| The Beidaihe conference held in the second half of 1958 passed the resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the establishment of people’s communes in rural areas.With the adoption of the resolution,the whole country rapidly realized the people’s commune within one month.The highly centralized grass-roots governance system with "commune-production brigade-production team" as the main vertical structure was generally constructed in rural areas."Policy re-decision behavior" mainly occurs in the production brigade and production teams.It means that under the background of the great leap forward,the cadres of production teams have a wide range of discretion in the implementation of national policies.They resist the distortion of national policies through human intervention,which leads to the distortion of national will.The cadres of production teams become the actual policy re-decision behavior.Based on the investigation of Yangjiao village,Huichang County,Jiangxi Province,it is found that the cadres of production teams in Yangjiao village have a relatively common policy re-decision behavior in this period,and according to the types of behavior,there were such situations as concealing the property privately,expanding the standard of opening up wasteland,and contracting the output to the household without authorization.Therefore,the policy re-decision behavior of the cadres of the village’s production team has aroused my thinking:Under the highly centralized people’s commune system,as the agents of state power at the grass-roots level in rural areas,how do cadres of production teams carry out such policy re-decision behavior?What is the behavioral logic behind policy re-decision behavior?What is the relationship with the identity of production team cadres?This paper takes the theory of street-level bureaucracy as the main analysis tool.Street-level bureaucrats are the civil servants who directly deal with citizens in government employees.They generally have a wide range of discretion in policy implementation and have the actual ability to re-decision,However,the power source,behavior motivation and interest pursuit of production team cadres in the Great Leap Forward period are different from street-level bureaucrats in general.Based on this,this paper summarizes the production team cadres as a kind of "village-level bureaucracy".It is found that the behavior of village-level bureaucracy can be divided into three types,namely,policy resolution,policy discretion and policy flexibility.These three types of behavior are the result of the joint action of power base,spiritual incentive and self-protection of village-level bureaucracy. |
