Institutionalizing Village Governance in China

Institutionalizing from the Middle: the Impacts of Provincial Legislation on Rural Grassroots Democracy in China

“…However, scholars disagree about how to assess Chinese grassroots democracy (Alpermann 2009;Kennedy 2002;Li 2002;Manion 1996Manion , 2009Manion , 2015O'Brien and Han 2009;Tan 2006;Zhong and Chen 2002). The development of village democracy in China appears to be highly idiosyncratic and village-specific, defying any easy generalizations.…”

“…Ever since its introduction, grassroots democracy in rural China has attracted considerable attention. Despite agreement on the critical importance of grassroots democracy to our understanding of the resilience of the CCP regime, scholars have not reached a consensus as to whether such grassroots democracy encourages democratization or consolidates CCP authoritarian rule (Alpermann 2009;Kennedy 2002;Manion 2009;O'Brien and Han 2009;Zhong and Chen 2002). The large amount of evidence accumulated from earlier studies provides mainly inconsistent, if not contradictory, information about the overall status and patterns of village democratization.…”

“…Although many argued that grassroots democracy was the only solution to the deterioration in rural governance, opponents contended that villager autonomy was "an example of 'bourgeois liberalization'" that would endanger the party's ability to rule (Li and O'Brien 1999: 132). Given the intra-party disagreements, the national OLVC adopted ambiguous language and explicitly delegated to the PPCs authorities to make specific stipulations on critical issues, for instance, on the relationship between the VC and the village party branch (VPB) (Alpermann 2009;Guo and Bernstein 2004;Li 1999):…”

“…Based on a 2006 nationwide survey sponsored by the MoCA (for more details, see the Appendix), this study empirically examines the impact of provincial legislation on village democratization. When assessing grassroots democracy in rural China, scholars are divided as to whether to focus on electoral institutions (i.e., "access to power") or to examine actual implementation of village governance (i.e., the "exercise of power") (Alpermann 2009;Lu 2012;Manion 2009; O'Brien and Han 2009). Here we do not assume that the two approaches are mutually exclusive, and thus we examine both the access-to-power and the exercise-of-power dimensions of village democratization.…”

A Mixed Bag of Results: Village Elections in Contemporary China

“…There has been an interesting debate around the meaning of village elections ever since their introduction in 1988. Björn Alpermann (2009), John J. Kennedy (2002Kennedy ( , 2007, Li Lianjiang and Kevin O'Brien (2008), and Melanie Manion (2009) have all presented analyses of village elections, including observations of actual electoral practice, and more importantly, reflection on the relationship of such elections to Communist Party leadership.…”