The Predicament and Way Out of Village Community Power in China
In recent years, Chinese society has misunderstood the nature of village community power, resented it in attitude, rejected it in policy, and restricted it in the legal system, resulting in village community power being unable to perform its due functions. In fact, village community power is a fundamental institution in China's rural society. It is the common vehicle for villagers' public interests, the interests of collective organizations, and the extended interests of state power. It is the basic means by which farmers' collectives exist and operate, and it plays an irreplaceable role in providing public goods. Only by activating village community power can the issues of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers be effectively resolved.
I. The Predicament of Village Community Power
At the present stage, village community power in China is in a predicament, manifested in the lack of authority of village community power, the role confusion of village community cadres, and the weak constraint of village community rules.
(1) Village community power lacks authority
“Every form of domination attempts to awaken and maintain belief in its ‘legitimacy’.” The legitimacy of village community power supports its authority. In the ritual and legal order of ancient China, meticulous institutional rules were established for the gentry who held village community power and for the villagers affected by that power: religious precepts such as karmic retribution, ethical rules such as the Three Cardinal Guides and Five Constant Virtues, and the requirements of human feeling and worldly wisdom provided ample legitimacy and authority for the gentry to exercise power. During the people's commune period, all rural social resources were placed under the control of political power; village community power was replaced by state power, and village community interests were subordinated to state interests. With the backing of strong state power, this so-called “village community power” was robust and authoritative. However, the existing system focuses on the extension of state power into rural society while neglecting the construction and maintenance of rural power itself. Today's village community power lacks both the economic foundation necessary to sustain its existence and operation and the necessary coercive means to apply to those subject to its constraints. Village community power lacks sufficient support in the realms of politics, morality, public opinion, prestige, and trust. The authority conferred by the position of village cadre is insufficient, making it difficult to establish an order of village community power. In the few places where village community power can function, it often relies on the personal prestige of charismatic leaders. Because support from formal institutional rules is insufficient, power elites can only build power prestige on their own. Core members of village community power need to propose, publicize, and promote power creeds, such as the “Wu Renbao Quotations” of Huaxi Village and the “two hundred and fifty spirit” of Nanjie Village. Such power creeds serve on the one hand to integrate the power team and on the other to obtain villagers' identification. However, efforts to self-compensate for the inadequacy of formal social rules depend on support factors specific to the small village community environment, such as particular resource endowments, traditional customs, the leader's personal abilities, or economic interests. These support factors are not universal, and successful models of self-built authority cannot be generalized. At the same time, power strongmen have a dual nature: excessive strengthening of village community power based on personal will often breaks through the constraints of general social propriety and the rule of law, leading to self-mythologization and the creation of “local emperors”.
(2) Village community cadres lose their role
Village community cadres have a dual role, namely that of state agents and that of village heads. In the relationship between the village community and the state, the state has always held a dominant position, firmly controlling rural cadres through formal and informal institutional rules, so that rural cadres become state agents. Within the internal relationships of the village community, cadres hold power as village heads, and the village community and villagers, as principals, cannot effectively ensure that cadres serve their interests. When state interests conflict with village community interests and villagers' interests, and when the state will conflicts with the village community will and the villagers' will, village community cadres often become a self-contradictory locus of conflict. In the contest between the two constraining forces, the village community side is often severely imbalanced; the village community's ability to constrain its own agents is insufficient, and the reality is that villagers are powerless to constrain village cadres.
Village community cadres who have lost their role swing between two extremes: passive inaction and self-serving recklessness. On the one hand, in most agricultural village communities, land is contracted to households, subsidies go directly to individuals, village cadres have no resources in hand, are powerless to organize public services, and the collective is powerless to provide public goods. Cadre remuneration is low, and only the elderly and infirm are willing to serve as village cadres. The result is that village community cadres become passively inactive, turning into mere watchmen of the village community. On the other hand, in villages with a collective economy, village community power generally shows a tendency toward abuse, and village cadres easily act recklessly for self-interest. “In modern society, associations other than the state may exercise constraints and coercion over their members and even non-members that are more oppressive than those of the state.” Because of conflicts among relevant policies and laws, state law and village regulations and folk conventions, and compared with state power and power within corporations, village community power suffers from problems such as unclear relevant institutional rules and inadequate safeguards, as well as selective application arising from the parallel existence of multiple sets of rules. Village cadres possess discretionary power exceeding that of government departments, yet are not subject to the strict division of labor, checks and balances, and procedural constraints that government departments face. They possess the operational power of enterprise managers, yet need not bear corresponding risks. Village cadres can freely play in the blank zones between village self-governance and political power constraints. Some scholars have pointed out that so-called collective land ownership has in fact become ownership by small groups of township and village cadres, and in some cases even the personal property of individual township or village cadres.
(3) Institutional rules impose weak constraints
Village community power originally derived from villagers' right to self-governance, and village cadres who hold village community power should be accountable to villagers. However, the current system conducts direct top-down constraint according to administrative management logic, treating village community power as subordinate power of government subordinates. Since reform and opening up, the government has gradually withdrawn from comprehensive control over rural society, and village community power could have gained greater space. Unfortunately, the government has not made efforts to foster village community power. At the policy and legislative level, many state policies and laws act directly on farming households; for example, agricultural subsidies go directly into farmers' accounts, bypassing the village collective level. At the level of economic operation, individual villagers participate directly in market activities and do not rely on the village collective as an intermediary. The village community can neither control rural resources nor directly provide benefits to villagers. Because the interests held in the hands of the village collective are thin, village cadres cannot effectively constrain villagers through power mechanisms, and villagers' identification with, dependence on, respect for, and awe of village community power are all very low. State power should provide authority for the existence and operation of village community power, but at present the starting point for state regulation of village community power is inappropriate: it focuses on preventing village cadres from abusing power while neglecting to safeguard their exercise of power. Because “its coercive force lacks the guarantee of state coercive force at the level of actual effect, and its frequent forms of appearance are mainly internal constraints”, such as village regulations and folk conventions, village committee resolutions, and rural public opinion. Village community power does not possess the coercive means of criticism, rewards, penalties, and expulsion that corporate and other associational powers possess, let alone the rigid violent apparatus of the army, police, courts, and prisons that public power possesses. Village community power is at the lowest level of power evolution; the basic guarantee for the exercise of power lies in the personal prestige of the power holder, and village community power lacks coercive force. The ordinary current situation of village community power in China is this: constraints by village community power on villagers are maintained mainly through flexible means such as morality and personal favor; village cadres who hold village community power do not know which powers they can exercise or how to exercise them, resulting in protective inaction and slackness of village community power.
II. Reasons Why Village Community Power Has Fallen into Predicament
The predicament of village community power has both macro-structural causes and causes internal to the village community structure; there are causes stemming from the squeezing of government power as well as causes stemming from the dissolution of the current legal rights structure.
(1) The village community on which village community power relies has already become desolate
In the urban-rural dual structure, the city has become the center where wealth is generated and allocated, while the rural economy has been marginalized in status and has become a reservoir of labor power. In periods of economic prosperity, migrant workers go to the cities to provide cheap labor; in periods of economic depression, migrant workers return to their villages to dissolve urban economic and social risks. Facing the impact of the market economy, farmers are in an unorganized state. The city's extraction of rural resources and labor has led to a trend of hollowing out in the countryside. The weak-industry nature of agriculture and the disadvantaged-group status of farmers have become increasingly prominent; the urban-rural gap and the wealth gap continue to widen.
Rural industries cannot provide sufficient income to retain people, and rural undertakings cannot provide sufficient space to retain talent. Rural elites flow outward, and young talent is in short supply. Village community cadres are generally aging; some cadres are confused in thought, lack enthusiasm for work, and suffer from problems such as mental slackness, inadequate capability, alienation from the masses, and passive corruption. Rural grassroots organizations lack the practical ability and motivation to solve the “three rural issues” and cannot effectively coordinate village community affairs. They cannot, through cadres, apply relevant policies and laws, analyze the village's resource advantages and villagers' interest needs, learn from successful experience, and grasp development opportunities. They cannot effectively integrate rural social resources, promote the transfer of contracted management rights, and form scaled operations. They cannot properly coordinate the relationship between farmers who have left the land and farmers who remain on the land, safeguard “land to those who till it”, reduce abandoned farmland, and increase the scale of economic resources controlled by and the income of farmers who remain on the land. They cannot strengthen rural infrastructure construction, improve rural markets and agricultural service systems, and make rural society suitable for entrepreneurship. Nor can they strengthen public services such as medical care, health, education, and elderly care to make rural society suitable for living. In short, in the pattern of imbalanced urban-rural development, public facilities such as water conservancy have been abandoned, and public goods such as production services are scarce; cultural life is poor and monotonous, and rural customs and folk traditions are dissolving; the subject status of the countryside is being lost, and rural society finds it difficult to form an capacity for autonomous development.
(2) The connection between village community power and villagers' interests is loose
The basic model of the operation of a power institution is “command and obedience”. The current question is: on what basis should villagers obey the domination of village community power? Only when village community power controls the village community's economic resources and can provide villagers with interests for survival and development, and villagers have an interest dependence on the village community, village community power, and those who hold village community power, can villagers possibly obey village community power. Because unified operation has become nominal and the collective economy is absent, under the household contract management system, farmers' interest dependence on village community power hardly exists. The current situation of the relationship between village cadres and villagers is this: ordinarily there are few practical matters linking village cadres and villagers, and after problems arise village cadres are basically unable to solve them; when conflicts arise between villagers and village cadres, villagers report village cadres without scruple. On the one hand, because they easily encounter challenges from villagers, some village community cadres lack confidence in exercising power; on the other hand, supervision of village community cadres cannot be carried out either. The cost for villagers to participate in democratic elections and supervision far exceeds the benefits they can obtain; farmers no longer have the village community in their hearts, and most villagers rationally choose to give up the right to elect village cadres. Because most functions of village community organizations cannot be performed, village affairs are already sparse, and village affairs worth disclosing are even sparser, so the system of disclosing village affairs has no practical significance for ordinary villages.
(3) State power has squeezed out village community power
Village community power formed on the basis of natural resources and historical tradition and is mutually exclusive with state power. Traditional Chinese political power basically stopped at the county level; rural society relied on gentry governance, and village community power was very strong. Since the founding of New China, village community power has differentiated, with part of it being taken back by the government. The boundary between village community power and state power has become further blurred, and state power under a strong government system has extended excessively into the village community. This excessive extension distorted village community power, causing it to lose direction, shifting from serving villagers to being responsible to higher-level governments, and alienating from villagers' right to self-governance into subordinate power of state power. During the people's commune period, farmers' private sphere was completely covered by the public sphere, and village community power was concentrated from society toward the state; in the post-commune period, the state recaptured village community power by controlling village cadres. The role of village cadres was misaligned as agents of state political power. Village cadres are “neither state cadres nor recipients of state salary, neither administrative managers nor law enforcers, yet they must complete work tasks that only administrative and law enforcement personnel can complete by relying on coercive means.” Before the tax and fee reform, the main work of village cadres was collecting taxes for the state and implementing the family planning policy. After the tax and fee reform, the selection of village cadres is still influenced by higher-level governments, and fiscal support has strengthened the capture effect. Because rural power cannot draw financial support from the locality for daily expenses, it depends on fiscal transfer payments from higher levels; state finance subsidizes the wages of rural cadres, and the wages of village cadres in poor village communities are basically paid by finance. This approach undoubtedly solved practical difficulties in rural society, but at the same time it further implied that village cadres are employees of the government. Because every expenditure must be examined and approved by the township-level government, village-level organizations find it even less convenient to use power to carry out activities. “Village finances managed by the township” both reflects and intensifies the helplessness and inaction of rural power. It can be seen that risks are also hidden in fiscal transfer payments: the state pays the cost of the operation of village community power, and this may be alienated into consideration for purchasing village community power. Because the village community is unable to pay acceptable remuneration and cannot attract and retain talent, the government promotes the system of college student village officials. College student village officials are selected and dispatched by the government, enter rural communities from outside, and directly hold village community power. Its starting point is mainly to supply talent to village communities and provide intellectual resources. The problems it brings are: on whose behalf do college student village officials hold village power? Can they be naturalized as representatives of village community interests and be loyal to the village community? This acquisition of village community power has not received authorization from village community members; is this takeover recognized by villagers? On what conditions and through what procedures can villagers refuse and recall outside village officials?