Abstract
The rural situation in China has been a trouble spot for the Chinese government since the late 1980s. Rural problems are often summarized as san nong wenti (three rural issues), that is, nongmin (peasants), nongye (agriculture), and nongcun (rural areas). The three rural issues entail both economic and political dimensions. The peasant problem refers to the peasants’ declining income, poor living conditions, low education level, and the difficulty in controlling peasant population. The agricultural problem involves the low profitability of Chinese agricultural products, scarce agricultural land use, low agricultural technology levels, and the vulnerability of Chinese agricultural economy in world competition after China’s accession to the WTO. These two problems lead to the overall rural problems (nongcun wenti) of instability and potential chaos in the Chinese countryside.
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Notes
Minxin Pei, “Creeping Democratization in China,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 5, no. 4 (1995), p. 73.
See Deng Sanlong, Diceng wenti: “qipinguan” mianlin de nandian yu duice [Problems at the Bottom: Local Officials’ Dilemma and Responses] (Beijing, China: China Personnel Press, 1998), p. 112.
On the adoption of villagers’ committee election system in China, see Tianjian Shi, “Village Committee Elections in China: Institutionalist Tactics for Democracy,” World Politics, vol. 51, no. 3 (April 1999), pp. 385–412.
Sylvia Chan, “Research Notes on Villagers’ Committee Election: Chinese-Style Democracy,” Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 7, no. 19 (1998), p. 519; and Chun Gao, Cunmin zizhi: zhongguo nongcun de zhidu chuangxin, p. 121.
See, for example, Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State: Introducing Village Elections in China,” p. 488; and Tianjian Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China: Voting Behavior in Plebiscitary and Limited-Choice Elections,” The Journal of Politics, vol. 61, no. 4 (1999), p. 1135.
See Tyrene White, “Reforming the Countryside,” Current History, vol. 91, no. 566 (1998), p. 267; Robert Pastor and Qingshan Tan, “The Meaning of Chinese Village Elections,” The China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000), p. 512;
and Daniel Kelliher, “The Chinese Debate Over Village Self-government,” The China Journal, vol. 37 (1997), p. 86.
Yang Zhong, “Village Democracy in China: The Case of Southern Jiangsu Province,” in Thomas J. Bellows, ed., Taiwan and Mainland China: Democratization, Political Participation and Economic Development in the 1990s (New York, NY: Center of Asian Stueies, St. John’s University, 2000), pp. 269–300.
See Yang Zhong and Jie Chen, “To Vote or Not To Vote: An Analysis of Peasants’ Participation in Chinese Village Elections,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 35, no. 6 (August 2002), pp. 686–712.
See Jie Chen and Yang Zhong, “Why Do People Vote in Semicompetitive Elections in China?” The Journal of Politics, vol. 64, no. 1 (February 2002), pp. 178–97.
For more discussion on the disengagement model, see Wayne DeFranceisco and Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet political culture and ‘covert participation’ in policy implementation,” American Political Science Review, vol. 78, no. 3 (1984), pp. 603–21;
Theordore H. Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979) and “On the effectiveness of participatory institutions in Soviet communities,” Research Paper no. 42 (1981), Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The competing theoretical framework in the study of Soviet citizens’ voting behavior is the mobilization model that emphasizes the mobilization nature of Soviet psudeo elections.
See Robert Sharlet, “Concept Formation in Political Science and Communist Studies: Conceptualizing Political Participation,” Canadian Slavic Studies, vol. 1 (1967), pp. 640–49;
Alexander Shtromas, “Dissent and Political Change in the Soviet Union.” In Erik P. Hoffmann and Robbin F. Laird, eds., The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era (New York: Aldine, 1984);
and Philip Roeder, “Modernization and Participation in the Leninist Developmental Strategy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 83, no. 3 (1989), pp. 859–84.
See Wang Zhenyao and Bai Yihua, eds., Xiangzhen zhengquan ji cunweihui jianshe [Strengthening the Township/Town Government and the Villagers’ Committee] (Beijing, China: China Social Press, 1996), p. 168.
See Lianjiang Li, “The Two-Ballot System in Shanxi Province: Subjective Village Party Secretaries to a Popular Vote,” The China Journal, no. 42 (July 1999), pp. 103–18; and Huang Weiping, Zhang Dinghuai, and Yang Longfang, eds., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan de zuixin tupe [A New Breakthrough in China’s Grassroots Democracy] (Beijing, China: Social Sciences Documentation Press, 2000), p. 180.
See Chen Guangjin, Xiancun jingying jiuqi he chengzhang de aomi [The Secret of the Rse and Development of Rural Elites], in Liu Yingjie et al., eds., Zhongguo shihui xianxiang fenxi [An Analysis of Chinese Societal Kaleidoscope] (Beijing, China: China City Press, 1998), p. 376.
See Ma Rong, Liu Shiding, and Qiu Zeqi, eds., Zhongguo xiangzhen zuzhi diaocha [Survey of Township Organizations in China] (Beijing, China: Hua Xia Press, 2000), pp. 192–96.
See Li Kang, “Zhengtong renhe zhiyu jiceng shiqu: ningxia nongcun qianren chouyang diaocha fengxi” [Smooth Governance at Grassroots Level: A Survey of One Thousand Chinese Peasants in Ningxia], in Li Xueju, Wang Zhenyao, and Tang Jinsu, eds., Xiang zhen zhengquan de xiangshi yu gaige (The Reality and Reform of Township and Town Government) (Beijing, China: China Social Sciences Press, 1994), p. 286.
See Tian Huisheng, Xiangzhen zhengquan jianshe [Building Up Governmental Authorities at the Township/Town Level] (Beijing, China: Economic Science Press, 1990), pp. 173–74.
See Yuan Yayu, Zhongguo nongye xiandaihua de lishi huigu yu zhanwang [A Historical Review and Prospect of China Rural Modernization] (Chengdu, China: Sichuan University Press, 1999), pp. 228–29.
See Agricultural Research Center (of Chinese Agriculture Ministry), Dangdai zhongguo nongye biange yu fazhan yanjiu [Evolution and Development of Contemporary Chinese Agricultre] (Beijing, China: China Agriculture Press, 1998), p. 221.
More on village collective enterprises, see William A. Byrd and Lin Qinsong, eds., China’s Rural Industry: Structure, Development, and Reform (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1990).
See Xu Yuanming, Shi Xunru, and Zhou Faqi, Jiangsu xiangzhen qiyie xinlun [New Theories of Township and Village Enterprises in Jiangsu] (Nanjing, China: Jiangsu People’s Press, 1997), pp. 105–14.
See Bai Shazhou, Zhongguo erdeng gongmin: dangdai nongmin kaocha baogao [China’s Second-Class Citizens: A Report on Contemporary Peasants] (New York, NY: Mirror Books, 2001), pp. 283–90.
Also see Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village under Mao and Deng, second edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 324–26.
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© 2005 Weixing Chen and Yang Zhong
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Zhong, Y. (2005). New Institution Building or Muddling Through in the Chinese Countryside. In: Leadership in a Changing China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980397_5
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