Individual and Institution: The First Secretary Embedded in Rural Governance

Since 2015, the appointment of a special “first secretary” (for the village party branch 村党支部) has become an important method for reinforcing rural party building and attacking rural poverty. On the obvious level, the first secretary can enhance access to redirected resources and solve the problems of insufficiency and uneven distribution in rural areas. On a deeper level, the first secretary institution can play a role in overcoming problems in bureaucratic governance and optimizing the rural governance structure. Based on an analysis of the actual practices of first secretaries, this article highlights the operational mode, institutional characteristics, and governance effectiveness of the first secretary institution. It points out that the most prominent characteristics of the first secretary institution are non-bureaucratic governance, flexibility, and resource reallocation, thus reflecting the duality of comprehensive party leadership and bureaucratic governance by the government. However, there are still some institutional paradoxes: the first secretary institution retains some characteristics of campaign-style governance, at least to a certain extent, and its social embeddedness is dependent on individual access to resources and particular operational strategies, resulting in practical effects that vary across regions and individuals. Nevertheless, the first secretary institution still has a governance ability and effectiveness that are different from conventional governance and conform to the goal of both establishing links between internal and external resources in rural reconstruction and satisfying the mass line requirement of the party’s rural work in the new era. It will be worthwhile to further study the implications of the first secretary institution for governance in general.