Peasants and Rural Democracy
There are so many friends coming to my speech on rural democracy in such a cold day, which shows your enthusiasm of this issue. Why I am going to talk about this topic? It is because this is a highlighted issue in both rural study and political research.
- PDF / 543,914 Bytes
- 76 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 61 Downloads / 184 Views
Peasants and Rural Democracy
3.1
Prospect of Rural Democracy
There are so many friends coming to my speech on rural democracy in such a cold day, which shows your enthusiasm of this issue. Why I am going to talk about this topic? It is because this is a highlighted issue in both rural study and political research. Of course, present study of rural democracy study is no longer as hot as before. Especially since the beginning of the 21st century, academic and social attention to this issue has sharply declined. Against this background, I think it is necessary for us to discuss the following questions: what is the status of rural democracy? What will be its prospect? What will be the direction of its development? I. The Starting of Rural Democracy Village self-governance, which was started in the 1980s, is the basic issue of China’s present rural democracy. There were elections in rural areas without legal and institutional support before the reform. Prior to the establishment of Rural Household Contracting System, there was the People’s Commune System, a three-level organization consisted of commune, production brigade, and production team with a policy statement of “three-level ownership based on production team.” As the essential expression of planned economy in rural areas, the People’s Commune is a production and manage‐ ment system under the direct control of administrative power, or a kind of semimilitarized organizational system. At that time, the government decided all peasant issues including how much to plant, what to plant, how to distribute harvest, and even how much grain one will eat each year. Despite such rigorous control, there were some direct village elections mainly at the level of production team. In term of policy, there was statement that the People’s Commune should practice democratic management and let peasants play their initiatives. Before I went to college, I had been a peasant working in the production team with direct experience and under‐ © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. and The Commercial Press, Ltd. 2017 S. Zhao, Regeneration of Peasants, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3314-8_3
63
64
3 Peasants and Rural Democracy
standing. From my own experience, there would be election for production team cadres once a year, as the local saying goes “sweet potatoes dried, team leader changed,” which means Commune members would begin to elect next leader of the production team as soon as sweet potato was dried and autumn harvest was over. I took part in such election at that time. Were it not for my entering into college in 1978, I would have been a leader of production team. The discussion of rural democracy since the reform shall be started from house‐ hold contracting system. It is necessary to recognize the differences between “fixing farm output quotas for each household” and “household contract system” which are often confused. In fact, there are major distinctions between these two concepts. The former did not break the management framework of production team. For example, the harvest of lan
Data Loading...
