A Study On The Formation Mechanism Of Village Official Corruption From The Perspective Of Power Restriction

Since the 18th CPC National Congress, as the continuous deepening of the anti-corruption construction, the governance of corruption has become a significant way to promote the modernization of national governance system and capacity, and to achieve the goal of Rule of Law in China. Under the joint efforts of all-level Party Committees, governments, and the masses of people, the corruption has been curbed in a certain extent. However, the corruption of low-level officials, especially the village officials, is still getting worse. In July 2015, of all the 131 corruption cases exposed on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline, more than half of them are committed by the village officials. As the direct organizers, leaders and commanders of the new rural construction project, the village officials are more and more engaged in basic administrative activities to help superior government, which enables them to control more resources and power without strict supervision. Thus, the village officials’ corruption cases happen in a high frequency, and the amount of illicit money ranges from thousands to millions. As the closest administrators to the masses of farmers, the village officials’ corruption is directly related to the vital interests of nine hundred million farmers, and deeply impacts the prestige of the party and government in the minds of the farmers. Worse still, this might discourage the enthusiasm and activism of farmers to participate in the new rural construction, and even lead to mass social events, which will seriously undermine the overall harmonious and stable situation of society. Therefore, exploring its internal generating mechanism and seeking the preventive measures should be regarded as one of the most important aspects in promoting the modernization of rural area and even national governance system and capacity.Based on the collection of numerous related documents and in-depth field research, this paper takes a bunch of typical cases in recent years as examples to research, comprehensively utilizing literature analysis, empirical analysis, case analysis and other methods of analysis from the perspective of power restriction. Besides, this paper mainly consists of the four parts below.Firstly, the introduction part briefly describes the background and significance of this study, and summarizes the existing researches on the issues of corruption and the village officials’ corruption from domestic and foreign scholars. Meanwhile, this part clarifies the research ideas, research methods, writing framework and possible innovative points of the paper. In addition, it also defines the related concepts.The second part is the theoretical statements of power restriction and corruption. This part expounds the research perspective and theoretical basis of the paper, namely the power restriction theory, in order to pave the way for the related research of the next part. Then it analyzes the relationship between the power restriction and the corruption on account of the researches mentioned in the former part. The conclusion is that the root cause for corruption is the lack of restriction, so the power restriction naturally becomes the fundamental way to cut the throat of corruption, and also the core objective of restriction system is to prevent corruption from power.Combined with the reality of the current status of China’s rural society and based on the theoretical analysis of the second chapter, the third part sums up four specific ways to restrict the power of village cadres. There are the restriction from the villagers’ representative meeting, the restriction from the supervisory committee of village affairs, the mutual restriction between the villagers’ autonomous committee and the CCP committee in villages, and the restriction from villagers as the separate members in villages. Furthermore, this chapter provides a brief analysis of those four ways above from the sights of institution design, positioning and efficiency.The fourth part comes up with a theoretical framework and some hypotheses in the perspective of power restriction to study the generating mechanism of the village officials’ corruption. Through the empirical analysis of the 96 typical cases, the final result suggests that the lack and weakness of the four kinds of restrictions are the momentous causes which induce the corruption of the village officials.The fifth chapter briefly summarizes the empirical research conclusions. It believes that the generating mechanism of the corruption of village officials mainly includes the four kinds of rest riction weakness mentioned above. And according to these conclusions, it suggests that we must perfect the system of villagers’ representative meeting, improve the supervision of the supervisory committee of village affairs, clear the relationship between the villagers’ autonomous committe e and the CCP committee in villages, increase the participation degree of villagers’ supervision, to prevent the corruption.