Governance Social Organisation And Reform In Rural China

This study focuses upon governance and social organisation within the Chinese village and explores the extent to which farmers have autonomy vis-à-vis their economic and political activities in an attempt to understand the relationship between farmers and the state in a rapidly changing China.

This study focuses upon governance and social organisation within the Chinese village and explores the extent to which farmers have autonomy vis-à-vis their economic and political activities in an attempt to understand the relationship between farmers and the state in a rapidly changing China.

The rapid marketization of rural labor, agricultural products, and land has dramatically reshaped village life and its structures of governance. This volume, edited by Alexander F. Day, collects twelve key essays translated from Chinese on this transformation of rural society and governance over the past 20 years. These essays, originally published in the leading Chinese-language journal Open Times (开放时代), cover class differentiation, the atomization of rural society, the hollowing out of rural governance, land transfer, rural activism against marketization, lineage politics, the role of agricultural cooperatives, the transformation of small peasant farmers into wage labor, and the disintegration and expansion of peasant petitioning, all exploring the transformation in rural China during the post-socialist era.

Explores the economic, social and financial changes that have transformed China's rural governance over the past twenty years.

This unique volume takes a very different approach to township or xiangzhen governance. It explores the structural constraints on township governance and the way that these constraints influence the day-to-day behavior of Chinese rural grassroots government leaders. Based on thoroughgoing interviews with township and village cadres and villagers, the book depicts how individual actions affect and are affected by the underlying institutional arrangements and hence captures the dynamic micro functions of grassroots government as well as macro evolutions of overarching political institutions in China. The down-to-earth presentation of this book engages readers to deeply feel the genuine life and dilemmas of cadres at the rural grassroots levels in China.The goal of this book is to analyze the fiscal standing, power structure and public service functions of township governments in the context of its subtle relationships with upper level governments as well as with sub-level villages and the rural grassroots society. Its comprehensive documentation and in-depth discussion provide the best depiction of rural governance in contemporary China.

This study focuses upon governance and social organisation within the Chinese village and explores the extent to which farmers have autonomy vis-à-vis their economic and political activities in an attempt to understand the relationship between farmers and the state in a rapidly changing China.

This book reports the findings of two field studies between 1993 and 2001 in seven townships and six provinces in China. The authors find that the process of rural urbanization is bringing about profound economic, social, and political changes that are weakening the dominance of the central government.

"This book argues that any institution that can efficiently solve the problems of collective action and accountability is able to uphold quality governance in local communities, regardless of their nature and origins. The respective performance of different types of institutions, however, is contingent upon the characteristics of the social environment in which they are embedded. Such social environment characteristics are, in turn, closely shaped by the structural features of the local communities. This book further argues that, among a variety of factors that might have contributed to the structural transformation of rural communities, the most salient is a major phenomenon witnessed in many developing countries: rural-urban migration. More specifically, in local communities with distinct levels of outward migration, community members' contextualized choices between indigenous relation-based and imposed rule-based institutions for local governance issues are likely to unfold in different ways. This generates distinct dynamics of institutional change in these communities with varying communal structures. This is the first book that uses a coherent framework to simultaneously examine various aspects of rural China's governance (including public goods provision, conflict resolution, disaster and crisis relief, and raising modest credit and small loans) and covers both formal and informal institutions"--