Residents in thousands of Chinese villages are about to go to the polls to select their community committees, but officials and experts say there are loopholes in the law governing villagers' committees, which needs to be revised.

For more than half of the villages in China, where the villager autonomy system has been in place for almost two decades, this is an election year, said Monday's China Daily.

Rural people in more than 300,000 villages across 18 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in east China, will elect new village committees from this month.

A villagers' committee in China's countryside is a mass organization of self-management comprising local villagers usually five members that manage village affairs.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs indicates that most of the 680,000-strong villages in China have adopted a direct election system.

Twenty-six provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country have laid out their own election statutes, while 27 have completed five rounds of elections since the Organic Law of Villagers' Committees was enacted in 1988.

The law, which sets out basic principles to ensure democracy at a local level, states that any villager aged 18 years or over has the right to vote or stand as a candidate.