Ten Years After Village Mergers: Another Look at Rural Change
After the tax and fee reform, because village-level income was greatly affected, the government promptly launched the work of merging villages and combining groups, meaning that by reducing the number of village cadres it could cut expenditures and maintain the normal operation of village-level organizations. In fact, as the state in the following years increased input into rural areas, the salaries of village cadres were all guaranteed, and they rose substantially year after year; this expenditure on village cadres did not decrease, but only raised the average salary level of village cadres.
As the average salary level of village cadres rose, their enthusiasm for work increased somewhat, especially for those village cadres who could not go out or did not want to go out to work; a relatively good salary level was still quite attractive to them. However, as village cadres in recent years have gradually been replaced by wealthy people, the current salary level of village cadres is too little relative to their income, and its attractiveness has therefore declined significantly. From this angle, the positive potential of the village mergers and group combinations of that time has been exhausted.
However, the many troubles that village mergers and group combinations brought to rural governance have remained. In S Town, which we investigated, before 2003 there were 19 administrative villages, and after the merger they were reduced to 12 villages. After villages were merged, the village cadres in each village decreased, especially in those merged villages with relatively small populations, where the quota of village cadres was even smaller. Thus the sudden sharp reduction in the quota of village cadres became a contradiction in village politics.
For example, Xinbeimiao Village was formed by merging the former Beimiao Village and Nanmiao Village. The former had a population of more than 2,000, and the latter more than 1,000. At the time the government stipulated that only 5 cadre quotas would be given, 3 for Beimiao and 2 for Nanmiao, but later the cadres of Beimiao Village believed that because they had more people they should add 1 quota, and after repeated appeals to higher levels the town government was forced to agree. A similar case was Xinhe Village, which was formed by merging the former 3 villages. At first the government also gave only 5 cadre quotas; because the former 3 villages had similar populations, with 5 quotas one village was bound to have only 1 cadre, and the village cadres appealed to the town government to increase it to 6 quotas.
The problems in these two villages were still relatively mild, and the town government handled them fairly flexibly, but there were also villages with very great contradictions whose problems remain unresolved to this day. Xuan Village in S Town had a population of around 800 and was a small village in the whole town. At the end of 2003 the government merged it with two other villages into Shuang Village. Because Shuang Village had a larger population than the other three villages, after the merger Shuang Village provided two cadres and each of the other villages provided one cadre. The old cadres of Xuan Village felt very dissatisfied, and added to this the fact that the villagers of Xuan Village and Shuang Village had historically not gotten along well, they mobilized the villagers to demand independence, and even petitioned the provincial level for this. Later, seeing that independence was hopeless, they demanded to merge with Zhang Village, which had an even smaller population than their own. This demand was still not permitted, so they turned to demanding a merger with the somewhat more distant Cha Village. This matter dragged on for a long time, and the town really had no way out but to agree. Now, all affairs large and small in Xuan Village belong to Cha Village, though in administrative planning it still belongs to Shuang Village.
From the above several cases, we find that the reduction in the number of village cadres triggered dissatisfaction among the village political elite. From the perspective of individual village cadres, they should all have been considering personal interests, but from the perspective of the village power structure it is not so simple. It was precisely the village merger that led to a reduction in the quota of village cadres and broke the balance of the original power structure. This balance gradually formed during the collectivization period. At that time there were many cadres large and small in the village, and the large number made it possible to take care of all aspects of groups and factions in the village. From this angle, that time was precisely a democratic era of high villager participation. This balance continued into the 1990s. By the mid-to-late 1990s, under the background of reducing the burdens on farmers and streamlining state institutions, the quota of village cadres gradually decreased. For example, after 1998 each village in S Town was reduced to 4 formal village cadres, and this balance was gradually broken. After the large-scale village merger movement in 2003, some villages were reduced to only 1 village cadre, and this balance was completely broken. Of course, the town government also made some corresponding adjustments and adaptations in response to this kind of "resistance" at the grassroots level, and most contradictions were digested internally.
After the village merger, the allocation of village cadre quotas was determined according to population size, which is somewhat similar to the so-called "constituency system." Grassroots cadres could see the advantages of this election model very clearly. The chairman of the people's congress of S Town believed, "Nominally it is a merged election, but in actual operation it is divided into several constituencies, and each constituency is given several quotas, thus ensuring that villages with fewer people all have cadres." The "constituency system" was in fact proposed by some people in the early period of villager autonomy, but it was only implemented after the village merger, and this effect was greatly reduced. At the same time, after the village merger there was also the problem that small villages found it very hard to produce leading cadres. "Originally the two villages each had their own cadres, and small villages also had a secretary and a director. Now small villages find it very hard to have their own secretary and director; most are occupied by large villages, because quotas are allocated first and then everyone is gathered together to elect the secretary and director." Small villages could only produce deputy cadres, and it was easy for conflicts to arise among village cadres, which increased the difficulty of village governance after the merger.
In the actual operation of village-level organizations after the merger, most implemented a "one country, two systems." The "one country" was generally reflected only in formal administrative planning and during election periods, while the "two systems" were reflected in several core aspects. The first was village affairs. Jiang Jun, the village head of Xuan Village, said, "We are a merged village, but in fact it is small-scale independence. Whatever they have going on, we do not participate, and whatever we have going on, they do not participate either." The second was finance. Locally there was a saying of "one village, two accounts" or even "one village, three sets of accounts," that is, the old villages each had their own accounts, and there were also unified accounts made to cope with government requirements. The third was collective property. Locally the largest piece of collective property was the forest. After the village merger the forest still belonged to the original old village collective, and the new village-level organization and villagers could not share in it. From these several core levels, the new village could not achieve effective integration; the village merger was basically superficial, only coping with the reform demands of the higher-level government.
The fundamental reason for implementing "one country, two systems" still lies in the fact that villages formed over decades of history had already developed certain habits and traditions, and internal governance had also formed a certain model, and this model had support in resources. After the merger, the cadres of the large village, as "outsiders," were unfamiliar with the internal discourse and various relationships of the village, and were also a potential threat to the village's resources, so there was no possibility of them intervening.
From the perspective of governance in the old villages, one or two village cadres could not cope with many matters, so the village cadres thought of some flexible methods. One was the so-called "hiring system." For example, Xuan Village now had only one village committee member, actually the director of Xuan Village. Because finances necessarily required someone else to be responsible, they hired the old party member Liu Xijie, who was also a branch committee member of Cha Village, as accountant. In addition, from the perspective of ordinary people, the village merger increased the cost of having matters handled. For example, Zhujia Village, merged into Shuang Village, was too far from the village headquarters, so it was rather inconvenient for the people of Zhujia to have matters handled. Changing from a first-level government to a clerk, some village-head matters could no longer be handled.
Nearly ten years have passed since the village mergers and group combinations, and looking again at that reform of the time, its drawbacks are becoming clearer and clearer. Grassroots cadres who personally experienced this reform have also reflected on it. The chairman of the people's congress of S Town sighed, "The higher levels designated according to region and population that several should be cut. Some townships did not follow it and that was that. We strictly followed it, and I think this was a kind of failure." As we see it, this reflection is still far from enough; it remains merely at the level of the policy itself, and it has not yet touched the logic behind this kind of government reform, namely a bureaucratized reform mentality. Legally speaking, villagers have the right to self-governance; culturally speaking, villages have formed their own traditions. Therefore, the government merging villages in a mode of streamlining government institutions has no realistic basis.