Grassroots Governance: Cautions for the Government
In my rural surveys, I often heard some grassroots officials questioned the villagers’ self-governance and thought it was unrealistic to grant autonomy to peasants because they hold that the present quality of Chinese peasants is too low to exercise democ
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Grassroots Governance: Cautions for the Government
In my rural surveys, I often heard some grassroots officials questioned the villagers’ self-governance and thought it was unrealistic to grant autonomy to peasants because they hold that the present quality of Chinese peasants is too low to exercise democracy. But when the topic turned to a specific job, they often complained, “Peasants know too much now and it is more and more difficult to deal with them. The peasants are so hard to be managed”. At this time I often asked, “Does it mean that their quality is improving?” The present knowledge and ability of peasants often surprise us. Last winter, I made a survey in the rural area in northern China. In one village, I sat in on the chat of a few old ladies. They were senior villagers ranging from more than 70–80 years old, sitting idle at the end of their village. An old woman said, “The Americans invade Iraq, and originally thought 1000 people would die in the war, but now 2000 people have died, the war has not finished”. Another continued, “The outcome of a war is not reliable, wasn’t even our village cheated by the Japanese in planting vegetables? They said that a Japan company would come to buy, but this fall they didn’t buy. You see those tossed spinaches, turnips, bunch by bunch”. A third woman followed, “Land is more and more precious, I hear that our village has sold once again more than 10 homesteads to urban residents. There are also some pieces of land having been requisitioned, and I hear that they want to build a road or some kind of parks. After bulldozers worked for a day, they were driven away by some young men of our village. If I had known this would happen, I would have planted something”. The old ladies chatted in high spirits and on various topics. They later mentioned the official building of the county government, contracted by a foreman who was a relative of the party secretary of the county party committee, and they even talked about the collective petition in a neighboring village, and they heard that some persons studying or working in Beijing and the provincial capital send
This article was published in Zhongguo fazhan guancha (China Development Observation), 2006 (5). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. and The Commercial Press, Ltd. 2017 S. Zhao, The Politics of Peasants, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4341-3_7
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7 Grassroots Governance: Cautions for the Government
files via computer to tell villagers how to sue their town government. Thinking carefully about their chats, I realized suddenly that it was really hard to “lead” these peasants when even illiterate villagers in their twilight years had such remarks, wasn’t it? The full exchanges of external resources and information as a result of the opening of villages, especially the flow of population, have brought in many variables to villages which used to be rather stable. These variables are not only changing villagers’ daily life, but also the relationships inside and outside the villages, as well as the process and structure of rur
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