The Rural Community Governance On The Perspective Of Social Capital

As an important mechanism of rural community governance, although the system of village autonomy promotes the development of village democracy in large measure, it gradually turns into be a formalization bureaucratic and involution system. In this sense, peasants need their organizations and a new mechanism of coherence in their organizations for the expression of their own interests. Social capital can be a mechanism of coherence that promotes reasonable collective actions, positive social capital promotes synergy in collective action.Social capital can be explained in micro-, meso-or macro-level, that is the levels of individual, organization and system, while the core elements, are the rules of generalized trust, cooperation, and the network of citizen participation. Social capital affects the governance of rural communities. Individual social capital intensifies the diversification of the model of elite governance, which leads to the differences and imbalances of individual capital that constitutes village power structure of the model of plural elite governance. Organizational social capital reflects the capacity of village collective action. Atomized village shows inability in collective action; Village of strong family and clan, in the opinion of western scholars, retains bonding-social capital, which is limited in blood and geo-relationship and intensified factional struggles in village governance. Religious, functional and recreational organizations possess bridging-social capital, which bridges differences by citizens'patience and identification, and cultivates the spirits of tolerance and consensus among citizens. When villages break out isolation to make mutual-benefit decisions and take actions of consensus, they cherish linking-social capital, which is embodied in regional citizens'collective action of meeting the higher authorities. Institutional social capital, which is not only reflected in the stipulations of contextual institutions, but also in the performance of institutions, and more in the construction of state itself, produces sustainable influences on village governance.Theory of the growth of social capital contains society-centered and institutional-centered point views. The former explains the development of citizen attitude and the ability of breaking out the dilemma of collective action lies in varieties of face-to-face communications. The latter explains that the growth of social capital embed in institutions and relate to the establishment of formal political and legal institutions, which affect the development of the network of citizen cooperation and the establishment of social trust. In political reality, the most important aspect of the growth of village social capital is generalized trust that contains inter-personal trust and trust-to-government, which is an indispensable element in any kind of collective action. Trust to grass-roots government and village cadres is one of the prerequisites of the citizens'willing to take part in public affairs. While trust is a production of civil society.