Governance Reform And Rural Administration Reality

To better Rural Governance in recent years, Chinese government has beenimplementing a pact of policies and projects, including the People’s Republic ofChina Sustainable Development in Poor Rural Areas Project, which is conductedwith the cooperation of World Bank, and which is also named as CDD programbecause it applies with the Community-Driven Development conception. Thisconception empowers the rural communities to control the resources of publicgovernance and to decide how to use it.This thesis attempts to get insights on China rural governance by analyzing theCDD program with the framework of “Specific Episodes, Governance Process andGovernance Culture”. In order to do so, it studied four cases with several episodes atthe village level, and one event at county level.Behavior of the Stakeholders and the logic and culture underpinning it areshowed in this study. In the process of governance, most of the villagers act for theinterests of their own or the community they belong to, which sometimes, if not often,is not good for others or the public.They are of relatively strong capacities to learnand cooperate and share participatory political culture.Others may be inactive,or be a“free rider”, while some villagers even never participate because of their extremelylow efficacy.They are embedded in subjective political culture.However, the CCPsecretary or the village head has great power advantage in local governanceprocess.They may actively promote public interests in some cases but may also capture the public resources in other cases.When it comes to county government and its departments, this paper reveals themeso-level of rural governance.They dominate the public governance resources andtry very best to maximize their own interests.On one hand, they seek to control theprocess of resources distribution so as to get the most rent. On the other hand, theywill minimize the cost of conducting public service programs for their own sake.As aresult, the core procedures of CDD program fail to work. What’s worse, thees areprotected by the collusion network among local governments.The role of community facilitator is of extraordinary importance in the projectdesign of governance transformation, but it functions poorly under the contextmentioned above, whether it is played by government officers part-timely or byfull-time volunteers, who function better than former because they can get supportfrom independent NGO and the network between them.