Rural Governance By Law

Since the1990s, the policy-dominating governance has been gradually shifted tolaw-dominating governance. Based on the field investigation in H People’s court in BananDistrict, Chongqing, this article aimed to describe problems faced by the people’s court whenexercising judicial power in rural society, and to discuss the effective way in that powerexercising.This article indicated the important role played by legal elites in the administration ofjustice in the countryside from the people’s court perspective. And it also revealed the specificsystem adaptation of people’s court in order to successfully carry out the work. This articlelisted the real case which described knowledge and skills of judges of people’s court in theexisting judicial system that cannot be seen, or despised or misunderstood after being seen,and tried to analyze the institutional conditions of these knowledge and skills. Then the valueorientation of the people’s court judges in dispute resolution and the rules governing werediscussed and analyzed. Why special attention were paid to dispute settlement, but not to ruleformation. The causes were not derived from a certain abstract culture, but the adaptation tosocial life environment. Finally, the interaction between law development and custom werediscussed.This paper has revealed the original and institutional constraint of characteristic traditionof politics and law in China on village governance through the analysis of governmentfunction change of the court in the different historical period. Rural governance realizes theconfrontation and interaction between top-down universal rules and bottom-up local policy inthe country-social framework.