| Abstract |
After the Second Sino-Japanese War was over, the national government decided to establish local parliaments to serve as the elected representative assemblies at the request of domestic democratization and with the hope of obtaining international assistance so that it might implement the practice of autonomy. This study is aimed at discovering the issues generated in the process of election based on the case of Shanghai Senator Election. First of all, concerning the issue of census, since the city government spent an extremely short period of time conducting the population census, a great number of heads of baojia simply reported the results voluntarily without conducting the real census at all. On the other hand, there were many mistakes in the roll of candidates. Moreover, this roll was not completed until the voting day was approaching, so mistakes and flaws could have been made easily. Regarding the election campaign, there were 1,195 candidates in total fighting for 181 parliament seats. These candidates mainly addressed to their supporters by means of the radio broadcast, giving public speech in the park, holding banquets, or interviews with newspapers. Yet, on the election day of Apr. 28th, 1946, Shanghai city government made another big mistake. It offered as less as 100 polling booths for more than 2 million voters to cast their votes. In such a chaos, many illiterate voters had some representatives write the name of candidate on their behalf. Therefore, some candidates took advantage of them, bribing these representatives into fraudulence. On the other hand, some candidates hired gangsters to interfere the polls. As the report of election result suggests, a lot of votes were missing from nearly all polling booths. It was possible that many voters failed to go to the polls although they had claimed their votes. Or, some votes were switched in the process of counting and announcing the ballots. After the election was over, some heads of districts attempted to discourage the elected candidates from taking their posts but were stopped by the city government. All in all, a lot of problems were encountered in this election. After all, it was not easy to promote the practice of democracy under the shadow of Chinese Civil war. |
