A Vigorous Democratic Practice Summarization of the First SEE Council Meeting

http://www.sina.com.cn 2005/06/29 11:05

　　On the night of June 4th and in the morning of the 5th, charter members of Alxa SEE Ecological Association experienced a memorable time that they would never forget. The meeting went out of the planned track as a result of everyone’s enthusiasm and woo for democracy and it finally reached the goal of democratization and regulation.

　　1.Voting often solved the discussion of Constitution.

　　According to the meeting agenda, the discussion of constitution was the major focus of the meeting on June 4th. Yang Peng, the drafter of the Constitution gave a brief introduction. His introduction focused mainly on the 19th line of the Constitution which was about the check and balance supervision system of the Association. In order to avoid the loss of public trust, SEE put great emphasis on the effectiveness of the supervising committee when designing the rules and regulations. Emphasis was also put on the error-correcting and impeaching of the supervisors. There are two central powers in the Association. They are the executive committee represented by the President and the supervising committee represented by the leading supervisor.

　　During the discussion, everyone expressed their opinions actively. Some opinions were apropos and some caused fierce argument.

　　The opinions towards the Constitution focused on the following topics:

　　Qualification of charter members. The Constitution says that an enterprise will be qualified as a charter member only if it continues to donate 100,000 yuan annually for 10 years. But after discussion, everyone agreed that an enterprise would automatically become a charter member once it donated the first 100,000 and it could abandon this qualification by stop making further donations.

　　The number of charter members. Some people thought that the more charter members there were, the better. The number did not have to be restricted to only 100. But everyone reached a common agreement after discussion. That was, these 100 positions represented a historical status and an honour. It had to have some restrictions. On the other hand, it would be hard to administer if there were too many charter members.

　　The scope of work of the Association. This topic brought the fiercest discussion. Some people didn’t think it should be restricted to only within Alxa but others held the opposite opinion. Eventually they reached a decision of harnessing sandstorm within Alxa by voting.

　　The procedures of impeach in the supervising committee. The Constitution stipulates that the supervising committee has the right to impeach the President and Vice-President. Some charter members doubted and thought this line was not clearly stated. For example, under what conditions could the supervising committee formally bring up impeachment to the Council? Yang Peng agreed that this was a very good point. Only the right to impeach was considered during the initial designing of the Constitution but not the detailed procedures. This line definitely needed further adjustments.

　　After an intensive discussion and voting for more than an hour, all participants of the meeting agreed on the amended Constitution in principle and urged the preparation group to make further refinements and amendments to the Constitution.

　　2.The form of voting changed from single-candidate election to competitive election that was differential voting.

　　The preparation group distributed questionnaires to the charter members three times, asking for their opinions on who should be the managerial candidates. However, this task was not accomplished due to various reasons. In order to fully prepare for the meeting, the preparation group drafted a list of candidates for the executive committee and supervising committee and presented it in the meeting.

　　According to the selection procedure, attendants of the meeting could tick the names that they agreed and cross those they didn’t, and write down who they thought were more appropriate.

　　This procedure was finalized after few rounds of discussion within the preparation group as it could be easily executed. But this procedure immediately brought up disagreements in the meeting. Lots of people thought that the preparation could select candidates they knew well according to their personal views but they could not deprive the recommendation rights of other members. At the same time, a single-candidate election should not substitute for a competitive election as it breached the basic principle of democracy and equal participation.

　　Through discussion and voting, most members agreed that the preparation group had the right to recommend candidates. However at the same time, the charter members of each round table could also add more candidates to the list. Eventually, there were 10 more candidates apart from the 20 candidates recommended by the preparation group. Eight of them were candidates of the executive committee and 2 of them were of the supervising committee. Differential voting would make the final decision.

　　3.The result of the election proved that democracy was realistic within the entrepreneurs.

　　In the morning of June 5th, the meeting moved on to voting procedures. Director Liu XiaoGuang of the preparation group announced the Statistics and qualification of electing asserting. Before dawn of June 5th, 102 entrepreneurs made promises to join the Association. The standards were: a) they had filled out the application form; b) they had paid the fee; c) their funds should arrive before July 5th according to promise; d) Council member’s qualification was automatically cancelled if funds didn’t arrive before that date; f) if all entrepreneurs fulfilled their promise, the number of charter members would be increased from 100 to 102.

　　Zhang ShuXin, the host of the meeting announced Hu BaoSen and Zhao Min to be the scrutinizers and Miao HongBing to count the ballot-slips and call out the names of those voted. He also announced that there were 67 entrepreneurs out of the 102 entrepreneurs present that promised to join accounting for over two thirds of the total. The election was effective.

　　Candidates gave another short speech stating their attitudes and thoughts before voting. Two candidates gave up their qualifications voluntarily. Zhang XinSheng of Asian Info Holdings Inc. transferred his qualification to Ding Jian, the Director of Asian Info Holdings, who was more capable in terms of time and energy.

　　After many rounds of counting and calling out, the following final executive committee members were elected: Li MouWei, Dai ZhiKang, Jiao JiaLiang, Liu XiaoGuang, Zhang ShuXin, Wang Yan, Wang Shi, Song Jun, Liu ChuanZhi, Han JiaHuan, Gao WenNing, Shi YuZhu, Feng Lun, Wang QingHai, Ding Jian.

　　The final supervisors were: Ma WeiHua, Zhang ZhaoYang, Lu ZhengXin, Lin RongQiang, Chen DongSheng.

　　The executive committee and the supervising committee had separate meetings after the announcement of the voting results and they voted for the following positions. President: Liu XiaoGuang; Vice President: Wang Shi, Zhang ShuXin, Han JiaHuan, Song Jun, Gao WenNing; Leading Supervisor: Ma WeiHua; General Secretary: Yang Ping.

　　Director Wang WeiJia of Shanghai Mtone Wireless who lost in the election said a few words about the election which was worth noting. He said, ‘though I lost in the election, I still feel very happy at heart. I’m so glad that we can reach this perfect conclusion after so much chaos that we’ve gone through since last night. This represents the strong sense of democracy within us. Participation is most important after all. Let’s put our hands together for the future success.’