Governance Under Siege

This paper takes governance practice in one of the towns of central China as research object, including public goods supply, dispute mediation, petition management and others. It chose governance rules as the breakthrough point and revealed the contemporary China rural governance transformation characteristics for readers'better understanding.In amid of rural governance practice, the state on one hand allowed the existence of local norms through which the state is expecting to achieve rural governance, but meanwhile, the state is trying to bring the public rules (such as the national policy on "spread the law to the countryside") to local society and aimed to turn them into dominant rules for the purpose of governing local society. Hence the rural governance was shaped as "Dual-formal governance" in its practice form.The rural social change in recent thirty years in essence can also be seen as a process through which the state continues to compress the legitimacy level of the local norms and push public rules into rural social practice. In this process, the organizational basis and authoritative foundation of local norm practice were gradually dissipated. The result turned out negative for rural society order. The idea of governing the rural society by law instead gave chance to some people to destroy the rural order and set the countryside out of sequence in the name of law. This governance by law is a distorted one. In other words, this rural order lost the basic morality in the law and the governance by law becomes "without social morality".After the household contract responsibility system was implemented, the peasants began to gain the independence and the village community border gradually disappeared. Dispelled by their own profits, the peasants are always looking for opportunities to meet their goal. In this transformation period, the chaos of rightful discourse left the chance for rural society to construct the legitimacy for their behavior by using the words that correspond to their own interests. It largely helped rural society get rid of all sorts of discipline and put rural governance in dilemma.After the taxation reform, the dilemma of rural governance in River Town was amplified due to lack of governing resources and loss of governmental power. As for the loss of power, the readers can see a rough picture through River Town's public gods supply, dispute mediate and petition management dilemma.This paper finally draws three basic conclusions:first, the rural society of River Town is presented neither a traditional community order under simple governance, nor a modern legal order sustained by rules of law. It is the rural order coming out from Dual-formal governance. Second, in the rural governance practice, the peasants made use of optional scene constructures and introduction rules, which resulted different dilemmas in the process of rural governance. Third, the current Dual-formal governance practice can not be well understood unless it is placed into the background of Chinese social transformation. During social transformation, the state destroy the local norm and rural society order when she is trying to spread the public rules to the countryside. The destroyed rural society order made the local rule level system into disorder and put the rural governance into dilemma.