Operable Democracy

Chinese villagers learn from U.S. rules on deliberative decision making By Yuan Yuan

Operable Democracy

Chinese villagers learn from U.S. rules on deliberative decision making By Yuan Yuan

WRittEN RECoRD: the book Operable Democracy, which is written based on the experience of adopting Robert's Rules of order in Nantang Village, is published in April 2012

On May 2, a small meeting attended by seven people was held in Nantang Village in Fuyang City, east China’s Anhui Province. They were discussing how to involve more senior villagers in the organic chicken-raising industry.

The host of the meeting, Yang Yunbiao,is the head of the Nantang Xingnong Cooperative, an organization set up in 2007 to develop the village’s economy.

Xu Changqiang, a 29-year-old man from southwest China’s Guizhou Province, attended the meeting. As the owner of a chicken farm in Guizhou, he was sent to Nantang to share his experience in poultry farming. “I think the first thing in raising chicken is to learn how to prevent chicken diseases,” said Xu at the meeting. Before he continued, Yang interrupted him.

“Xu, this is not the topic of this meeting.We’ll discuss that later,” said Yang, who then added that each person had only two minutes to state their idea.

This was the first time Xu attended a meeting in this village and he found the format of the meeting was very different from similar gatherings in his hometown.

“In my hometown, the meetings are mostly chaotic. Some people are too loud and some are too silent and no matter what we discuss, it is the village head who makes the fi nal decision,” Xu said.

However, in Nantang, although Yang is the head of the cooperative, he cannot make a unilateral decision on any issue and has to listen to all the attendants’ opinions. Finally those present vote to make a fi nal decision and all attendants have to follow the same rules regardless of their age and position in the village.

New-style meetings

Until just a few years ago Nantang’s meetings were no different from those in any other Chinese village. “When we set a topic for a meeting, normally people would start talking about some other things and some people talked for almost half an hour and many other people didn’t even get a chance to talk. Fights broke out in quite a few cases,” Yang said,who once almost dismissed the cooperative.

All the changes came in 2008, when Yuan Tianpeng came to the village.

Yuan, then 36 years old, graduated from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1998. After working for one year in the China Post Group, he quit and went to study at the University of Alaska in the United States for a master’s degree.

At Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Yuan was chairman of the Students’ Union and participated in meetings almost every week on the union’s activities and the arrangement of the its funds.“The meetings were mostly not effective at all. Attendants either complained a lot or talked about other things for a long time,” Yuan said. “When I asked them to bring out some constructive ideas, few people could do that.This made me feel frustrated.”

At the University of Alaska, Yuan was enrolled in the Students’ Senate and found the organization’s meetings were held in a totally different way.

The head of the senate had no right to make decisions. His or her job was only to announce the beginning and ending of the meeting and to organize people to speak and vote. Everybody gets the chance to speak and different ideas will all be taken into consideration.

It was the first time Yuan got to know Robert’s Rules of Order, which were set by an engineering officer, Henry Martyn Robert,more than 200 years ago. After failing to preside over a public meeting in his community, Robert decided to study parliamentary law and fi nd out an effective way to hold meetings. Finally, he completed the bookRobert’s Rules of Order,which has become the basis for rules governing conventions in the United States.

According to the rules, a meeting should allow the airing of as many different opinions as possible concerning a motion. Everybody has the chance to state their ideas within a fixed length of time. People have to state clearly whether they are for or against the motion at the very beginning of the speech.

Yuan learnt that these rules were introduced to China more than 100 years ago. “But in those days, China was in civil war and the procedure was not spread well under those circumstances,” Yuan said.

In 2003, Yuan came back to China and started his own business. In the process of dealing with other business people and government of fi cials, he found they also had similar problems in holding meetings. Yuan saw the chance and decided to devote his time to spreading Robert’s Rules of Order in China.

For Yuan, there are four factors in China that make the spread of Robert’s Rules of Order possible: More and more homeowners are organizing themselves independently to protect the property rights endorsed by the Constitution;minority shareholders are learning to protect their rights and interests; NGOs are improving their self-governance capacities, and rural selfgovernment organizations (cooperatives/village committees) have mushroomed and they need to establish a democratic and ef fi cient decisionmaking process.

“All these factors offer the possibilities of spreading Robert’s Rules of Order in China,”Yuan said.

In early 2006, Yuan stopped his business and spent one and a half years translatingRobert’s Rules of Order. After completing the translation, he started a new company in 2007 to instruct people on how to hold meetings for business units and organizations.

In April 2007, Yuan spent a month teaching Robert’s Rules of Order in a law fi rm in Beijing.“They had already built up an effective procedure before my training, but after one month,they still couldn’t get used to some of the rules,including asking for the host’s permission before speaking,” Yuan said.

Nantang experiment

In May 2008, introduced by Kou Yanding, a female documentary maker and NGO worker in Beijing, Yuan met Yang, who was very interested in adopting Robert’s Rules of Order in arranging village meetings. Yuan also wanted to see whether this Western procedure could work in Chinese villages.

Yuan had never worked in any villages before so this was fresh and challenging. At first, he didn’t know how to explain the rules in an understandable way to villagers.

“Words like motion, amendment and election are so far away from the villagers’ lives,”said Kou, who went to the village with Yuan.

Volunteers recruited by Yuan then created shows about problems with meetings and present them to Nantang villagers. “It worked very well,” Yang said. “After the shows, we asked the villagers to find out the problems revealed in them and instructed them how to avoid similar problems.”

Yuan visited Nantang three times in 2008 and fi nally worked out the Nantang Xingnong Cooperative Conference Regulations based on Robert’s Rules of Order. There were nine articles in the regulations at the beginning and by the end of the process it increased to 15.

Kou filmed the whole process of Yuan’s training in the village and saw the changes with the villagers. “Everybody is actually willing to be involved in village issues and they just need an effective way to express that,” Kou said.of Order to make decisions on controversial issues. Now, newcomers to the village have to learn and adapt themselves to the new format of the meetings.

“But we don’t have to use it on every meeting as in some cases, when the majority of people all agree on an issue, we don’t need to discuss and vote,” Yang said.

Based on their successful pilot in Nantang, Kou and Yuan wrote the bookOperable Democracy, which was published in April 2012.

The meeting on May 2 ended with a vote on the issue of who should pay for the baby chickens offered to the senior villagers to raise—the cooperative or the villagers themselves.

“We finally voted and the decision was that the costs should be split 50-50 between the villagers and the cooperative. If the villagers raise the chickens well, they will get a bonus, so it will not be a burden but a motivation for the villagers,” Yang said.

After half a month, Yang and other

GENG YUHE

But there are some habits that couldn’t be modified within a short time. According to Kou, at the last meeting of the Nantang Xingnong Cooperative she and Yuan attended before they left the village, some people still said “opposition to you” instead of “opposition to your motion.”

“It will take some time,” Yang said. After the training in 2008, the Nantang Xingnong Cooperative started to adopt Robert’s Rules members of the cooperative visited the senior villagers involved in the project and found it worked very well.

“Now, I’m working with Yuan on setting up a standard on what issues should be discussed with Robert’s Rules of Order and what should not,” said Yang.