Mutual empowerment of state and peasantry: Village self-government in rural China

This study addresses a series of questions regarding one of the most important political developments in contemporary China: the state-led democratic practice of village self-government in rural areas. Why would an authoritarian state promote grassroots democratic reform? To what extent has this reform changed the local power structures, grassroots governance, and state-peasant relations? What would be the implications of this grassroots democratic reform for China's democratization in the long run? By examining the origins, process, and impact of this paradoxical political development, this study explores the dynamics of political change and mutually transforming relations between the state and society in Post-Mao China.; It argues that the practice of village self-government was promoted by the Chinese party-state to cope with the dual crises of legitimacy and governability it had faced in the countryside after a decade of rural economic reforms. This grassroots democratic reform was implemented by the Chinese state through an unusual “sandwich strategy,” in which state reformists in the central government closely collaborated with ordinary peasants, making use of peasants' initiative to fight against various forms of local resistance. As least in some pioneering areas, the village self-government reform has proved to be a critical process in which the state and peasants have been mutually empowering each other by linking peasant demands to state power through contested elections and self-governing villagers' committees. Not only have peasants been empowered to a large extent in local political life, the capacity of the state to govern in rural areas has also been greatly enhanced. This state-led democratic reform, however, has some unanticipated consequences. By contradicting the highly undemocratic politics of the larger state within which it is situated, a growing village democracy not only raises some fundamental challenges to the party-state power structure at the grassroots, but also brings some significant impact on higher-level politics. Thus a purely instrumental change promoted by an authoritarian state to enhance its infrastructural power may evolve in the long run into an incremental process of political development that allows social forces to gradually penetrate into the very state and eventually curtail its despotic power.