Critique of a New Trend in Villager Self-Government Studies

Over the past decade, research on villager self-government has been a hot topic in contemporary China studies. It is rare that other topics attract as much attention as this from both academic and government circles, Chinese and foreign alike. However, despite all this attention, it is also rare that this field produces any profound new insights into rural Chinese society during the present period of transition, especially its complex social contradictions and subtle webs of relationships. In particular, although villager self-government was originally a creation of individual villages themselves, for various reasons it was quickly embraced by the state system to become something imposed by the state on most villages in a top-down manner, so it can basically be called an exogenous variable. In practice, such a highly contingent exogenous variable is inevitably shaped by the operational mechanisms of internal village relations and the solution of practical problems. However, most analysts—from idealistic democrats to utilitarian pragmatists—fail to deal with the relationship between villager committee elections, issues of village governance, and the internal mechanisms of villager interaction.