The impact of elections on the village structure of power: the relations between the village committees and the party branches

Abstract

Village committee elections are one of the major innovations of the reform era. Electoral processes have elicited much scholarly and public attention. Less attention has been devoted to studying the impact of this innovation on the relations between the elected village committee chair persons and the appointed Party secretaries. This article shows that conflicts can arise between the two because the basis of their legitimacy and authority differs. A concrete instance of conflict is control over collective economic resources and financial decisions. The field research on which much of this article is based was done in southern Guangdong, where villages tend to be quite industrialized and wealthy. In these villages, control had hitherto been vested in the secretaries. Now, town leaders had to adjudicate jurisdictional disputes between village committees and the Party branches. Often they preferred to side with the latter, since secretaries were likely to be more responsive to their superiors than elected village chiefs. A solution to these conflicts that is now being widely adopted in rural China is to require that Party secretaries run for the post of village committee chair, thereby in effect merging the two institutions.