詹姆斯盖库里视频:Grassroots democracy shot forth by village photographers

A dozen villagers with sober earnest faces sitting on stools awaiting the village election to begin: a villager slipping his vote inside the ballot box and another writing on the blackboard to show the number of votes each candidate gets.
These are the pictures taken by an ordinary Chinese farmer who had never used a camera before.
Wu Jianjun, a villager from Pingtang village, Yongxiu county in east China's Jiangxi province, won the first prize in the Villager Photographers Project, a project supported by the EU-China Training Programme on Village Governance.
Along with Wu's works, 20 other pictures sorted out by the organizers from a few thousand photos taken by 100 Chinese villagers from 17 different provinces were displayed at the ongoing exhibition.
"Most of these villager cameramen had never taken a single picture in their life before they received the amateur camera," said Jian Yi, the program's public communications expert.
The project put 125 cameras and four films into the hands of 125 villagers from different provinces and inspired them in taking pictures of the election taking place in their village.
"These pictures have a unique perspective because people look at their own village affairs in a very special way," said Dr. Jurgen Ritter, team leader of the EU-China Training Program on Village Governance.
"This is a fine example of how local villagers are not only the object of photography and how they can participate and play major roles in their own history. This is a vivid presentation of the Chinese saying that people are the masters of their own homes," he said.
"It serves to initiate new ways of approaching a topic which sounds relatively abstract - like village governance."
China formally granted farmers the right to directly elect or oust their village heads and members of the village committees with the Organic Law of Village Committees in 1998.
"Democracy at a basic level was established two decades ago and the democratic awareness of farmers has been growing ever since," said Wang Jinhua, director of rural affairs for the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
In 2005, approximately 300,000 villages in China's 18 provinces had village committee elections.
"Management in a democratic way" is listed as one of the prerequisites for building a new socialist countryside in the 11th Five-Year Program (2006-2010) of China.
Premier Wen Jiabao said in his government work report on March 5 that "building a new socialist countryside has to respect the aspiration of the Chinese farmers and enhance democracy at the grassroot level."
"The cameras gave these villagers an access to express and unbossom themselves," said Wu Wenguang, an independent documentary director who is considered as the driving force behind the project.
"The villagers usually have no sense of lighting, composition or structure, the pictures are their instinctive expressions," he said.
If these villagers are given more channels in which to voice their desires and rural officials handle them with more meticulous care, patience and skills, the problems of widespread protests in the countryside will be tackled since the Chinese farmers are the "most lovable", he acknowledged.
"The training program is more or less confined to the classroom but, thanks to these additional visual channels, we can address village governance in a more efficient form," Dr. Jurgen Ritter said. "It opens new horizons."
Source: Xinhua