How is rural China arranged politically?

James Carne and Henry Sadler-Dawe

Basic Structure

Village Level Town Level County Level Prefectural Level Province Level Country wide Level

Village / Town Level

The village level serves as an organizational division and does not have much importance in political representative power.

Basic local divisions like neighbourhoods and communities have defined boundaries and designated heads (one per area):

Rural areas are organized into village committees or villager groups.

A "village" in this case can either be a naturally occurring village or an administrative village, which is a bureaucratic entity.

There are 40895 township level areas

County

Every level of administrative division has a local Communist Party of China Committee.

The head of the committee is called the Secretary the real first-in-charge of the county.

Further, there is the People's government of the county, and its head is called the County Governor.

The governor is sometimes also one of the Deputy Secretaries in the CPC Committee.

There 2858 countys within china

Prefectural

The prefectural government is an administrative branch office with the rank of a national ministerial department and is created by the province government.

The leader of the prefecture government, titled as prefectural commissioner and is appointed by the provincial government.

The prefectural committee are part of the province wide committee so are not a separate entity

There are 333 prefecturals in china

Province

A standard provincial government is nominally led by a provincial committee, headed by a secretary.

The committee secretary is first-in-charge of the province, come in second is the governor of the provincial government.

There are currently 33 provinces within China

Party Cadre

A local party official with power of decision making and influence on a local scale

Hukou

House Hold Registration Residency permit issued by

government It identifies someone as resident of

area Reduces migration Since 1997 gradual reform to end this Migrants now get temporary hukou

People’s Communes

People’s Communes were born during the Great Leap Forward and were made official state policy in 1958.

They Were the highest of 3 administrative levels in rural areas of the People’s Republic China and are the largest collectivist units divided into Production Brigades and Production Teams.

Each commune was a combination of smaller collectivist farms consisting of 4000 to 5000 households.

Townships Between 1982 and 1985 when People’s communes

were disbanded and replaced by Townships (production teams replaced by village groups)

Townships is the fourth-level in the administrative hierarchy and contain a number of village committees and villages (as 2000 took up 20% of China’s area).

Townships are smaller, more remote and less populous than towns than towns and in 1995 there were 29500 townships and 17500 towns.

Township’s governance is divided between the Communist Party Township Secretary and the mayor

Guanxi or ‘the art of using personal contacts’

Winning trust and engaging with potential business partners is the first priority for the Chinese. Relationships come first, transactions second.

Significant in small farms in rural areas as most are family owned. The relationships with the most lasting importance are those of kinship, home town, kindness or favours between families.