"control" And "activate"

Serving as a major strategic measure aiming to promote "national building" of contemporary China and "good governance" in Chinese rural society, tax-fee reform has not only reduced the burden of peasants and improved their living standards, but also has, in a deeper lever, reshaped "the relationship between state and peasant" and "local political ecology". During post-tax era, what kind of institutional environment and power structure will township government face? What mechanisms will township government, with the administrative ideology of "stability" and "development", utilize to "control" local cadres and rural society, and at the same time to "re-activate" cadres and local community with the purpose of "development"? Previous academic studies of Chinese local politics mainly followed three basic paths-"corporatism","clientelism" and "theories of local regime’s roles and behaviors", these studies accurately captured certain characteristics of township regime during different periods, regarding township government under different circumstance as a "developmental regime","collusive regime","embedded regime","extractive regime" or "suspended regime". However, over-emphasis on the changes and certain property of township regime failed to present its overlapping logics and associated mechanisms, and distracted our attention from "changeless" or even "intensified" facets of local regime.Based on fieldwork and empirical study, this paper attempts to explore local political ecology in Mainland China by middle-level conceptualizations of "ultra-stable structure of pressure","creating competition" and "simplified governance", and adopt "logic-mechanism" approach rather than "structure-system" analysis or "event-process" analysis. As this paper argues, the various properties and logics of township government are not fragmented but functionally accreted and simultaneously linked, and present different combined form and interactive structure under different incentive systems. The new incentive system created by tax-fee reform may help to diminish the township government’s "extractive" and "collusive" preference, but has not changed the township government’s logic of "embedability" and "development"."Controlling" and "activating" have consistently been the dominant administrative ideology of local regime, and are practiced or even intensified by operational mechanisms——"ultra-stable structure of pressure" comprising of "target-responsibility system","leading group","political contract system","one-vote-down","imbedded domination of CCP" and "centralization of power and finance";"creating competition" comprising of "performance wages","materialization of honors " and " producing models";"simplified governance" such as "one issue, one deliberation" and "specialized farmers cooperatives". Drived by the logic of "controlling" and "activating", township government runs neither through the bureaucratic system, nor solely by clientelism networks, but largely relies on the "pressure-competition-simplification" system in operation. During the post-tax era, the local development guided by township regime mainly depends on three driving forces, namely,"driving force of pressure" characterized by top-down responsibility and centralized power and finance;"driving force of competition" characterized by performance comparisons and contention for projects;"driving force of governance" characterized by decentralization and mobilization of local resources.