Residents of the rebellious Guangdong village of Wukan voted for new election officials on Wednesday in the wake of several weeks of protests last year sparked by anger over official corruption and the sale of local farmland.
Villagers chose from more than 40 candidates for election to the 11-member election committee, many of whom were nonofficial candidates and former participants in the recent protests.
For some, this was their first experience even of the limited, village-level voting system that China has to offer.
"From a democratic point of view, this election will be very important in influencing the future of our village," said said Wukan resident Zhang Jiancheng. "There will be a lot of changes."
Zhang said that in previous elections, the candidates were all internally decided, and the entire election was organized by that same group of people from the preparatory stage right through to the supervision of voting.
"Everything took place behind closed doors, and the villagers hadn't even seen the candidates [prior to voting]," he said.
"This is a huge breakthrough for democratic elections."
Concerns over pressure
Those who are elected will then supervise elections to the Wukan village committee of China's ruling Communist Party on March 1, but won't be allowed to stand in those elections themselves, official media reported.
Zhang said the newly elected committee is likely to come under considerable pressure from powerful local vested interests, which have yet to be probed in any depth by official investigators.
"Some locally powerful people may find some of their interests are involved in the attempt to return villagers' land," Zhang said. "They will definitely do everything they can to ... affect the fairness of the elections."
The election committee poll comes two weeks after Wukan protest leader Lin Zuluan was appointed village Party secretary, displacing Xue Chang, a local businessman who ruled its affairs for more than four decades.
Lin, who has been a Party member since 1965, was named village Party chief on Jan. 15, in an official endorsement of protesters' demands during last year's rebellion, in which he played a key role.
Rare concessions
Violent protests by the Wukan villagers last month against unscrupulous land grabs and rigged elections sparked rare concessions following an investigation by the provincial government of Guangdong, which concluded that most of the villagers' demands and complaints were fair.
The requisitioning of rural land for lucrative property deals by cash-hungry local governments sparks thousands of "mass incidents" across China every year, but many result in violent suppression, the detention of the main organizers, and intense pressure on the local population to comply with the government's wishes.
However, villagers said they were still waiting for police to return the body of Xue Jinbo, a protester in his forties who died in police custody at the height of the December standoff at the barricades between local people and thousands of armed police.
An official autopsy said Xue had died of a heart attack, but relatives who identified his body said it was covered in bruises from head to foot.
The authorities have refused to release Xue's body to his relatives until the family "admits" he died of illness, his daughter Xue Jianwan said.
"[Lin] has said that he will seek justice for my father, but right now we don't want to ask anything of him, because he is so busy with the affairs of the village that he doesn't even have time to eat," she said.
"We will wait a while, but we absolutely must have my father's body back so he can be laid to rest properly," she said.
'An initial success'
Former independent parliamentary delegate and constitutional scholar Yao Lifa said that a large number of China's villages now have direct elections to local Party committees, but that vote-buying and selling are still a serious problem.
He gave a cautious welcome to the forthcoming elections in Wukan.
"We can say that this is an initial success," said Yao, who has recently been under tight police surveillance as a potential mentor to political activists seeking election to district-level parliamentary bodies across the country.
"But the farmers' awareness of electoral supervision is still quite tenuous, and there is still no input from the outside world [or] from experts."
"I still fear that the villagers will be unable to resist the pressure of local vested interests trying to influence the election result," he said.
Reported by Fung Yat-yiu for RFA's Cantonese service, and by Xin Yu for the Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.