A Study on the Problem of Villager’s Self-governance Under the Population Hollowisation

Abstract

The acceleration of urbanization, industrialization and marketization are fundamentally changing the traditional rural society as well as the social structure and ideology of China, prompting the rural population to constantly flow and migrate to cities. At the meantime, the traditional concept of rural area is also increasingly updated and even subverted, seriously affecting the effect of villagers' self-governance. Therefore, started from the level of subject, the research explores the economic dilemma and the dilemma of democratic rights of villagers’ self-govemance under the background of population hollowisation from the angle of subject construction, and analyzes the practical dilemma of villagers’ self-govemance from three aspects including autonomous subject, the foundation of autonomous economy, and democratic management and democratic supervision. With the methods of documental analysis, questionnaire, field research in D, S, X village of J county in Zhejiang China, and with the theory of Deliberative Democracy and the HCM-Human Capital being taken as theoretical basis, the research finds that villagers’ self-governance is confronted with predicaments of the absence of autonomous subjects, the weak foundation of the autonomous economy, the formalization of democratic management and democratic supervision. In response to the above predicaments, this paper holds that these problems can be addressed effectively through the following four countermeasures. Firstly, rural economy should be developed greatly and rapidly so that the villagers who flowed to cities can be encouraged to return to rural areas. Secondly, a new type of autonomous subject should be fostered with the purpose of improving the effectiveness of villagers’ self-governance. Thirdly, the rural public services have to be improved to a high level so that the gap between urban and rural public services can be narrowed. Finally, the content realization of autonomous governance should be optimized for the long-term significance of villagers’ self-governance.