Why a handful of village officials become the powder keg of mass incidents

Governing village officials' “absolute power” through the rule of law and institutional means is the fundamental remedy for correcting violations of discipline and law by village officials

There is a film called "Don't Take Yourself Not As a Cadre," in which Feng Gong plays Wang Xi, a workshop section chief at a textile factory. His rank is not high, but he holds himself to the strict standards of a cadre in everything he does, always keeping in mind the saying “If an official does not stand up for the people, he might as well go home and sell fermented bean curd,” and he is embraced by the masses. In reality, however, some grassroots “minor officials” never forget that they are cadres when wielding power, but when it comes to corruption they presume that “the law cannot reach them, so if they don't grab something, it's a missed opportunity,” opening their greedy jaws toward public resources.

⟦NL> According to reports, in recent years grassroots cadres, especially “village officials,” have gradually become a hardest-hit area of corruption. In Jishou, Hunan, after a village cadre was investigated for embezzling public funds, he actually retorted with full confidence: “Isn't being a village cadre all about grabbing a little something? How is that against the law?” Such shamelessness reveals the distorted logic behind the brazen corruption of village officials, and also exposes the weak spot of the lack of rule-of-law awareness in grassroots governance.

In fact, in the legal sense, village cadres are only agents of grassroots mass self-governance organizations and indeed do not yet belong to the category of state public officials. However, when village officials are “grabbing a little something,” they really should not fail to treat themselves as cadres and assume that party discipline and state law cannot touch them. According to the interpretation of Article 93, Paragraph 2 of China's Criminal Law, when personnel of villagers' committees and other village-level grassroots organizations assist the people's government in administrative management work, if they use their position to improperly seek gains in 7 circumstances, including disaster relief and emergency rescue, poverty alleviation and resettlement, and compensation for land requisition, this can constitute the crimes of embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds, and bribery. Moreover, beyond state law, there are even stricter party rules and discipline.

Village officials are unequivocal image spokespersons for the party and the government at the grassroots level. Whether they handle matters in accordance with regulations, discipline, and law concerns the vital interests of the people and also the orderly operation of the grassroots. In reality, most village officials can fulfill their duties diligently and responsibly, building a solid foundation for governance. However, a small number of village officials have become the “pathogens” of grassroots governance, and have even become the powder keg that triggers collective petitions and mass incidents. From lavish eating and drinking and extravagant waste, to nibbling away at poverty alleviation funds and grain subsidies, to swallowing up land requisition compensation and land transfer fees, when corrupt flies buzz around the people, for the credibility of the party and the government it is nothing short of a collapse.

In July of this year, the work report of the Central Inspection Team once sharply stated that in some places “the problem of corruption among rural cadres is prominent, and the problem of ‘minor officials with huge corruption’ is serious.” Other statistics show that since 2013, 171 cases of violations of discipline and law by village officials have been made public across the country, among which 12 cases involved amounts exceeding ten million, with a total amount as high as 2.2 billion yuan. Some institutions believe that whether corruption among low-level officials can be eliminated is the real test of clean politics, and that the success or failure of anti-corruption depends on swatting “flies.” Such a view may be debatable, but it also reminds us that although “flies” are small, their harm is not small, and they must be dealt with as mercilessly as “tigers.” Only by intensifying punishment of corruption in accordance with the law can a strong deterrent be formed against corrupt village officials.

Why do minor village officials breed major corruption? The fundamental reason is that power loses supervision and checks and balances. For a long time, ordinary people, constrained by a lack of legal knowledge, have been pained by village official corruption but helpless to do anything about it. Some grassroots governments, out of consideration for developing the economy and maintaining stability, often adopt the attitude toward corruption among village cadres that “if the people do not report it, officials do not ask; if the people do not make a fuss, officials do not investigate.” The power of village officials is not great, but compared with the weakness of supervisory forces, their relative power cannot be called small; it even reaches the point of “managing heaven above, managing earth below, and managing the air in between.” When power is unrestricted, village officials inevitably treat the law as child's play, and instead of taking themselves as cadres, they take themselves as local emperors. Some people joke that “villager self-governance” in certain places has almost turned into “village official self-governance,” which is enough to explain the problem.

In this sense, governing village officials' absolute power through the rule of law and institutional means is the fundamental remedy for correcting violations of discipline and law by village officials. On the one hand, existing systems such as economic responsibility audits for village cadres and village affairs disclosure must be activated; on the other hand, the institutionalization of village-level anti-corruption must be advanced, with disciplinary inspection forces extending down to the countryside. The Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee proposed advancing the rule of law in grassroots governance and set out specific reform requirements for strengthening grassroots cadres' awareness of the rule of law and strengthening the construction of grassroots rule-of-law institutions, pointing out the direction for solving the difficult problem of village-level anti-corruption. If these requirements are put into practice and village-level power is firmly bound within the cage of institutions, it will certainly be possible to fundamentally reverse grassroots cadres' view of the rule of law and their view of power.

In comprehensively advancing the rule of law, the foundation lies at the grassroots level, and the focus of the work is also at the grassroots level. Rural areas should not be a dead corner of anti-corruption. Governing corruption among village officials should be elevated to the height of advancing the rule of law in grassroots governance. Only by cracking this hard nut as soon as possible can a more solid foundation be laid for rural China's march toward modernization.