The elections were neither free nor fair - from a modern perspective. I will only address the National Assembly election, as many of the same problems appeared during the legislative election and it would be redundant to repeat them. The presidential election, on the other hand, was an indirect election voted upon by the members of the National Assembly.

First, some basics. One could be elected to the National Assembly through three ways. Around 2,000 seats were up for grabs in county-level geographical constituencies. Around 500 seats could be won through functional constituencies (i.e. voting as a member of a worker’s/farmer’s/business union). Another 500 seats were allocated for ‘special’ constituencies, which included voting blocs of women federations, ethnic minorities, military representatives and overseas Chinese. In total, 3,045 seats were up for contention. Allegedly, 53.8% of eligible voters voted in the National Assembly election. However, these numbers were rough or made-up provincial estimates, and it is hard to know in reality how many people were able to vote.

The National Assembly election was supposedly a multi-party election. However, the second biggest party in China at that time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was engaged in a civil war with the GMD and naturally refused to participate in elections. China’s third biggest party, the Democratic League, had decisively split with the GMD in late 1946 following increased repression (a minority of the Democratic League actively supported the CCP in the Civil War). On 1 October, 1946, the Democratic League issued the following statement, rejecting the National Assembly entirely:

As far as we know, the sole purpose of the convocation of the N.P.A. [National People's Assembly] is to enact the Constitution. This important task can only be accomplished after the unity of the people and of all the parties and groups in the country has been achieved. At present the Guomindang and the Communist Party are engaged in the greatest civil war in the history of China. It would be a mere illusion to think that under these circumstances, the representatives of the two parties could calmly sit down in the same room and discuss the basic law of the nation...Furthermore, if the situation develops to a stage where all parties will convoke their own assemblies, enact their own Constitutions, set up their own governments, and organise their own nations, the N.P.A., if convoked on 12 November, will cause a permanent split in the nation. This is a situation which we dread most and we would rather die than see it. We feel that under the present circumstances, China must immediately stop her civil war and restore peace. Then, an N.P.A. supported by the entire nation should be held and a truly democratic constitution should be enacted, thereby achieving peace, unity and democracy in the country.

This concern that a GMD-convened National Assembly would effectively split the nation was shared by many other third-parties. Despite it being a multi-party election, it was hardly a secret that the GMD would control a majority in the assembly by any means necessary. It was only after much debate that the Chinese Youth Party and the China Democratic Socialist Party (no relation to it’s more infamous doppelganger in Germany) decided to participate in the election. Both parties demanded assurances from the GMD. Threatened by their boycotts, the GMD ‘allocated’ 300 seats to the Youth Party and 260 seats to the Democratic Socialist Party by declaring its members would not contest the seats sought by both parties. Ironically, both the GMD and the third parties lost seats in doing so - many GMD members simply declared themselves unaligned and were voted in. This 'allocation' of seats was merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of electoral misconduct.

The GMD was mainly able to control the electoral process through vetoing unpreferred candidates. This created a wholly undemocratic phenomenon in which more than 6,000 ambitious men and women swarmed to Nanjing to get official candidacy from the central GMD government, rather than canvassing support in the local counties. Additionally, the GMD openly declared its preferred and back-up candidates in each county, openly disregarding any impartiality as the governing body. The GMD unsurprisingly won 81% of the seats in the National Assembly.

Multiple forms of electoral misconduct soon occurred when elections started on 21 November, 1947. Electoral fraud was a common occurrence, with cases of vote buying prevalent across China. Local elites liberally bribed electoral officers to conduct vote ringing. As many people in China were illiterate, officers were responsible for writing down their preferred candidates on a ballot. Corrupt officers simply wrote down the name of who bribed them the most. In Hunan’s Xiangyin County, more than 30,000 ballots for the local worker’s union candidacy were locked in the union office, where electoral officers were hard at work filling them out with the preferred candidate’s name. A hundred ounces of gold was the price of 400,000 ballots in Jiangsu’s Gaoyou County. Many candidates took over a restaurant during the day of elections and offered Chinese delicacies such as shark fin and bird’s nest, while others blatantly placed food carts right next to electoral offices and offered free food for a vote.

Voter pressuring was also a serious issue. As county and village heads had the right to nominate candidates, many of them simply nominated close relatives or friends. Using their local prestige, these local leaders pressured voters to vote for their preferred candidates. Even without pressure, in rural areas dominated by members of the same clan, voting was often decided by familial ties. This in fact created a big headache for the GMD, for the party’s preferred candidates often did not have the same local recognition compared to those supported by the native gentry. To combat this trend, GMD officials ordered villagers to vote for a certain candidate en masse. In extreme cases, violence would be used to ‘persuade’ voters. The local intellectual Ding Ke-shan had this to write:

Today all the nation’s newspapers are carrying news about the opening of the National Assembly. But I still remember what a joke it was last year when Hsuan-hua hsien (county) elected its National Assembly representative…

[T]he GMD’s candidate for the National Assembly representative was T’ung Hsiu-ming; and there were a few others also contesting the election. One cold cloudy afternoon, T’ung Hsiu-ming gave a public election speech in the open-air theatre grounds in the marketplace. In order to learn something about democracy, I braved the cold wind to listen. When I arrived, except for a few shop apprentices, all those seated in the audience were peddlers from off the nearby streets. When I asked them what they had come for, their answer was that the police had told them to come...Then three or four officers brought in over two hundred men who were said to be just then undergoing military training. Only then were all the seats filled. Mr. T’ung’s speech was very simple and contained no election principles at all...After Mr. T’ung had concluded his speech, the hsien magistrate, Wang I-fang, took over and began to talk. To the “voters” in the audience he said: “I order you to elect Mr. T’ung Hsiu-ming. This order is the same as the order telling you that you should go to do repair work on the defence installations. It is wrong for anyone to disobey...” After the meeting, the pao and chia heads certainly obeyed the words of Magistrate Wang; they went to every household and spoke as follows: “The hsien magistrate has spoken. Whoever does not vote for T’ung Hsiu-ming will have to go out and work on the defence installations when they need repairs in the future.” The result of the election was of course that T’ung Hsiu-ming received the most votes.

Today is the big opening of the National Assembly and I suppose Mr. T’ung Hsiu-ming is already sitting securely in a representative’s seat. But with so much having gone on behind the scenes, is it any wonder that those representatives who have been elected but cannot obtain their election certificates have...gone to the National Assembly meeting place and are clamouring to be allowed to participate. Really what a joke it is.