Rural Women's Participation In Policy Protection And Its Real Influence

Modern civilization and women liberation have been characterized by gender equality. Legally speaking, women and their male counterparts are entitled with same political rights in the institution of rural autonomous governance, in which very few rural women yet have been actually involved and even marginalized since the foundation of PRC. What's more, rural women tend to be given limited members in the village's committee. All these phenomenal have greatly undermined the effect of women's civilian rights in their exercises, upsetting the balance of gender equality in rural governance.Given this phenomenon, to guarantee rural women's participation in rural autonomous governance and provide protective policies, the Organization Department under Zhejiang Provincial Governance together with Civic Administration has decreed a regulation, the Opinions on the Work of Reelection of Villages' Committee in 2008 Village Party Organization, and introduced the mechanism of special election for women committee members. The coming election in Villagers' Committee has a series of new requirements:to strengthen the scale of female leaders' recommendation, to set up special positions for women, and to exercise the policy of target election. The new requirement has conformed to the decree of Sixth Article of The Law of Organization for Village Committee, which stipulates that Village Committee should have certain women members. In addition, other departments such as Civic Administration and Women's Federation all have similar protective regulations to ensure women's interests and rights in their political life.The essay is intended to analyze and study the political mechanism, Target Election for Women Members in Village's Committee, by takingⅩvillage as a study case in the context of rural governance. Then it will come to assess its operation under the sponsor of various governmental levels, focus on its exercises in the levels of township and village, analyze the social soil for this new gender equality-oriented protective policy, and finally present related theoretical reflection. The whole paper is to be divided into 7 sections:The first part will deal with the origin of the study, target theory and its significance, provide the development and critique of its recent academic research, and introduce its study methodology and clue as well as the basic information of X village.The second part will introduce the protective policy, Target Election for Women Members in Village's Committee. In addition to briefly mentioning its original background, the paper will mainly engage in analysis of its role in the institutional structure of provincial, municipal, county and township levels together with the election architecture retaining to Village's Committee.The third part will introduce rural women's participation in locla election and the application of the protective policy in rural community. The main focus of this part is to reveal how governments in different levels promote the policy and see how it was carried out in the 8th Village's Committee election of X village in 2008.The fourth part will analyze the roles played by various interest groups in the process of applying the protective policy for women's participation; it will include the role of sponsor and promoter acted by township government, local elites'reluctant support for women's participation, and quasi-designation of women candidates for Village's Committee and other inhabitants'passive involvement.The fifth part will scrutinize the real influence of the protective policy and its functions in effect. The exercise of the protective policy does transform the structure of governance in rural community, promote women's political participation, and enhance gender equality to some degree; however, it also encounters some hostility from local community, leading to the dysfunction of women members in local governance.The sixth part will explore social basis of the creative mechanism, Target Election for Women Members in Village's Committee, which will be analyzed from the perspectives of national institution and its related policies, various social requirements, rural women's qualities and rural cultural traditions and social conventions in Chinese villages.The seventh part will give an initial theoretical exploration for rural governance by the method of case study. And it will reckon the following questions:whether the gender equality sought by the protective policy can be achieved? whether it will occasion potential new inequality? whether the projection of ensuring women's interests by their personal participation can be realized? In the end, it will evaluate the social basis for this creative institutional innovation.