Hua Youjuan is an unlikely Chinese official.
Free-spirited but driven, she left her village at age 17, got a degree in marketing, and opened a string of businesses in nearby cities in eastern China before settling in the coastal boomtown of Ningbo, 160 km (100 miles) from home.
She never looked back - until she got a phone call two years ago that set off a chain of events that would turn her into an anti-corruption campaigner, then the elected head of her village and, finally, into a disillusioned witness to the ruling Communist Party's attempts at limited grassroots democracy.
Her story, as she tells it, ends with a party unwilling to yield power and with her campaign losing momentum - a tale that reveals one of the most challenging riddles facing China's incoming new leadership team: how can the party shore up its waning legitimacy without loosening its grip on power?
So far, an answer has been elusive.
Critics say political reform stalled as the current leadership focused on delivering economic growth. Rumors have circulated ahead of the once-in-a-decade transition that leader-to-be Xi Jinping and his colleagues may be willing to push through much needed reforms - but it is far from clear.
Large-scale protests have increased in China, reflecting anger over corruption and the lack of government accountability and transparency - the kind of unrest that experiments in grassroots democracy, like the one Hua Youjuan participated in, were meant to help short-circuit.
Instead, Hua said democracy in her home village of Huangshan, in eastern Zhejiang province, was never allowed to fully succeed, thwarted by senior party officials who she accused of resisting her campaign to root out corruption.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/29/us-china-politics-democracy-idUSBRE89R0JJ20121029
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