The three candidates delivered campaign speeches. One spoke with a folksy, unprepossessing style, and one sounded as though he was giving a Mao-era harangue. All obliquely criticized the financial expertise of the outgoing village party chief, who had frittered away $1,200 on an ill-conceived pig-raising venture. It was a prodigious sum in a poor area where per capita income averages only $120 a year. The incumbent party chief, the local leader for 20 years, dropped out after a disappointing showing in the primary.

"My thinking can't keep up with the current thinking," he said.

"We need to build a democratic culture," said Wang. "Our tradition is that you don't speak out loud, you wait some years, have a revolution and overthrow the government. We're saying that in three years you can throw out the government."

It is one of the ironies of communist China that a government that proclaimed the wisdom of peasants during the Cultural Revolution, which took refuge among the peasants during the civil war with the Nationalists, in fact places little faith in peasants and frequently cites the rural dwellers' lack of education as a reason that Western style democracy can't be introduced here. Chinese leaders fear that open elections would lead to irresponsible populism or, worse yet, chaos.

Wang, however, has never doubted the common sense of people from the countryside. He's one of them. During his life, chaos has come from above.

Born in 1954 in a village in Henan province, Wang's first political memory is hunger. Mao's economic program, the Great Leap Forward initiated in 1958, had failed spectacularly. Though Mao wouldn't admit that the economy was collapsing, in villages like the one where Wang grew up it was no secret. Fuel and cooking oil were in short supply. The cooking pots had been melted down to meet Mao's unrealistic steel production targets.

To survive, Wang ate raw tree bark. "We ate it raw, right off the tree," he said. "For my generation, the first deep impression is hunger. We were very, very hungry."

His area barely had time to recover from the Great Leap Forward when the Cultural Revolution began. In November 1966, at age 12, Wang spent two weeks in distant Beijing with his classmates to catch a glimpse of the revered Mao in Tiananmen Square. When Mao appeared in the square, he was greeted by Wang and half a million other screaming youths waving their little red books of Mao's quotations and chanting "Long live Chairman Mao."

"My generation really believed we were red," Wang recalls. "We believed in Chairman Mao and that we should devote ourselves to Chairman Mao."

Wang went back to his village. Each Sunday he would walk 15 miles to school, stay there for the week, and walk back on Saturdays. Soon classes stopped, and the students planted crops instead. He was essentially self-educated, having borrowed the few books permitted at the time, mostly classic Chinese novels or books about Marxism or Maoism.

In 1972, Wang joined the army. He stood guard in four-hour shifts at an airport near Guilin, in Guanxi province. To keep his mind alive, he studied at night and on Sundays, reading the only books available. One was an official diatribe against Confucius. In 1976, he was promoted to platoon leader and sent to work in a factory.

Mao died the same year. Youths like Wang, who worshiped him at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, had started to question Mao's godlike stature as the infighting of the Cultural Revolution dragged on and the proletarian utopia Mao promised failed to materialize.

When senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated the next year, he reintroduced an examination system for university admissions. Wang was one of a half-dozen selected from a group of 100 soldiers. In 1978, he enrolled in the prestigious Nankai University, with its impressive Soviet-built facade, in Tianjin.

"The older generation remembers the 1950s when life was going well, and they can compare before and after liberation," Wang said. "But for my generation, it is very, very different. We felt emancipation in 1979," when Deng introduced his economic reform program.

After graduate school, Wang went to work for the rural policy institute of the State Council, China's cabinet, and was put to work doing rural political reform. Economically, Mao's communes were finished by the mid-1980s. Land once managed collectively was contracted to individual households. Communes were renamed townships, and production brigades rechristened villages. But politically, the old, appointed cadre structures were still in place.

The real impetus for village elections wasn't a liberal reformist impulse, but rather the desire among Chinese leaders to regain greater control of the countryside. In the 1980s, discontent was spreading like a prairie fire. Peasants were ignoring family planning guidelines, physically assaulting tax collectors and refusing to hand in to state depots the minimum quantities of grain required under government-set quotas.

"In the rural areas, democracy may have originated in a dispute about taxes," Wang said, not unlike the Boston Tea Party.

Wang researched local elections and wrote reports to rally support within the party for change. In the winter before the Tiananmen uprising, Wang studied two unruly villages in Heilongjiang province. In one village, the party appointed a leader to reimpose order. But the peasants continued to boycott tax payments, burned the village cadre's house and cut down his trees. In the other village, order was restored after a competitive election.

In a report to the party's central committee, Wang concluded that "by introducing competitive elections, we can gain the peasants' support and avoid the danger of loss of control in the countryside." A key party elder, Bo Yibo, endorsed the report.

"This was not going against the Chinese Communist Party line," Wang said. "These were the facts."

Over time, the idea of rural elections attracted an odd alliance. Peng Zhen, a conservative who was then chairman of the National People's Congress, rammed a village election law through the reluctant parliament. Wang said party elders like Peng "believed that the Chinese Communist Party would rule forever, but that they needed democracy to protect themselves." To win over waverers, Peng dubbed the law "experimental." Eleven years later, it still is.

Some election supporters were true democrats who hoped the elections would spread to the more populous townships and cities, and ultimately include national offices like the presidency. Other supporters, like Bo, were party faithful who saw the elections as techniques for ridding the party of corrupt and unpopular officials and spotting new talent. Roughly 40 percent of the candidates elected in village balloting aren't party members, Wang said. But half of those people are successfully recruited by the party within a year. Wang calls the process "mutual and spontaneous."

Despite broad support at the top, many local officials feel threatened by elections or loathe sharing power with the electorate. Wang needed broad support because he couldn't do it alone. His 1995 visit to Lishu county was part of a calculated gamble. Wang wanted to drum up more support by getting publicity from Chinese media about the elections, but Chinese reporters balked for fear of offending Marxist ideologues.

So Wang took along three American reporters whose articles were later reprinted in a Chinese party newspaper, Reference News, devoted to reprinting foreign dispatches. The Foreign Ministry, realizing the elections could be good publicity for China overseas, then wrote a report to the party's central committee. Chinese journalists soon followed up with articles of their own.

China's Communist Party central committee now seems more committed to the process. Last Thursday, the front pages of the leading state-run newspapers led with news of a new central committee circular ordering all villages to comply with the election law, and saying that the party would "make active efforts" to introduce elections at the township level, the next highest rung of government.

Wang Zhenyao (right) surrounded by peasants in a village in Sichuan. (File Photo)

No one in China believes that the world's most populous nation is on the verge of democracy as the West knows it. The most prominent democracy dissidents remain in jail, under surveillance or in exile. Asked at his maiden news conference as premier about the possibility of holding elections at higher levels of government, Zhu Rongji said that the government would study and consider it. But he didn't suggest it would happen any time soon.

Wang said that if far-reaching political change ever comes to China, it needs a foundation. "If there is no foundation, there will be no pluralism," he said.

The experience of the former Soviet Union, viewed by the Chinese as a combination of political instability and economic collapse, serves as a cautionary tale. "[Former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev's biggest problem was at the grass roots. He didn't build any political culture for pluralism at the grass roots. He tried to impose it from above," Wang said.

"This [holding elections] is worth doing whether it results in a more democratic [Communist] party or a democracy with many parties," Wang said philosophically. When, how or if multiparty democracy might come about is out of Wang's hands. "Who can predict?" he said.

China's experiment with village democracy has become a favorite cause among Americans looking for a reason to hope that China is becoming more democratic. For a time, Wang became a common name on American guest lists. On his bookshelf, he has photos of himself meeting Vice President Gore and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

But last year, Wang was suddenly reassigned to a job running disaster relief. Some people who know him say it was a normal job rotation. Others say he fell victim to jealous colleagues at the civil affairs ministry. Now he does everything from coordinating aid to flood areas to building a social safety net for the poor and unemployed in the cities. On the side, he still consults with local election officials and researches local elections.

"Disasters are no problem," he said. "They're not like democracy. They're not as dangerous."