Disputes And Village Governance In The Context Of Collective Forest Right System Reform

At the end of 1970s the rural reform focused on clearing the rural land tenure mainly solved the tenure problem of 0.12billion hectares plough while the tenure of another 0.287 billion hectares forest land(among which there are 0.167 billion hectares collective forest land) remains unclear.The rural issue also includes the issues concerning about forestry,forest zone and foresters.In 2003 a new round collective forest tenure reform(called New Forest Reform for short) in FuJian and JiangXi province,which has been called the Second Reform after the Household Contract Responsibility System Reform in 1978,has accompanished by and large by 2006 and then spread to all over the country.On June 8,2008,the centural government proclaimed to popularize the collective forest tenure reform.Therefore it's of great significance realistically and theoritically to make an overall evaluation on the achievement of the forest reform and its effect on the village governance.Taking the case of the practice in collective forest tenure reform in Mu Village of K Town in JiangXi,this paper makes a deep analysis on the disputes caused by the new reform,which includes the variety of the disputes,the reasons of the disputes,people's logical behavior,the gambling among the people concerned,and so on.Furthermore,the thesis aims at reasearching on the influence on the village order and governance caused by the disputes.The paper maintains that the disputes in the new reform not only weakened villagers' sense of identity of village,but also affects the resource and authority of village govemance.At the same time,The roll played by the village cadres in these disputes is also much more complicated.On one hand,the cadres act as an important mediators of the disputes,on the other hand,they harm the collective interest by colluding with the capitalists outside their own village,which reduces villagers' credibility on the village cadres,thus caused a negtive influence on the whole village governance.In the last part of the thesis,some political suggestion has been put forward on the basis of the analysis on the influence on the village governance made by the disputes.