The informal roots of state capacity and social stability in rural China

The Chinese government implemented a number of reforms in the early 2000s to build a "harmonious society." These reforms intended to lessen fiscal burdens on peasants so as to reduce local state-society conflict in rural areas surrounded by tax and fee collections. Surprisingly, accompanied by declining fiscal extraction from peasants, these reforms led to eroding control of local state over society, evidenced by the rise of collective petitions. Why have central reforms not achieved their intended results? How have they affected social discontent and state capacity to cope with social resistance?;My dissertation argues that the destabilizing impact of central fiscal reforms on local governance derives from the altering position of village cadres in the alliance and opposition relations of collective contention. More specifically, prior to the central fiscal reforms in the early 2000s, there existed an informal collaboration among the county, township, and village levels of government, which had contributed both to local predatory policies in tax collection and to local state repressive capacity. The central fiscal reforms disrupted this informal collaboration by rearranging the distribution of benefits among the three levels of local government. Whereas counties and townships continue their collaboration and seek external revenue sources, village cadres are excluded from the benefit-sharing relations. Instead of working to alleviate rural discontent, therefore, village cadres have encouraged and even colluded with rural citizens in lodging collective petitions.;Village cadres are the middlemen between the state and society. Their changing attitude towards collective contention portends an eroding state access to the information about society, which is necessary for effective governance and timely resolution of local political conflicts. This could engender greater violence in state-society conflicts, anarchic tendencies in rural society, and ultimately undermine the regime's capacity to govern and mobilize rural society.;Theoretically, this dissertation proposes a dynamic understanding of contentious politics with shifting boundaries between the state and society and changing relations among state segments. This approach emphasizes an examination of the informal institutions that shape and direct ways in which benefits get distributed among levels of government with asymmetric power, and ways in which state and society interact.