Here's another Chinese provincial election, and as you can probably tell, I kinda let my imagination wander a bit with Jilin. It was a lot of fun, though!
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Jilin, the only Chinese province to border both Korea and Russia, has a surprisingly vibrant political culture that its reputation as an ardently Progressive state at the national level disguises. For one thing, the reasons for this status are unique in China- as the capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, it was a major hotbed of insurgent support for the guerrilla movements of Zhang Xueliang (and is arguably even more strongly associated with him than his actual home province, neighbouring Liaoning). In the 1950s, when the Korean War broke out, despite China’s military action against the small Republic the Jilin prefecture of Yanbian (or 연변,
Yŏnbyŏn in Korean) on the border became famous for its Korean majority population taking up arms against the Chinese central government, uniting its people in opposition to racial prejudice regardless of whether they were sympathetic to communism or not (though many leaders of the insurgent movement were).
The group which organized this later became one of the first formal political groups to oppose the one-party democracy of Moshan, calling itself the Korean People’s Party (KPP) and making a name for itself as a big-tent group agitating for democracy on the other side of the border around the same time. It should come as no surprise to hear that the party was an ardent supporter of the Tiananmen Square Revolution, nor that Zhao Ziyang legalized it immediately in the hopes it would split the left-wing vote against the Kuomintang in the province. This did not really work, though, as Jilin was also the home province of one Liu Xiaobo, one of the leading lights of the Revolution who helped make the new Progressive Party extremely popular among the Han Chinese in the province.
Despite this, Liu primarily focused on national politics at first; it was not until 1997 that he started to get active in Jilin’s provincial politics. After the Progressives lost that year’s National Congress election, Liu resigned as the party’s leader in the chamber and decided to try and fix what he saw as an utterly dire situation in his home province. See, in the 1995 election the Progressive government of Liu Gang had lost popularity not to the Kuomintang but to a new faction of the Loyalists that had sprung up in Jilin. This faction was led by Li Hongzhi, the founder of the Falun Gong new religious movement, who promised to replace the ‘divisive’ Progressive government with a more moderate one, forming a pre-election arrangement to get the support of the KPP, now led by the more conservative Kim Jong-il (a former communist who had fled to Yanbian after his father, Korean communist leader Kim Il-sung, was famously executed by the Rhee government in Korea after the war).
Li and Kim had proven decidedly ineffective at running the province, and their cutbacks to its welfare state had seriously damaged its economy and caused a significant increase in unemployment exacerbated by the reverberations of the East Asian financial crisis. Consequently, when Liu joined the Provincial Assembly the Progressives quickly skyrocketed in the polls, and after a motion of no confidence, he became Premier in 1998, as Kim’s replacement as KPP leader Lee Soon-ok shifted to supporting the Progressives.
Progressives hoping Liu’s time as Premier would be quiet would be sadly mistaken, though- while he was adamantly critical of nationalism and kept up good relations with the KPP and other minorities like Mongolians and Manchus in the province, he started becoming more distant with the national leadership and its interventionist policies, occasionally getting into spats with its then-National Congress leader Huang Qi. He also commonly postured to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Mario Cuomo, and surprised many left-wingers by vocally backing the invasion of Afghanistan and anti-terror laws before promptly backing John McCain for President in 2004. His questionable interpersonal relationships weren’t just restricted to politicians in this period, either, as he remained implacable friends with U2 (who had been adamant celebrity supporters of him in the 1990 Chinese presidential election) and attended their concerts whenever they toured China, to the point that a clip of him ‘vibing’ to ‘Beautiful Day’ at a Changchun concert during the 2003 election campaign became a popular meme on Chinese social media soon after his death in 2017.
Nevertheless, as the main alternative was Li Hongzhi’s Loyalists and the Kuomintang and Lee was willing to be patient with Liu’s controversies, the Progressives were never in any danger of losing power in the 9 years Liu spent as Premier. That is, until 2007, when the economy was starting to really decline and many Progressive supporters jumped ship to the Communists and Greens while the KPP kicked out Lee in favour of, of all people, Kim’s son Kim Jong-un.
The uniting spirit behind this new coalition, both on the part of the politicians and the voters, was basically just how sick they were of Liu, and after Li returned to office and not only spectacularly failed to alleviate the ongoing recession (in fact, many economists suggest he made it worse) but also started unnerving non-Han Jilin residents by making some extremely unfortunate remarks about miscegenation, they soon remembered why they got rid of him. This time, he did last the full four year term, but this was a conscious choice on the part of his opponents.
After the 2007 election, the provincial Progressives had unceremoniously given Liu the elbow, and he was left quietly occupying the backbenches of the National Congress until his death (though his occasional moments of publicity post-Premiership, such as provoking Xi Jinping on social media by posting photos of himself and his wife with Winnie the Pooh mugs during the 2012 Beijing mayoral election campaign, were much better received than his time as Premier). To replace him, they picked Wang Dan, another Tiananmen Square Revolution activist who had remained much lower-profile than Liu and allegedly didn’t get along well with him, which finally paid off as his relentless attacks on Li, positive talks with the Communists and backdoor negotiations with the left of the KPP left gave him much political capital in the lead-up to the 2011 provincial election.
Wang later termed his political approach the ‘cooking pot strategy’, as the opposition carves out a name for itself as a credible alternative while public distaste for the government is left to boil over in the run-up to an election. And boil over it did, as in 2011 the Progressives, Communists and KPP collectively won a huge landslide victory. Li, characteristically, refused to resign, and has spent the 8 years Wang has been in power disparaging him as a communist devoted to disgusting practices like promotion of evolution, atheism, homosexuality and mixed marriages.
While this does represent a significant minority in Jilin politics, it is increasingly a minority and perceived more and more by the rest of the Jilin public as cult-like; as Li has moved to the right he has also marginalized his own party more and more, to the point that in 2014 several Loyalists split from the party to form the New Falun Gong Party, ironically associated with the movement’s original ideas. In 2015, the Kuomintang finally overtook the Loyalists to a distant second place in their national surge, and in 2019 the Loyalists fell even further while Wang won a third substantial majority with support from the Communists and KPP, the latter now led by Jang Gil-su and following a more centrist to centre-left ideology.
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020, it briefly looked like the Loyalists might finally achieve a resurgence in the province, managing to foster the negative public opinion on Wang to improve their position in the polls. However, in typical fashion Li blew this by making things all about the Progressives’ ‘communist agenda’ and attacking things like the recognition of gay marriage in the province and the takeover of ‘liberals in the KPP’ in the 2010s. Jang’s dismissal of Li at a press conference as a ‘racist manchild’ perfectly captured the popular consensus, and Kuomintang leader Zhang Qingwei was unable to escape neither the poisonous association with Li nor the allegations of his aerospace work with military contractors.
By mid-2020, with infection rates in Jilin quite low and those in Korea similarly limited, it was clear the Jilin right had missed their window, and as Wang nears the tenth anniversary of his ascension to the Premiership, the question is not so much if anyone can stop him as whether he will choose to go on and on.
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Chinese provincial/city council election maps
Beijing
Guangdong
Chongqing
Shaanxi
Inner Mongolia
Shanxi
Sichuan
Tibet
Qinghai
Xinjiang/East Turkestan referendum
Fujian
Hubei
Shanghai
Hainan
Jiangsu