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CCE-065 ｜ What Is the Value of Local Self-Government for Democracy-Building?

Free China Movement

CCE-065 ｜ What Is the Value of Local Self-Government for Democracy-Building?

v1.0 ｜ 2026-10-20

CCE-100 Civic Education Project · Index entry CCE-065

What is the value of local self-government for democracy-building?

Abstract: Local self-government means that residents of a given area decide and execute local public affairs on their own, through organs elected by them, within the scope prescribed by law. This article argues that the value of local self-government for democracy-building lies mainly in three aspects: it is the arena where citizens learn participation and accountability; it is the dispersal of power along the vertical axis; and it is the space in which political talent and opposition forces can grow. But local self-government is not itself democracy: the “provincial constitutions” (shengxian) and county self-government regulations of provinces like Zhejiang and Guangdong a century ago mostly remained on paper, while the local elections introduced by the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1950 onward long operated under the martial-law system. Whether local self-government can become a foundation of democracy depends on whether it has real fiscal and personnel powers, whether it is protected by law rather than by the will of higher authorities, and whether it connects with political competition at the national level.

I. The First Sentence of a Law

On January 25, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui promulgated the Local Government Act. Article 1 of the text as published in the Presidential Office Gazette reads: “This Act is enacted in accordance with Article 118 of the Constitution of the Republic of China and Article 9(1) of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China.” Article 2 goes on to define: a local self-government body is “a body implementing local self-government in accordance with this Act, having the status of a public-law juridical person”; self-governing matters are matters on which a local self-government body “may enact its own legislation and implement it,” “and bear responsibility for policy planning and administrative implementation.” The same article also states: “The provincial government is a dispatched organ of the Executive Yuan; the province is not a local self-government body.”

These seemingly technical sentences record a turning point. According to the National Archives Administration’s “Archives Supporting Teaching Network,” the Taiwan Provincial Government promulgated the “Outline for Implementing Local Self-Government in the Counties and Cities of Taiwan Province” on April 20, 1950, and local self-government was implemented starting that July; the Ministry of the Interior’s official overview states that the first-term county and city heads were directly elected by county and city residents beginning that October. In other words, elections for county and city heads and councilors in Taiwan had already been held for nearly half a century, yet local self-government did not gain a law enacted under the Constitution until 1999. Before that, its basis was executive orders. The Archives Administration’s note specifically points out that local self-government at the time was handled “not in accordance with the Constitution,” revealing the peculiar circumstances of postwar Taiwan politics.

This fact alone illustrates the question this article addresses: local elections can exist for a long time, while their legal status, scope of powers, and relationship with national politics can remain unsettled for a long time.

II. Three Concepts

“Local self-government,” “decentralization,” and “federalism” are often confused.

Decentralization is the central government handing some powers to localities to exercise; it can be merely administrative delegation, with local officials still appointed by higher authorities. Local self-government goes a step further: local organs are elected by local residents, make decisions autonomously within the scope prescribed by law, and are accountable to local voters. Federalism, in turn, divides the powers of the center and the constituent units at the constitutional level, and neither side can unilaterally change that division.

This article discusses the second concept. Its core is not “how many affairs the locality has,” but “to whom the locality’s decision-makers are accountable.”

III. Value One: The School of Democracy

The most frequently cited argument comes from Tocqueville. In Volume 1 of Democracy in America, published in 1835, he wrote that the self-governing institutions of the township stand to liberty as elementary schools stand to learning: they make liberty something the people can touch, teaching them to use and enjoy freedom peacefully.

The point of this argument is: on a small scale, public affairs are directly related to residents’ lives, the results are visible, and decision-makers are easy to find and hold to account. Here residents learn to hold meetings, vote, supervise budgets, and accept losing a vote — habits that democracy at the national level needs in order to operate.

China’s constitution-makers a century ago had already recognized this. According to the later digital text of the 1921 Zhejiang Municipal and Township Self-Government Act, one hundred residents of a city or township could jointly petition a proposal, and if the council rejected it, it could be submitted to a vote of the residents; city and township revenues and budgets had to be made public (Articles 21, 34–35). The Guangdong Provisional County Self-Government Regulations of the same year provided that three county-head candidates be directly elected by county residents, one of whom the provincial governor would then appoint (Article 43). These designs all sought to write “local affairs decided by local people” into operable rules.

IV. Value Two: The Vertical Dispersal of Power

The second value of local self-government is the establishment of another elected center of power outside the central government. This matters especially when the central government intends to concentrate power: if a local head is elected by local voters, higher authorities cannot remove him at will; if a local council controls the budget, the execution of higher-level policies must pass through another set of deliberative procedures.

The “United Provinces Self-Government” movement of 1921–1922 proceeded precisely from this point. An article, “Executive Organs in the Provincial Constitutions,” published in Vol. 19, No. 22 of Dongfang Zazhi in 1922, compared the different methods by which provincial governors were produced under the constitutions or drafts of four provinces — Hunan, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Jiangsu: Hunan’s provincial assembly nominated four candidates who were then voted on province-wide, Zhejiang’s was chosen by district electoral colleges, and Guangdong’s draft had the governor elected by county and special-municipality councilors. The common goal of these schemes was to make provincial-level power derive from the residents of the province, rather than from appointment by the Beijing government or some military leader.

V. Value Three: A Space for Talent and Opposition Forces

The third value is discussed less often, yet may be the most critical for democratic transition: when competition had not yet opened at the national level, local elections provided the opposition with a legal channel for political participation.

Taiwan’s experience illustrates this. The Archives Administration’s “Local Government and Local Self-Government” feature notes that among those who worked to organize opposition parties in the late 1950s to the 1960s, “many of them were members of the provincial assembly”; although founding parties did not succeed, it “laid the foundation for the future development of the tangwai democratic movement.”

From the 1970s on, tangwai figures used county and city head, provincial councilor, and county and city councilor elections as their main arena, accumulating voter bases, organizational experience, and public visibility. These people later became the backbone of the party founded in 1986 and of the full elections of the 1990s. Local elections did not directly bring national democracy, but when the national level opened, there was already a cohort of people who had experienced campaigning and questioning the government ready to take over.

VI. The Counterargument: Local Self-Government Can Also Consolidate Authoritarianism

A weighty objection holds that local self-government need not lead to democracy, but may instead become a tool of authoritarian rule.

First, local elections can be used by those in power to co-opt and divide local elites. Through nominations, subsidies, and the allocation of local resources, the ruling party forms reciprocal relationships with local factions; the livelier local elections are, the deeper local factions’ dependence on the ruling party may become, while the power structure at the national level is not thereby changed.

Second, the powers of local self-government can be taken back by higher authorities at any time. When the basis of local self-government is executive orders rather than the constitution or laws, higher authorities can adjust election rules, freeze local finances, or replace self-governing bodies with “dispatched organs.” The 1999 Local Government Act’s conversion of the province into an “Executive Yuan dispatched organ,” abolishing the province’s self-governing status, itself illustrates this: even under a democratic system, the scope of local self-government is decided by national legislation.

Third, the “provincial constitution” experience of a century ago shows that the banner of local self-government can be exploited by local militarists. Taking Zhejiang as an example: on September 9, 1921, the provincial-constitution conference promulgated the provincial constitution and ancillary laws; in October of the same year, the provincial assembly, on the grounds that it had not been submitted to a province-wide citizen vote, resolved to suspend implementation and reclassified it as a draft. According to existing materials, this design in Zhejiang never truly operated. In the absence of unified rule of law and an independent judiciary, “self-government” easily becomes another word for “fragmented warlord control.”

These criticisms reveal the genuine limits of local self-government. But what they show is: local self-government needs conditions — not that local self-government has no value. Taiwan’s local elections were indeed effectively managed by the ruling party during the martial-law period, but they also preserved for the tangwai movement a space that was difficult to close completely; and the local-faction problem, after democratization, has gradually come under the constraints of national party competition, media scrutiny, and judicial prosecution.

VII. What Conditions Does Local Self-Government Need

Drawing on the experience above, for local self-government to become a foundation of democracy, at least three conditions are needed.

First, legal guarantees. The status and powers of self-governing bodies should be prescribed by the constitution or laws, not decided by orders from higher organs; when disputes arise between localities and the center, there should be a judicial route to resolve them. Article 77 of the Local Government Act provides that disputes between the central government and special municipalities or counties (cities) are resolved by resolution of the Legislative Yuan in plenary session; autonomy disputes between counties and townships (towns, cities) are resolved by the Ministry of the Interior together with the relevant central competent authorities; disputes at other levels are resolved respectively by the Executive Yuan, the relevant central competent authorities, or county governments.

Second, real fiscal and personnel powers. Without its own revenue sources and without the power to appoint local officials, a locally elected head is merely an agent executing higher-level policies. The 1921 Zhejiang provincial constitution once set minimum proportions for education, industry, and other spending in the provincial budget; the intent of such designs was precisely to keep local priorities from having to take orders entirely from above.

Third, connection with national-level political competition. If local elections are cut off from party competition at the national level, they easily degenerate into resource distribution among local factions; only when local heads can run on behalf of national parties and local performance can affect national votes does local self-government truly become a link in the chain of accountability.

VIII. Limitations

The historical sections of this article rely mainly on later digital texts of 1920s provincial-constitution and county self-government regulations, plus secondary research by contemporary scholars; as to how far these regulations were actually implemented, existing evidence is very limited, and this article describes them throughout as “designs” or “provisions” without inferring their implementation effects. On the relationship between Taiwan’s local elections and local factions, this article only offers a general account and cites no specific quantitative research. The account of Tocqueville is paraphrased from the English translation, not a verbatim quotation. In addition, this article does not discuss the villagers’ committee elections in the People’s Republic of China after the 1980s; that topic involves a different institutional framework and is best treated in a separate article.

IX. Conclusion

The value of local self-government lies not in its being democracy itself, but in its providing democracy with three things hard to obtain elsewhere: the daily practice of citizen participation and accountability, another legitimate source of power outside the center, and political talent able to grow while national politics remains closed. The provincial-constitution movement of a century ago and postwar Taiwan’s local elections both show that these three things can be designed — and can also be shelved, co-opted, or taken back. The decisive question remains: whether local decision-makers are truly accountable to local voters, and whether that accountability relationship is protected by laws that even higher authorities cannot change at will.

Sources

Review record: Editorial independent review, 2026-10-19. Verdict: PASS.

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