Who governs rural China under the current township administration and village governance structure?
Through the ages, people have always been happy to believe that the countryside is beautiful and farmers are simple and honest, and that when the upper classes' morals collapse, one can still go to the countryside and among the common people to seek a rich deposit of morality. However, in recent days, rural governance problems have occurred frequently, and in some places underworld and evil forces have intervened in grassroots governance, while social problems such as sexual assault of left-behind children and left-behind elderly people have occurred from time to time. What kind of predicament is rural governance currently encountering? In the context of the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity, how can rural governance be modernized? On this matter, a Guangming Online reporter interviewed researcher Song Hongyuan, director of the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the following is a transcript of the interview.
Rural governance is indispensable in the national governance modernization system
Rural governance is the foundation and an important component of national governance. During the period of the Republic of China, the government did not extend down to the county level, and rural governance was mainly gentry governance. After the founding of New China, rural governance was the people's commune system, based on three-level ownership with the production team as the foundation, and it was a model of directing production by administrative means and replacing political power organizations with economic organizational forms. After the rural household contract responsibility system was implemented, this change in the economic system required the political system to adapt to it, and the "people's commune" model could no longer continue to be used for management, so a strategic response was implemented.
In 1983 township governments were restored in rural areas, and in 1987 the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed the Organic Law of the Villagers' Committees (for Trial Implementation), which began trial implementation in 1987, and villagers' committees were gradually established throughout rural China, replacing the people's commune model with the "township administration and village governance" model.
The so-called "township administration and village governance" contains two levels, "township administration" and "village governance." "Township administration" means that the state establishes the lowest level of government in townships and towns, representing the state in managing rural areas; "village governance" means villager self-governance, establishing autonomous organizations in rural areas and implementing democratic elections, democratic decision-making, democratic management and democratic supervision. Township administration embodies state power, while village governance is the embodiment of social power; the township is government, the village is an autonomous organization, and it is based on rural governance and household management.
From this evolutionary process, it can be seen that whether viewed from the governance system or the governance structure, rural governance is both a foundation and an important component of national governance.
Under the great wheel of urbanization, rural areas mesh with the state, cities and the market only with difficulty
Since reform and opening up, and especially since the advancement of urbanization, China's rural areas have undergone profound changes in spatial state, population pattern, social structure and interest structure, giving rise to a coexistence pattern of traditional rural communities, new rural communities formed through village integration, and new communities integrated into cities and towns.
For units at the township (town) level, the highest period was in 1990 with 56,000, and by 2012 this had decreased to 33,000. Villagers' committees peaked in 1990 at 740,000, and in 2012 were 590,000, so the social structure has already changed. In addition, with the transfer of labor for employment, the ratio of rural population to urban population has also changed. In the past we had a relatively large rural population, but by 2012 the urban population had already surpassed the rural population. In this context, the structure of the labor force has also changed considerably. At present, China has more than 200 million migrant workers, but among them 62.2% work in county seats or above, while 37.8% work below the county level, and 20% of the migrant worker group has already moved into cities. In addition, the problem of rural hollowing out is serious, and who will farm the land and who will raise livestock troubles the countryside.
In addition, the interest pattern in rural areas has also changed. On the one hand, some villages themselves have abundant resources, and disputes arise over who will control and dispose of these resources; on the other hand, in the process of the government advancing urbanization, the implementation of some engineering projects involves various resources, such as construction projects for water, electricity and gas, and livelihood projects such as education and health. How should these resources be distributed? Once there are economic interests, all actors in the countryside vie for the right to dispose of these resources and interests. All this involves changes in the rural interest structure.
What problems have such structural changes brought? That is, while changes in other aspects of the state are advancing, how should the rural governance system adapt to the modernization of other systems? How can rural governance capacity be improved? How can the problems of intervention and rent-seeking by grassroots organizations and the government be solved?
The enormous difficulties of China's rural transformation and village transformation are certainly due to the vastness of rural areas, the huge size of the population and the weak economic foundation, but more importantly they are due to the special social content and nature of this transformation: namely, rural areas, which are particular in geography, production, culture and governance, are on the one hand increasingly drawn into the process of market economy and even social construction, and on the other hand increasingly incorporated into the process of modern state governance. This means a rearrangement of the three basic relationships between the state and rural areas, the market and rural areas, and cities and rural areas. This is a tremendous transformation that Chinese rural society has never experienced. The manner, process and prospects of this transformation depend on the attitude of the state, the market and cities toward rural areas, and also on the attitude of rural areas toward the state, the market and cities. It is precisely in this sense that observing village transformation can also be regarded as observing the transformation of village relations.