New Villages, Old Problems? Exploring Policy Implementation in a                     Rapidly Changing Chinese Countryside

Trappel, René

doi:10.1177/186810261604500102

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Indeed, there has been much interest in the implementation of rural development policies at the local level. 5 In-depth studies have explored transformation and variation in provincial-level development strategies (Donaldson, 2009), the campaign to Open Up the West 西部大开发 (Goodman, 2004; Lai, 2002), the Construction of a New Socialist Countryside (Ahlers and Schubert, 2013; Thøgersen, 2011; Trappel, 2016), the New Cooperative Medical System 新型农村合作医疗 (Brown, de Brauw, and Du, 2009), the Rural Tax and Fee Reform 农村税费改革 (Göbel, 2011), the abolition of agricultural taxes (Linda Li, 2007), earmarked transfers from central to local governments (Liu et al, 2009), the law on specialized farmer cooperatives 农民专业合作社法 (Augustin-Jean and Xue, 2011), and agricultural industrialization (Gao, 2011), just to name a few.…”

Section: Background and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Policy and Practice of Microcredit in Rural China: Toward a Relational Understanding of Heterogeneous Implementation

Loubere

Shen

2018

Modern China

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Much research on rural development interventions in China has found substantial variation in their implementation at the local level. These studies often analyze the reasons for this heterogeneity by identifying variables responsible for influencing (or distorting) interventions as they travel from central formulation to local implementation. Through an in-depth ethnographic examination of the local implementation of one of China’s largest microcredit programs in three townships in rural Jiangxi province, this article challenges the dominant depiction of external development interventions as reified and linear, and instead proposes a relational approach to understanding local heterogeneity. This approach reveals implementation outcomes to be emergent from negotiations between diverse sets of actors at different levels. At the same time, it becomes clear that microcredit implementation reflects the contradictions implicit in China’s political economy of development. This points to two levels of implementation “relationality,” which results in unpredictable semi-chaotic variation, while simultaneously reproducing wider developmental relations.

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