Township Authority And Role Reconstruction In Managing Villages

After the reform of rural taxes and administrative charges,the Central People’s Government of China t has invested a large number of financial resources into rural areas in the form of project system,in order to continuously strengthen the feeding effect on rural areas.However,under the institutional reform,the financial and administrative powers of township governments have been continuously collected,so that they have gradually become the agencies of municipal and county-level governments and reflected the characteristics of dependence.Besides,their action ability has been weakened with the cancellation of agricultural taxes.As an important political organization connecting state authority and the rural society,the township governments without autonomy are incapable of effectively undertaking the project resources delegated by the country,and tend to be suspended because of its alienation from the rural society.In the face of institutional requirements for the transformation to a service-oriented government,how a township government should adjust to the current situation of its weakened functions and achieve the reconstruction of its authority and role has become an important issue of concern in the current rural governance.According to literature analysis of the researches on the role of regime managers,the project governance from the perspective of grass-roots regime,and the project governance from the perspective of village,the author attempts to put forward an analytical framework from a holistic perspective,with “structural duality” and “the state in society” as theoretical sources and the village-management case in Chen Village,Long Town as the research object,and uses the research method of expanding the case to deeply describe the interaction and game in its operation process.It is aimed at revealing the authority reconstruction mechanism and role shaping logic of the township government under the background of projects entering the village.In practice,the model village construction in Chen Village,Long Town has been confronted with the endogenous and exogenous dilemmas.As for the endogenous dilemma of the model village construction in Chen Village,Long Town,the economic recession of the village community weakened the endogenous foundation of the model village construction,and the disorder of the village-level organization dissolved the organizational foundation of the model village construction.The dilemma between attracting investment and building the model village,together with the paradox between weak governance and“concentrating resources and creating highlights”,constituted the exogenous dilemmas in the model village construction.Confronted with endogenous dilemma,the township government has realized the reshaping of rural governance structure by means of internal operational integration.The government of Long County has absorbed the village governance talents as a strategic resource into the model village construction project by means of operational mobilization.The talent authority has also achieved the integration of village governance through the transformation of credit capital,the absorption of non-system elites,and the dual-track operation of rebuilding the administrative management system.Finally,by shaping the horizontal interdependence of“ capital-project-power ”,that is,promoting “ capital-project ”interdependence with the institutionalization process of enterprise capital,promoting “power-capital” interdependence with the embedding of government power into scale management,and promoting “project-power”interdependence with the leverage and momentum of political potential energy,the integration of political authority,enterprise capital and project resources within the village and the reconstruction of rural governance structure have been achieved.Confronted with exogenous dilemma,the township government has completed the absorption of project resources and authority reconstruction by means of exogenous operational construction.The institutional tension of incentive and coordination encouraged the government of Long Town to carry out land management,but the blind expansion of connecting model projects also ultimately led to the county-level financial crisis and the imbalance of power and responsibility.In the face of crisis and dilemma,the township government has not been in a subordinate position of project operation as described by the “coordinated regime” theorist,without only existing as a media field during the process of project matching.Instead,It has made use of the inertia of power absorption and responsibility transfer to drive the power and responsibility connection among various subjects in the county,so that the“county-town-village”could still achieve structural interdependence in the form of power and responsibility binding,so as to further obtain the initiative in project operation and resource allocation and finally realize the reconstruction of township authority.Based on the above empirical facts,the author puts forward the theoretical framework of “institutional opportunity space”,focuses on the structural characteristics of grass-roots governance practice,and decomposes the project operation into a meaning construction process,a power domination process and a legitimacy constraint process.During the meaning construction process,the creation of opportunity space can provide the premise for the occurrence of managing villages.During the power domination process,the absorption and storage of allocation resources and authoritative resources can lay the foundation for the authority reconstruction of township government.During the legitimacy constraint process,the generated boundary can construct and restrict the specific choice of role shaping of township government.Under the analysis framework of “ institutional opportunity space ”,the authority construction is based on the “resource” variable,while the role shaping is selected with the “social embeddedness” as the boundary.Therefore,based on the two variables of “authority(resource)” and “social embeddedness”,the author investigates the authority construction of township government and the transformation relationship between the roles of “operator-administrator”,and finally draws a conclusion.According to the conclusion,the interaction and game among the action subjects during the process of managing villages can provide the opportunity space for the authority reconstruction of township government,so that its autonomy can be brought into play to a certain extent,so as to overcome the endogenous and exogenous governance dilemmas and finally make it adapt to the realistic requirements of the current rural social development.During the process,township government is also embodied in the complex role of “ operator-administrator ”.When the authority(resource)controlled by township government can break through the legitimacy constraint of social embeddedness,its action logic tends to be the role of “strong management-weak governance”.Otherwise,it tends to be the role of “strong governance-weak management”.This paper attempts to innovate on three levels: research perspective,analytical paradigm and theoretical construction.In terms of research perspective,this paper reviews the whole process of village management from both horizontal and vertical mesoscopic dimensions,in order to bridge the separation and isolation of action subjects at different levels from the traditional perspective of hierarchical operation,thereby achieving a holistic grasp of the interaction mechanism among county,township and village.In terms of analysis paradigm,this paper constructs an overall perspective of both internal and external aspects to bridge the dual separation between grass-roots organization-based and village-based research paradigms in project governance research.In terms of theoretical construction,the author puts forward an analytical framework of “ institutional opportunity space ” to analyze the relationship between the authority reconstruction and role shaping of township government from the theoretical level,as well as bridge the ontological orientation in the existing research.In the practice of managing villages described in this paper,the township government has achieved the reconstruction of rural governance structure and its own authority through the construction of horizontal and vertical interdependent structure.In addition,the government role has also been transformed into the complex role of“operator-administrator”.Certainly,the remarkable achievements of the new rural construction still cannot cover up some issues that need to be further investigated.It is still an important issue of continuous concern for how the state power should guide village administration to achieve good governance.