In Chinese villages, government
authorities are
giving some decision
making power to citizens,
to secure their trust. (Photograph by iStock)
When East Ping Village in rural China rebuilt its middle school, none of the funds for the public project passed through government officials’ hands; an elected citizens’ committee supervised and managed the construction instead. Why?
“Local officials could have control over everything if they wanted to,” says Lily Tsai, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Tsai showed that in China local officials sometimes permit, and even encourage, their potential political competitors to take leading roles in providing public goods and services. “Local officials might be willing to give up some control over financial resources if they think that that makes citizens trust them more,” Tsai says.
To find out how different kinds of power structures influence citizen-state relations, Tsai surveyed 100 rural villages and interviewed village officials. She found that when non-state actors—like the Catholic church in the northern agricultural village of South Bend—entirely take over the government’s job, officials’ authority suffers. Villagers often refuse to pay taxes or comply with state policies. The church, which paved the main roads without any help from local officials (who are forbidden by the Communist Party from having anything to do with the church), has far higher standing with villagers than does the village government.
Similarly, when the state works with corporations—like the concrete factory in Wan Family Village—rather than community members to accomplish public projects, villagers wind up with better roads, but no better relations with officials. Citizens continue to keep their distance from the state.
On the other hand, when public projects are a joint effort between citizens and the state, officials have a chance to develop trust and reciprocity. Since East Ping Village renovated its middle school, it has continued to use the same model—citizen authority with government support—to build its bridges and pave its roads. “Officials believe that if in one arena they submit to citizen decision making, then in other arenas they’re responsible for—such as collecting taxes—citizens are more likely to cooperate with them in return,” says Tsai. “It’s basically a quid pro quo, a kind of trade.”
Practitioners in the development community might want to keep these objectives in mind. “How non-state provision is structured matters a lot for general citizen-government relations and for the willingness of local officials to work with non-state providers,” says Tsai.
“To know that there are models like this that are working, and why they work, could be useful for NGOs,” says Kristen McDonald, the China program director for Pacific Environment, a nonprofit that promotes grassroots activism. “Because then they can come in and say, ‘Here’s why this is actually helping you meet your governance challenges,’ rather than making it seem like somebody’s trying to take power away from them.”
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.