Why village officials' income is no small matter? Read this to understand
The question of whether civil servants' salaries should be raised has been hotly debated recently, while the issue of village officials' income seems to have received the attention it deserves. Village officials are the key to maintaining rural order. Whether village officials can keep going, and whether their income can support them in doing so, is a major matter in China's rural governance.
In ordinary central and western agricultural areas, villages lack resources and the collective village economy is very weak. As the末端 of the administrative system, village officials are not national civil servants and cannot receive civil servant salaries; they can only receive lost-work subsidies as non-full-time officials.
If a village is relatively closed and farmers' income mainly comes from agriculture and rural industry and commerce, village officials engage in household business on the one hand and serve part-time as village officials on the other, receiving lost-work subsidies, so their income is not lower than that of ordinary villagers. But in the current situation where rural society is fully open, it is very convenient for farmers to go to the cities, and the vast majority of young and middle-aged laborers in rural areas have already gone to the cities to work or do business, village officials cannot go to the cities to work or do business because they are in office, and can only continue to operate in the village. If there is not enough village operating income, the economic income of village officials will be far lower than that of ordinary villagers who go out to work or do business, and it will be very difficult for village officials to continue serving.
Not long ago, the author conducted a survey in Luotian County, Hubei, and incidentally investigated the issue of village officials' income. Dahe'an Town in Luotian County belongs to the Dabie Mountain area, and the economy is underdeveloped. According to the current remuneration for village officials, principal village officials such as village party secretaries and village committee directors generally receive about 10,000 yuan per year, while ordinary village officials receive about 8,000 yuan. On average, village officials' remuneration (including all bonuses) is less than 1,000 yuan per month, which is a big gap from the roughly 3,000 yuan monthly salary of local civil servants, and even far lower than the 2,000 yuan monthly salary of college-graduate village officials.
At present, in order to increase the enthusiasm of village officials, some places are considering regularizing village officials, raising their remuneration, and allowing them to become full-time and professionalized, so as to solve the current problem of village officials taking side jobs. However, in China's thousands of years of history, there has always been an intermediate buffer zone between the state and society. It is precisely the identity of village officials as neither officials nor ordinary citizens, and the villager self-governance system based on it, that provides a relatively good space for administrative flexibility in national policy. Once village officials are regularized, villager self-governance loses its foundation, and it will be difficult for state power to face the complexity and diversity of rural society.
In this sense, for a fairly long period in the future, it is still reasonable for non-full-time village officials to solve the basic order problems of grassroots governance. Its premise is the economic diversity of rural society itself. It can be said that the small-peasant economy needs a grassroots organizational system centered on non-full-time village officials to "coordinate," and at the same time it is the small-peasant economy that provides the economic space for the operation of the rural grassroots organizational system.