Village Affairs Research

Publicizing general village affairs, the only access to realizing the democratic management in the rural areas of our country, plays a significant part in building China into a legalized socialist nation. At present, the majority of villages China's have conducted it according to laws from the central government, and obtained great achievements. But at the same time, there still exist some quite serious problems, which fully deserves our attention. The present author tends to make a thorough inquiry and analysis about this subject.The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part is a description of the unavoidable generation and development stages of the system. There are altogether three stages in order of increasing maturity, the initial stage being from 1957-1989, the second from 1990-1996, and the third from 1997-2000.The second part is a statement of contents and approaches for publicizing general village affairs. The contents include three aspects: financial affairs, self-governing affairs, affairs from the government. The publicizing procedure include three steps: to determine what items to be brought into the open, to set up special superintendent committees, to approve the determined items by the conference of village representatives (or all villagers), and to collect opinions and make adjustments or corrections.The third part investigates the existent problems and the causes for such problems. The main problems include: inadequate awareness of the significance of the publicizing system; invalid measures taken; untruthfulness of the publicized items; the confusing management of financial affairs; non-standardization of the publicizing procedures; lack of government statutes to uphold the system, etc. The chief causes for such problems include, shallow understanding of the importance of the system; corruptions for some officials; the awkward working procedures; and the ineffective working mechanisms; etc.The fourth part puts forward some overall trains of thought, followed by some practical measures to resolve the problems. The trains of thought include: to enforce the establishment of laws and rules to provide guidance for the local leaders; to strengthen the effective power of the government; to increase the villagers participating ability to achieve valid effect. The measures include: to adhere to the practice of combining publicizing village affairs with the villagers' autonomous administration, to change the singular result publicizing into whole-process publicizing, i.e. pre-event publicizing, process-publicizing, and the result- publicizing; to improve the legal system; and to strengthen intensity of supervision and inspection. Only so, can China be likely to move onto the track of healthy development.