Rural politics in transitional China: Urban–rural disparity,national integration,and grassroots democracy

Chinese politics due to urban–rural disparity

Xu believes that the urban–rural disparity in China is a result of a society that has been politicized since the establishment of the monarchy. Therefore, rather than a parallel association of two economies, China’s urban–rural relationship represents a people’s political network across geographical space. This relationship implies distinct positions within the same political community, thus forming an institutionalized discrepancy. This analysis of urban–rural disparity reveals the structural characteristics of Chinese politics, providing a perspective for understanding the political dynamics across dynasties. For a long period, Chinese dynastic politics presented a baffling cycle of ‘upper-tier authorities shift while grassroots politics remain the same.’ That is, on the one hand, struggles for state-level political power continually recurred, resulting in frequent dynastic change. On the other hand, the development of China’s grassroots society was slow or even stagnant. Because scholars have been fascinated by the regime changes, research on rural society as a basis of political power has been insufficient. Xu notes that Chinese politics is characterized by urban–rural disparity, with very different emphases on the urban and rural aspects. Rather than highlighting the comparability of cities and villages, the approach of the ‘urban–rural disparity’ analysis is to ‘strip’ and ‘uncover’ a rural society that corresponds to an urban society viewed as a political fortress. Xu believes that investigating the development of a politicized society should not become entangled with investigating shifts in state power. He argues that an in-depth analysis of the grassroots society on which the higher society is based is required. Thus, Chinese society can be divided in two from the perspective of urban–rural differences. One component is state power that originates in but is also above society. The state power structural system has absolute power and is based on cities. The other component is a primary politicized society based on the village. Under the jurisdiction of state power, the primary politicized society is closely connected with society and penetrates daily social life. The application of this dual analysis framework to Chinese politics profoundly reveals the characteristics of Chinese politicized society since the establishment of the monarchic system. Additionally, it enables researchers to delve into Chinese rural society to discover and describe a politicized grassroots society that determines the evolution of China’s politics at the higher level.

The separation of the Chinese polity into urban and rural social forms stems from the division of the political status of these two social forms. In essence, the political relationship between cities and villages is one of domination and being ruled, respectively. However, because the political power of the monarchical ruling class could not penetrate directly into rural society, the latter enjoyed a degree of autonomy. As a result, China’s urban–rural relations further transformed into continual interaction and adjustment between the monarchical administration and local autonomy. Chinese cities have long been bastions and centers of the political power that has dominated rural society. Rural society exists within vast open land and consists of scattered smallholding peasants. It has a certain degree of autonomy with respect to top-down administration. This autonomy is associated with the kinship system of the ancient rural society and its corresponding self-organizing function. Based on a combination of traditional kinship and the geo-village, rural society can independently address its internal public affairs and thus establish a certain degree of autonomy. However, in the rural power system, administration and autonomy are not separate. Power is held by the gentry class, the traditional dominant class in China, thus forming the governance model known as ‘squire autonomy.’ However, in the modern era, particularly since 1949, the state’s administration has been continuously expanding and has gradually permeated rural society, significantly reducing such autonomy. The scattered local power arrangements of the rural areas were rapidly integrated into the state system, thus completing China’s modernization. To examine the discrepancies and relationships between urban and rural China, Urban–Rural Disparity in China uses five analytical dimensions: social stratification and political relations, social structure and the power structure system, social order and political control, social awareness and political culture, and social contradictions and political activities. The book conducts an in-depth study on the interaction between executive power and autonomy. However, the analysis adopts a salient structural-functionalist perspective, which only focuses on a cross-section of the political system. This approach fails to address evolutionary paths from one political system to another as well as the internal logic of such transformations. Undoubtedly, Xu recognizes this problem but found it difficult to resolve in his analysis.

China is an ancient country with thousands of years of civilization. It is an unprecedented challenge for an analyst to compress such a long history into a single book. To reveal the historical evolution of urban–rural disparity, Xu examined three different historical periods – ancient, modern, and contemporary – and studied the characteristics of the urban–rural relationship in them. However, this periodization oversimplifies Chinese history. In this approach, a potential theoretical assumption is that urban and rural societies as well as their relationship remain unchanged within each historical period. However, ancient China encompasses more than a thousand years of history, from the Qin and Han to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Thus, a scholar viewing China as an unchanging entity is liable to fall into the trap of the Chinese stagnation theory. It is also inconceivable to view China as an undifferentiated unity even within a single period. There are at least two unavoidable differentiating factors. The first is regional differences. China is an enormous country with a vast territory, possessing an area equivalent to dozens of European countries. Clear distinctions among regions are evident. Such regional diversity in geography, economy, society, and culture has a significant impact on urban and rural societies as well as their relationships. The distinctions are more apparent in border districts far from the Central Plains, where the urban–rural contrast is more pronounced. The second factor is ethnic variety. China is a country that unites a wide variety of ethnic groups. In ethnic minority areas, urban and rural societies display significant internal variation due to ethnic diversity in culture, beliefs, customs, and institutions. As Xu states, a critical feature of Chinese politics is disequilibrium, which is manifested as a united and consistent country as a whole but that includes many nonequivalent and inconsistently politicized subsocieties under the national government’s jurisdiction. The combination of the ‘great unification’ and nonequilibrium reflects the wide panorama of politicized society in China.

Urban–Rural Disparity in China primarily adopts the research method of comparative analysis. Here, the urban–rural comparison represents the starting point of Xu’s research and the predominant focus of his discussion. More specifically, the comparison of urban and rural societies is focused on examining the inequality of the two: that is, their qualitative discrepancies and even oppositions in different dimensions. Prominent manifestations of this inequality include the city exercising its political ruling function, while the village is in a submissive position; the city representing the core of political power, while the village remains at the margins of the power extension; and the city representing the center of an autocratic system, while the village is the basis of social autonomy. The dichotomy of comparative analysis is of considerable significance to understanding the nature and functions of China’s urban and rural societies, which is the original intention of Urban–Rural Disparity in China. However, while emphasizing the ‘disparity’ of urban and rural society, Xu obscure the ‘identities’ of the two. The cities discussed are central cities with large urban populations. In Chinese history, however, there is scattered a series of urban and rural societies of various sizes with the same continuous genealogy between villages and central cities. Certain small towns or cities constitute a combination of urban and rural areas as well as transitional forms, which possess characteristics of both central cities and ordinary villages. Because Xu emphasizes the ‘inequality’ of urban and rural areas, it is difficult to explain the transitional forms, such as small towns and cities. Therefore, his attempt to compare the practical distinctions between urban and rural societies can be interpreted as comparisons of Weber’s ‘ideal types’ of urban and rural society. It is worth noting that when comparing Chinese urban and rural societies, Xu introduces a comparison between China and Western countries. He evaluates similarities and differences between Chinese urban and rural society as well as those occurring in Western Europe during the same period. Therefore, Xu belongs among the Chinese scholars who pioneered comparative studies of urban and rural societies in both China and the West. In his comparison, Xu maintains a ‘China-centric view’ and distinguishes it from the traditional ‘Western-centered view,’ which endows his book with profound meaning and value.

Political integration of the rural area

Given that urban–rural disparity is a structural feature of Chinese monarchical politics, China’s transformation and integration of the rural area can be considered among the most remarkable political phenomena of the 20th century. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Chinese society began to modernize and thus to confront the historic task of how to build a modern nation. Xu believes that the essential characteristic of a modern state is its unity and integration, and therefore, China’s primary task was to effectively integrate rural society through state power. Thus, for modern China, the process of integrating the countryside was equivalent to achieving national unity and integration. In this process, the state, on the one hand, centralized scattered social power to improve state unity. On the other, the highly centralized state power sought to integrate the historically dispersed rural societies and to transform traditional rural society in a manner that would encourage it to conform to the national will. The Integration of Nationalization, Peasant, and Rural China analyzes and examines China’s major rural reforms following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, including land reform, cooperation, collectivization, rural reform, and the new rural structure of the 21st century. His investigation of the mechanisms of these critical rural reforms provides significant theoretical references for scholars seeking to understand the construction of modern China.

Historically, China’s modernization commenced in the first half of the 20th century and subsequently underwent an intricate course of development. During the monarchic period, China’s formal bureaucracy extended only to the county level. The sub-county entities were primarily governed by the gentry class, thus forming a governance system in which ‘the imperial power stopped at the county level and autonomy prevailed below the county level.’ Under such a governance structure, the state’s direct control over rural society was minimal. With enormous social power wielded by various organizations and individuals scattered across the geography of rural society, the state power system was incomplete and inadequate, allowing obstacles to remain to building a modern nation. Taking advantage of the ‘New Deal’ of the late Qing dynasty, the government attempted to advance the building of the modern state through a series of reforms. However, because of the cumulative weakness of the regime during late Qing as well as its conservativeness and limitations, the government could not complete the historical mission of modernization. In 1911, represented by Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionaries (i.e., the Kuomintang) launched the Xinhai Revolution, overthrew the imperial dynasty, which had endured more than 2000 years, and initiated the historical process leading to the establishment of the Republic of China. To build a powerful modern country, the Kuomintang government continuously strengthened its control and penetration of the countryside by establishing political institutions there. However, because the Kuomintang represented the interests of the bourgeoisie and landlords, its ability to integrate rural society was limited. In the end, the Kuomintang regime was unable to fundamentally change the traditional rural political structure. It was impossible for the regime to conduct large-scale social mobilization and integration, which resulted in its failure. It was not until 1949 that the Communist Party of China came to power and initiated a comprehensive transformation and integration of rural society. For the first time, state power sufficiently penetrated rural society to complete the historical mission of establishing an integrated state power system. The Integration of Nationalization, Peasant, and Rural China primarily focuses on the national integration process after 1949, which undoubtedly includes the critical phases of rural integration. During that period, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the state integrated decentralized rural society into the state power system through a series of social reforms, thereby achieving the expected goal of ‘government going to the countryside.’ However, as previously noted, China’s modern state-building began as early as the first half of the 20th century and was substantially influenced by Chinese history and tradition. The Integration of Nationalization, Peasant, and Rural China, which traces its topic from 1949, ignores the earlier development of China’s modern state prior. To better comprehend the process of China’s national integration, it is fair and objective to evaluate that process in wider historical terms that include the entire course of modernization. Only when one evaluates the failures of late Qing and the Kuomintang regime can one fully understand the transformation and integration that occurred after the founding of the People’s Republic and thus more accurately depict the construction of the modern state.

Xu believes that state integration is a process of centralizing state power in the course of modernization to incorporate a long-dispersed and differentiated society through the horizontal integration of the society and the vertical integration of the state. A core process is state construction, that is, the infiltration of state power into society. The state endeavored to transform and construct a society based on the state’s will so society would be nationalized by including increasing state elements. The success of national construction after 1949 was primarily attributed to the leadership of the Communist Party of China. In this regard, The Integration of Nationalization, Peasant, and Rural China conducts a meticulous analysis and summarizes the process as ‘the Party goes to the countryside.’ Xu believes that the Communist Party of China was highly organized and strictly disciplined, displaying the characteristics of a ‘solemn group.’ In his opinion, ‘the Party goes to the countryside’ was a process of party organizations penetrating the countryside and the control of rural society by the party. The Chinese Communist Party’s ability to penetrate the countryside was based on its strong organizational foundation and public motivation. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party established party organizations throughout the countryside. These party organizations employed harsh discipline and strict enforcement of its policies. The party formed cohesive leadership–subordinate relationships at different levels, thereby establishing a capacity for strong collective action. Based on this strong organizational structure, the Chinese Communist Party implemented its developmental paths, principles, and policies in the countryside, directly transforming and integrating it with the help of a large group of cadres. In addition, relying on this strong organizational foundation, the Chinese Communist Party also developed powerful abilities to motivate the public not found in other party organizations. As early as the revolutionary era, the Chinese Communist Party established a ‘mass line’ working method. This method emphasized ‘from the masses to the masses.’ Through working and living with the people, the Communists learned to comprehend their demands and suffering and to convert this knowledge into concrete policy. It was through this robust organizational structure and power to instill political motivation that the Chinese Communist Party could incorporate decentralized rural societies into the state’s political power system, shaping a communist state. If one considers the historical process of China’s modernization since 1949, the role of the Communist Party cannot be overestimated. The party is the crucial feature of the modern state-building process that distinguishes China from other countries, which is also a core factor in understanding Chinese politics.

Xu believes that state integration is an interactive process that includes not only the state power’s penetration into and control of rural society but also the general public’s behavior in response to the state. Therefore, he regards ‘social identity’ as another core process of state integration. He emphasizes that rather than negatively accepting the penetration of state power the public responded in various ways, to which the state should accordingly adjust its policies. On this basis, Xu further proposes the concept of ‘peasant nature.’ This concept refers to a social trait obtained through traditional agricultural activity and social communications. The concept includes both the peasants who constitute traditional villages and the sociohistorical conditions that determine the consciousness and behavior of village members. Xu holds that national integration is a process that occurs against the background and under the condition of a specific peasant nature and as a result of the interaction between nationalization and peasant nature. He argues that the degree to which state power could control and penetrate depends not only on the country but also on whether that power complies with the demands and expectations of peasants. Because the experiences and habits of peasants had enjoyed well-established dominance for a long period, if state control and penetration offended their right to their livelihoods, the peasants would resist and dissolve the country’s external integration according to a survival logic, thereby compromising the effectiveness of national integration. That is, although state power penetrated deeply into rural society after 1949, this penetration and control remained incomplete because rural society continued to maintain a degree of autonomy. The coexistence of the state’s coerciveness and control with peasant independence and autonomy provides insight into China’s modern state construction after 1949. However, although the book mentions social autonomy, its framework remains centered on the state. Had the book focused more closely on social autonomy and provided more convincing evidence, it would have reached a higher theoretical level.

Rural democratization in contemporary China

In the 1980s, China initiated the historic process of reform and opening-up. China’s reform began in the countryside, as epitomized by the disintegration of the People’s Commune and the implementation of the household contract responsibility system. By this return to the production and management model based on the family unit, the Chinese peasant’s enthusiasm for production has been dramatically improved, resulting in an income surge among peasant families and the growth of the rural economy. Although the disintegration of the People’s Commune promoted the liberalization of China’s rural economy, it created a ‘vacuum’ in rural politics. Rural public affairs that were previously under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commune were left unattended, resulting in stagnation and even chaos in rural social management. In response, peasants from Yizhou County, Yishan District, and Luocheng County in Guangxi Province spontaneously formed an autonomous mass organization, the Villagers’ Committee, as a body to manage village public affairs. The Villagers’ Committee was an important creation by China’s peasantry and was quickly recognized by China’s top leaders, who subsequently implemented it nationwide. The Villagers’ Committee consisted of local villagers. These villagers elect the chair of the Villagers’ Committee in a one-person-one-vote procedure, which is a vivid example of electoral democracy in Chinese villages and has initiated a democratization process in rural China. Xu’s The Autonomy of Chinese Peasants in Rural Villages adopts this self-government system as its research object and systematically examines the institutional framework and operating process of Chinese village autonomy while assessing its practical implementation and future trends.

Two distinct research perspectives on evaluating China’s village autonomy have emerged. One school embraces the democratic political value of Chinese village autonomy and considers it a landmark in China’s democratization. In this regard, certain scholars have described village autonomy as a ‘peaceful democratization revolution’ and a political reformation of the ‘rural encirclement of cities.’ Scholars also believe that village autonomy represents a breakthrough in China’s democratic political development that establishes the microsocial foundation of Chinese democracy and represents the path that China’s democratic politics should follow. Other scholars believe that village autonomy can enhance the democratic habits of peasants. It represents significant democratic training with respect to the transition from procedural to substantive democracy and can serve as a training base for the political culture of socialist democracy. In sharp contrast, another group of scholars are wary of village autonomy and believe that one should not overestimate the democratic value of self-government. They do not consider village autonomy the starting point of Chinese democratization because with its limited power rural society is hardly in a position to promote political change in the entire society. These scholars even regard village autonomy as a reverse evolution that runs counter to the typical model of political development in the world. They conclude that such autonomy represents a ‘theoretical freak’ that may produce a new round of ‘gentry governance.’ Xu’s The Autonomy of Chinese Peasants in Rural Villages is a crucial contribution to the ‘Affirmatives’ school. However, his conclusions are based on field investigation and analysis of village self-government rather than on normative values. He believes that China’s village autonomy is an effective form of direct democracy at the grassroots level. Village autonomy helps motivate and bolster the peasants’ political enthusiasm and initiative, improving their democratic quality and transforming democracy from an ideal to part of the peasant’s daily routine. Therefore, he asserts that village autonomy is a critical starting point of current socialist democracy that will facilitate realizing the ideal of empowering the people. However, reality is not the same as the ideal. With the widening spread of village autonomy in China, functional problems have continuously appeared, causing many previously optimistic researchers to reverse their views. Xu also notes such problems. Examples include the transition between township management and village autonomy, coordination between the village Communist Party and the organizations of the village autonomy, and the reasonable division of government and village affairs. To a certain degree, Xu anticipates the seriousness of these problems. However, his evaluation of the effectiveness of village autonomy as failing to reach his expectations has compelled researchers to re-examine village autonomy in China to find a more reasonable explanation.

The Autonomy of Chinese Peasants in Rural Villages adopts the perspective of institutionalism, focusing on examining village autonomy’s institutional system, legal norms, organizational forms, rules, and procedures to comprehend its overall framework on the institutional level. According to Xu’s research, China’s village autonomy has a three-level legislative and organizational structure in terms of the state, the district, and the village. The promulgation and implementation of the Organic Law of the Villagers’ Committees of the People’s Republic of China (Trial) represents a milestone in that it implies China’s village autonomy has reached the level of institutionalized operation. Village autonomy is also a concrete reflection of grassroots democratic institutionalization and legalization. Village autonomy includes four organizational forms: villagers’ meetings, villagers’ representative meetings, villagers’ committees, and villagers’ groups. These organizations are divided into two categories: authority agencies and working agencies. Xu believes that because of the different roles played by the authorities, two combinations of these organizations have formed: villagers’ meetings that dominate villagers’ representative meetings and villagers’ representative meetings that take the lead for villagers’ meetings. The former combination primarily appears in villages with small populations and emphasizes equality. The latter is more common in scattered villages with large populations and stresses efficiency. Based on the varying relationship between authority agencies and working agencies, there are two additional combinations: (1) powerful authority agencies and minor working agencies and (2) dominant working agencies and subordinate authority agencies. The former combination better reflects the spirit of mass autonomy and grassroots democracy but requires more support. The latter is more efficient and more commonly observed in practice. In terms of procedural rules, village autonomy must operate based on rules and procedures, as manifested in the four procedural rounds: democratic election, democratic decision-making, democratic management, and democratic supervision. Democratic election is the core of village autonomy and means that villagers vote to elect their leaders, including the director of the Village Committee. Judging from the practice of village autonomy, China has formed a series of detailed institutional regulations, including the establishment of electoral institutions, voter registration, candidate generation, and election of leaders. Xu speaks highly of the value of democratic elections by village members. In his opinion, hundreds of millions of peasants participating in democratic elections and directly electing their leaders based on rules is a landmark event in Chinese democratization whose value cannot be underestimated.

From the perspective of institutionalism, The Autonomy of Chinese Peasants in Rural Village systematically analyzes China’s village autonomy, which is of great significance for understanding the growth and development of such autonomy in China. However, while focusing on this system, the book virtually ignores the individuals who operate the system and the manner in which they operate it. A system is always implemented by people. The system norms described in the book are affected by factors such as cognitive differences, interests, and operational restrictions, which cause deviation or even alienation in system implementation. It is an unprecedentedly formidable and complicated matter to effectively implement such a political system that involves the vital interests of China’s hundreds of millions of peasants. If research only focuses on the system’s operation but ignores those who execute such operation and resultant processes in specific circumstances, then the understanding of the system is limited. For example, although villagers have individual votes, China’s long-standing householdism generates a high rate of identical voting among family members, resulting in massive proxy-voting behavior. In another example, because of factors such as kinship and financial interests, village elections can easily devolve into factional battles within the village, which hinders the realization of villager autonomy. If it is impossible to thoroughly delve into the countryside and conduct in-depth analyses of the practice of village autonomy, such issues will not be addressed. In any case, as a general introduction, The Autonomy of Chinese Peasants in Rural Villages cannot exhaustively address every possible research question, leaving it to other scholars to pursue more microlevel investigations.

In the 21st century, particularly in the last decade, China’s village autonomy has fallen into a predicament. Most scholars have become pessimistic regarding the prospects of villager self-government, and some even believe that ‘village autonomy is dead.’ Therefore, how should we understand and interpret the current plight of village autonomy? Xu believes this plight is a collective reflection of a series of real problems encountered by village autonomy as a national system during the process of ‘landing.’ To resolve these problems, we must transform the research paradigm from the original value-institutional paradigm to the form-conditional paradigm. Xu believes that the value-institutional paradigm positions village autonomy as a democratic orientation and focuses on the holistic study of village autonomy within an institutional framework. After the institution was established, the system faced the issue of how to ‘land.’ For Xu, the problem of village autonomy does not originate in the system itself but in the form and conditions of specific implementations that have gone unnoticed. For example, China’s village autonomy has long been organized based on the ‘administrative village’ as the basic autonomous unit. However, this autonomous unit has broad jurisdiction and cannot enable villagers to participate effectively in village affairs, thereby restricting the effectiveness of village autonomy. Therefore, he investigated autonomous units with reduced size in several regions that established village autonomy with villagers’ groups (prime villages) as units and achieved significant results. In this context, the 2014 No. 1 Central Document put forward the critical proposition of ‘exploring effective forms of village autonomy in different situations’ and encouraged the investigation of village autonomy practices at the level of villagers’ groups. Xu believes that the form-conditional paradigm focuses on returning to the essence of village autonomy, shifting the village autonomy research focus from national institutional arrangements to the demands and conditions of rural society. This paradigm captures the essential characteristics of village autonomy and increases research possibilities. Whether this research paradigm can be extended depends on the further development of research on and observation of village autonomy.

Generally, the political development of rural China has been full of twists and turns. Xu’s three books provide only a few cross-sectional views of Chinese rural political development and do not reflect the full picture of the evolution. However, based on his analyses, we receive several hints regarding the character of Chinese rural political evolution. From the perspectives of centralization and decentralization, the history of Chinese rural politics has undergone a cyclical process of decentralization–centralization–decentralization. In the dynastic era, the politicized urban–rural social division reflected the symbiotic relationship between the centralized government at the upper level and the scattered rural societies. Because of limited national capabilities, a large proportion of public power was dispersed across rural society and formed a vertically decentralized authoritarianism. In the 20th century, particularly after 1949, China’s state power began to penetrate rural society. The scattered social power was quickly incorporated into the unified state power system and thus a centralized communist state was formed. In the 1980s, the initially concentrated state power was intended to be redistributed to the society, with a typical manifestation of this intention being village autonomy. The state empowered peasants to elect leaders themselves and to manage village public affairs independently. The cyclical process of decentralization–centralization–decentralization implies a continuous adjustment and equalization of China’s state–society relations. This process has optimized the Chinese rural political structure and injected vitality into the political modernization of rural China. From a long-term perspective, the return of state power to the countryside is still evolving based on historical experience and the contemporary development of Chinese politics. Repetitions may occur during this period. However, the general trend will continue and represents the future of Chinese rural politics.