People's Mediation Of Rural China: Organization And Self-organization

Rural issue and harmonious society are the current hot topics in China. As an essential part of constructing harmonious villages, people conciliation and its development are worth talking about.In the former part of 1950s, Chinese government set up an organization—the people's conciliation committees—to deal with the civil disputes and slight criminal issues. This organization was based on the authority of grass-root people governments. Given that the authority had great control capability on the local residents, who were living and tied to the village or country, the committee functioned well.However, after 1978, this organization could not meet the needs of the society. The reason lied in the following two aspects: the first, market economy began to develop; the second, civil society, which was being developing, asked for a new conciliation system, as the local self-organization could not work efficiently any more.On the basis of survey in Xian' an County in Hubei Province, this paper try to answer these questions: What kind of self-organization should be established? What function they should have? What kind of relationship they should keep with formal one?...