in my throat. I'm a sucker for the rituals and realities of democracy, and here we were in the remote Chinese village of Liujiachang watching a thousand citizens in a schoolyard listen to campaign speeches and then vote for mayor. The incumbent, a slick young man elected three years ago, promised to lower taxes and improve irrigation. The challenger, older and more earthy, promised to open the village books for inspection and eloquently described how his own success as a farmer and former mayor would make him a better choice. "I'll bring you down the road I have walked already," he said. In the end, the challenger won by a narrow margin.
The visit was part of a two-week Newstour across China, from westernmost Kashgar to Beijing, by Time Warner executives, board members and journalists. We had to remember that this fledgling show of democracy is permitted only at the village level and is, so far, more symbolic than substantive. Government and party officials wearing Motorola beepers wandered the fringe of the crowd, much like the ward leaders at the elections in Louisiana I covered as a cub reporter.
But it was also important not to be too cynical. China is undergoing yet another awesome transformation, one marked by a pragmatic expansion of economic and individual freedom. We could sense both its promise and its limitations wherever we went: at a discussion with religious leaders in a mosque in Kashgar, at meetings with engineers and then environmental activists as we sailed the Yangtze and toured the mind-boggling Three Gorges Dam construction site, at a FORTUNE Global Forum of international CEOs in Shanghai's new convention center and at events surrounding the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Chinese revolution in Beijing.
The complexities of this change are often missed by those who pontificate from afar. "It is better to look at a thing once than to hear about it a hundred times," President Jiang Zemin told our group in a meeting in Shanghai. And for those of us who had marveled at being able to use the Internet in cafes in Kashgar, he updated that old Chinese saying for the digital era his country is now embracing: "You can know everything from the Internet, but it cannot replace personal experiences with people." This was, indeed, the prime purpose of our Newstour. "It's hard to appreciate the changes in China," says Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, "unless you experience them intimately and emotionally as well as intellectually."
President Jiang faces a tricky balancing act these days, made more so by the Clinton Administration's egregious failure to accept a World Trade Organization agreement in April. His speech to the FORTUNE forum included some hard-line words about Taiwan and about America's penchant to preach and meddle. "Every country has the right to choose the social system, ideology, economic system and path of development that suit its national conditions," he said. But the significant message he stressed in his talk was that economic and political liberalization would continue. "The Chinese people," he said, "will firmly and unswervingly follow the path of reform and opening up."