And another China TL provincial election map. (Also, fun fact: this is the 15th provincial election I've shown, so technically speaking I'm halfway through!)
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2019 was a striking year in terms of provincial elections, but the most spectacular of these without a doubt was that of Jiangsu. Jiangsu province is, of course, the home of Nanjing, which has in several eras (such as under the Ming dynasty and from when the Kuomintang took power in 1927 until after the Second World War) been the capital of China, and the efforts of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to turn the city into a capital have endeared its residents to the party for decades since. This resolve was only strengthened after the city was ravaged by Imperial Japanese forces during the Second World War, with the puppet government of Wang Jingwei and the Nanking Massacre facing insurgent resistance supported by Chiang’s forces.
Unfortunately for Nanjing, the immense damage caused to the city was not something the postwar Kuomintang government felt could be solved by turning it into the nation’s capital, and so the capital was moved to Beijing despite Chiang’s discomfort with such a move. To pacify Jiangsu’s people, massive spending stimuli were given to Nanjing and the rest of the province that turned Jiangsu into a historical tourism hotspot, with the presidential palace and Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum often being compared to the Imperial Palace of Kyoto and (perhaps less insultingly to its locals) to Windsor Castle.
The major upshot of this is that Jiangsu developing in this way has made the province one of China’s most small-c conservative. Its residents mostly stayed out of the Tiananmen Square Revolution (and the fact they did not outright advocate for the authoritarian Li Peng is often considered one of the major reasons the revolution succeeded), and made little noise about provincial government being established. Consequently, Jiangsu was the last province to hold elections for its provincial legislature, doing so on the 23rd October, 1992. The result was a surprise to nobody- the Kuomintang, led by Taizhou party official Hu Jintao, secured a massive majority.
In many ways, the province’s democratic history has been defined by Hu’s tenure, as he proved a reserved but largely conservative reformist, and under his tenure the province shifted away from neoliberal economics to a degree in order to provide better welfare spending to its residents, as well as surprising observers by switching from a county-based system to an electoral district system for its provincial legislature elections.
Despite this, Hu retained a strongly socially conservative bent, standing up to protests from the province’s small non-Han population (particularly during the 2001 ‘Nanjing incident’, in which protestors surrounded Sun’s memorial on the 90th anniversary of the Wuchan Uprising to condemn ongoing social inequality in China) and rejecting progressive causes like LGBTQ rights and affirmative action. This ensured he secured the continued support of the Kuomintang-supporting Jiangsu public; just two weeks after the ‘Nanjing incident’, he won the Kuomintang a fourth term.
After a decade in power and three provincial election victories, at the end of 2002 Hu stood down as he had pledged to during the 2001 campaign, and was succeeded by Li Yuanchao, a former lecturer at Fudan University who had been a right-hand man of Hu. Li would continue to govern the province in much the same way as Hu had, eventually moderating his rhetoric on social issues as attacking such causes became less politically expedient and only suffering a few seat losses to the Loyalists for his trouble.
Li managed the impressive feat of getting the Kuomintang through the Great Depression unscathed in the province, facing minor surges of the opposition parties in 2007 and 2010 but still comfortably retaining an overall majority, then coasting to victory in 2013 and 2016. A few austerity measures were brought in to keep the province’s GDP up, but all of these were temporary and did not end up incurring the ire of voters that much, particularly as Li was known to rescind such policies as soon as voters started complaining that they were feeling the squeeze.
So, what went wrong? Li and his party only started to get in hot water less than a year before the provincial election, but oh, did they get in hot water. For starters, Li had to resign in ignominy in April of that year after it was announced his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarised, and he made things a lot worse by denying it for almost a month until Zhang Mingeng confirmed Li had plagiarised from him as reported.
The humiliating demise of a leader after almost 17 years in power was, to put it mildly, not a good look for the Kuomintang with the people of Jiangsu, and overnight Li was transformed into the epitome of everything wrong with Jiangsu to the residents of poorer provinces and an embarrassment to the province to its own people. The Kuomintang picked to succeed him the younger and lower-profile Wu Zhenglong over Li Xueyong, a former academic who had formerly been supportive of Li Yuanchao and had turned hard against him.
Soon after this, two things undermined Wu’s premiership very quickly: first, Li (Xueyong) decided to take advantage of the media attention to Wu’s first speech by crossing the floor to sit with the Economic Liberals, distracting from anything on Wu’s agenda and energizing the opposition against him. And secondly, Wu decided to launch a corruption probe into the provincial Kuomintang, which proved fairly disastrous when it leaked that he was suppressing its findings due to the allegations against himself.
As a result of all this, when the election came round the Kuomintang were in a bad way. Li had managed to court a massive amount of former Kuomintang voters and even some of the Assembly members appalled by the corruption cover-up to the Economic Liberals, to the point that the traditionally dominant party of the province were miles behind in the polls. He had also managed to secure huge funding for the election from neighbouring Shanghai’s Keswick family, and cracked down hard on the Kuomintang’s flip-flopping on economic issues.
When election day came, the Economic Liberals had not only made history by kicking the Kuomintang out of power in their strongest province, they had done so by a bigger landslide than any the Kuomintang had managed even at their peaks. On 44% of the vote, they had snatched over 85% of the Jiangsu Provincial Assembly’s seats, not only causing the Kuomintang to lose more than 130 seats but snatching some that had occasionally gone for the Progressives or Loyalists (who took 5 seats between them). Almost every single member of Wu’s Cabinet was defeated, with Wu himself being unseated in Gaochun by 23 points as the Kuomintang were swept from their ancestral home; aside from some bloke in Jiangyan South called Hu Jintao, every Kuomintang representative held or won their seat by less than 20 points.
Speaking of Nanjing, that’s where the most parties were elected of any prefecture in the province; all the Progressives to win seats did so there, as did a single Green and an Independent former student of Guo Quan first elected the year after his mentor took one of Nanjing’s seats in the 2009 National Congress election.
Despite what you might imagine from such a massive landslide, under Li Jiangsu really didn’t change much overnight; it’s occasionally joked that if the Economic Liberals hadn’t won such a dramatic landslide, Li might’ve just used his clout to take over the Kuomintang leadership. This really started to change as 2020 came and the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, with Li establishing himself as more genuinely aligned with the Economic Liberals through behaviour like refusing to endorse President Wang for re-election and implementing tax cuts across the board.
The biggest change, though, was that Li eventually conceded a big point from the party manifesto: the Economic Liberals (and the other minor parties, but especially them) have wanted to switch to PR for decades. Given the enormous majority they’d won in 2019, this was considered likely to go by the wayside, but Li surprised observers in January of 2020, just a few months after the election, by announcing Jiangsu would be switching to a mixed-member system, where the seats would now be half their size but PR lists for each prefecture and city would be elected by voters. This is expected to cut back on the majoritarian nature of the current legislature, but it has been perceived as a shrewd reform very much in keeping with the traditions of political processes in Jiangsu.