emocracy was a very important concern. Towards the end of 1986 elections were held for local people's congresses (the main organ of local government across china). There was a precedent for using elections to express dissent. Democracy Wall activists had stood for election to the local people's congresses in 1980 and had made a very good showing despite party harassment and intimidation of them and their supporters. In a number of cases the elections had to be blatantly rigged or the results disregarded to prevent democracy activists actually winning seats. After 1980 control of election was tightened up again. But by 1986 there was talk of political reform and there were hopes mainly amongst students and intellectuals that something might come of it this time. So when in November the National People's Congress tightened the rule governing independent candidates for local elections thus making it harder for those not approved by the party to stand there was a great deal of anger and frustration. In the elections a certain amount of passive resistance was noted by the dissident and writer Wang Ruowang of Shanghai. He reported that in one Shanghai district the first round of elections was declared void due to the high number of spoiled ballot papers. People had written in names like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse or names of characters from popular Chinese fiction. Sometimes the names written in were more obviously political at one mechanical Technical School the invalid ballots contained the names of Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang. Also instead of dispersing after voting people stayed to hear the results. Election in factories were disrupted and in some cases workers had to be forced to vote with the threat of fines. So demonstrations were held by the students of the Science and Technology University in Hefei to protest against party interference in the election and these soon spread to Shanghai and throughout China. Hu Yaobang ten...
