Return Elite, Power Structure Reconfiguration And Rural Governance

In the rural area, different kinds of elite play great important roles between statepower and common villagers, they also make great difference to the socialstabilization and development. As the important class during the course of ruralsociety’s class stratification, return elites have obtained favorable growthenvironment, a good deal of fortune and high social status provided by thedevelopment of market economy. They left their hometown and worked hard in thecity to get achievements. In recent years, elites have showed a trend that they want togo back village and participate the village governance. So, the return elites are sureof making great effect on the rural political power.This paper takes the village D in Jiangxi province as an example, throughanalyzing the phenomenon of elites return and the operational state of village-levelpower structure, attempts to figure out the interactive relationship between returnelites and village-level power structure. According to the analysis, the author findsout that return elites always affect the development of village’s political by enteringthe village’s public power field. During this process, they don’t deviate the legalinstitutionalized method. That’s to say, they don’t bypass the democratic election ofvillagers committee. But they take some necessary measures during the process ofelection, including manipulating the influence of township government in the village,using the mobile polling boxes, leading the elective consciousness of villagers andso on. After the return elites entering the public power field, they make thetraditional dual power structure between village committee and the branch ofCommunist Party exist in name only because of their great deal of resource. As timegoes on, return elites accumulate a great deal of experience on village’s governance.So they are able to construct the monistic power structure system by means ofcontrolling the village committee, absorbing the non-system elites to participate thevillage governance and obtaining the support from township government. On theside of village’s finance state, public infrastructure and satisfaction degree ofvillagers, the monistic power structure has achieved great performance. But on theother side of the development of democracy, the monistic power structure can’t manifest the function of the public participation sufficiently.