Inheritors of the Boom: Private Enterprise and the Role of Local Government in a Rural South China Township

Abstract

Relations between the rural populace and the grass-roots levels of government vary enormously across China. A key reason, we have discovered during research in a range of rural districts, is that the very nature of the power wielded by a local rural government today is strongly influenced by the extent of local industrialization and, just as importantly, by the type of factory ownership that prevails locally. Thus far, most studies have concentrated on rural districts where the officials of villages and former communes have engineered the development of publicly owned, not privately owned, industry.1 (Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang describe precisely such a district in this issue of The China Journal.) Jean Oi, who has written a good deal about such local areas, states that their “local governments have taken on many of the characteristics of a business corporation, with officials acting as the equivalent of a board of directors”.2 Since they control the revenues from the publicly owned factories, local officials can shift new investments and resources from one enterprise to another, and to non-industrial parts of the public sector as well, much as a conglomerate shifts resources between its subsidiaries. Local officials also control access to coveted employment in factories, and through this and their control of revenues they can build patronage relationships