Chen Guohua won a landslide victory in the most recent vote for Communist Party chief of Longxing Township in the landlocked Chongqing Municipality with a promise to quadruple local GDP in three years.

But in his five-year term, Chen will need to make genuine efforts to achieve his ambitious target, because the 900 Party members in Longxing who voted him in can also vote him out.

They will review his performance every year, and a no-confidence vote from one-third of them could see him unseated.

Longxing is one of 200 townships in Chongqing and Sichuan and Hubei provinces where direct elections for Party chiefs are being trialled.

Multiple candidates and contested campaigns in direct elections have already been tried for more than 90 percent of village committees across the country.

Turning 86 years old and having ruled China for 58 years, the Party is moving step by step to further political reform.

At the Party's national congress that opened on Monday in Beijing, General Secretary Hu Jintao vowed in his report to "deepen political restructuring."

He acknowledged, however, the reform should go in a "correct political orientation" and under the leadership of the Party, echoing his speech at Yale University when visiting the United States in April 2006 that China would not embrace Western-style democracy, although it is open to any tested experience buttressing democracy.

Hu's prudence has been endorsed by the biggest rally in the Party's history. Delegates to the congress said the Party leadership, people's participation in political affairs as the country's masters and the rule of law are three cornerstones for "socialist democracy."

Yu Keping, deputy chief of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, has praised democracy as "the least defective" of all political institutions created and adopted by human beings.

"Comparatively, democracy is the best one in human history," Yu said in an article quaintly titled "Democracy Is A Lovely Thing," and published this year in the Study Times, a newspaper sponsored by the CPC Central Committee's Party School.

However, timing of pushing democracy and institutional arrangements must be carefully chosen, said the 48-year-old Yu, who is a visiting professor to both Duke University in the US and Free University of Berlin, Germany.

Professor Yang Guangbin, director of the Comparative Politics Institute at the Renmin University of China, said every country has its uniqueness to develop democracy based on its own history, culture and real conditions.

"It's quite harmful to oversimplify unique processes of different democracies to certain modes," Yang said.