In assessing Chinese village elections we must sort and discriminate as we consult the 'mountain of evidence' that has accumulated over the past two decades. We can find anecdotal evidence to support practically any claim about village democratization, but from such stories we can learn nothing about the status, trends, or patterns of village democratization. This article evaluates what we can learn and have learned about grassroots democratization in the Chinese countryside from nationally and locally representative sample survey data. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.