查看更多>>摘要：At the most basic level of governance, China had long relied on a state-society interactive “third sphere” approach, leaving considerable space for societal self-governance, lightening thereby the oppressiveness of bureaucratic government. This article delineates once more the modes and operative mechanisms of that third-sphere mode of governance. After China entered its revolutionary and contemporary periods, that system was transformed by the rise of Communist Party organization into a new third sphere model with a close relationship between party leadership and popular participation. It turned out to be one that released immense energies, as evidenced in the revolutionary movement and the “people’s war” that ended in victories first over Japanese occupation, then in the civil war against the Guomindang, and further in fighting to a standstill the even stronger U.S. led forces in the Korean War. That party and people combination evinced great energies also in the early-stage cooperatives based on the natural villages (and the return back to that mode of organization by 1963 after the errors of the Great Leap Forward), and again in the Reform era when the party-state yielded individual decision-making powers in the newly marketized economy to peasant households through the “responsibility land system. To be sure, there were also multiple errors of excessive bureaucratic control along the way. Nevertheless, even today, a mutually beneficial cooperative relationship between the party and the people can still be a good path for basic-level governance, one that could counter the excesses of “bureaucratism” and its “iron cage” effects, to enter into a kind of (popular) participatory socialist market economy, distinguished from a controlling bureaucratic socialist planned economy.
查看更多>>摘要：Rural governance in China has the significant characteristic of relying on the third sphere, in which state and society complement and interact with each other. The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party’s entry into the countryside brought a new operational logic to the third sphere. During the Cooperative Movement, labor experts emerged in the process of agricultural production in local village communities to become the pivotal figures in the operation of the third sphere. After the Rural Reform, those pivotal figures became the village leaders who knew how the market economy works and could organize collective activities to benefit their communities. In the present situation, when the nation is trying to find a way to revitalize the countryside, the third sphere, which closely relied on the endogenous energy of local village communities, can still exert a positive influence, provided that the top-down erosion of the third sphere by bureaucratization and formalism is avoided.
查看更多>>摘要：The Chinese central government has greatly increased the resources dedicated to the countryside since its abolition of agricultural taxes and fees but has also assigned many more tasks to the local governments. County government, which had previously adopted a “single prioritized task” approach to governance, now has transitioned to a “multiple prioritized tasks” approach. This transformation has not only jeopardized the capacity of township governments to coordinate rural projects, but has also changed the earlier performance evaluation system from one that emphasized results to one that increasingly emphasizes “processes. The relationship between the county and township governments has become increasingly bureaucratized and ossified. This has given rise to two problems. On the one hand, the increases in resource inputs have not come with a significant improvement of efficiency in local governance, which has resulted in involution in terms of returns to resource inputs. On the other hand, increasing bureaucratization has imposed mounting burdens on the administrative system. As a result, there has been a deteriorating relationship between the local government and the peasants, in which the former simply fails to respond to the villagers’ real needs and aspirations. To break through the problem of local governments becoming increasingly detached from and irrelevant to the villages, local governments should be given greater autonomy and flexibility. The central government should allow them greater autonomy in the use of resources in order to rebuild an organic relationship with the peasants by more appropriate uses of the new resources allocated to them.
查看更多>>摘要：The custom of prepaying land rent, a widespread practice in North China stretching from the Ming dynasty to the Republic, has not been fully discussed in the scholarship. This article addresses two issues surrounding this custom from the perspectives of legal history and the social and economic history of North China. The first issue is the custom itself. The article explores how the Guomindang government institutionalized and legitimized the custom at the normative and empirical levels through the Civil Code of the Republic of China and other laws. The second issue is the institutional consequences. Through historical analysis, this article points out that the rent prepayment custom brought about fluctuations in the grain market in rural North China, plunging peasants into a situation of selling grain at low prices in order to prepay the land rent, which in turn led them into a cycle of poverty.
查看更多>>摘要：“The Party leads the army,” “the Party controls the army,” and “the Party commands the gun” are the political principles and institutional designs of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership of the army, which emphasize that the army must follow the leadership of the Party, carry out the political tasks set by the Party, and defend the key interests of the Party. After the outbreak of the all-out War of Resistance against Japan, the Eighth Route Army, under the Party’s strategic guidance, marched toward the Taihang mountains. The army helped the local Party organizations there to recover and develop, while the local Party organizations helped the army to fight and to enlarge its forces. The coordination and cooperation of the local Party organizations and the army together established the basis of the political-military configuration of the Taihang Base Area and put into effect the strategic intentions of the Party. When the Base Area entered into the consolidation-and-development stage 发展巩固阶段, however, signs of discoordination emerged. In this special political situation, in order to ensure the smooth progress of the war against Japan, the Chinese Communist Party further ironed out the Party-army relationship by organization-building (for both Party central and local and military branches) and fighting against Guomindang reactionaries and the Japanese invaders and their puppet government. Particularly, the Party continued political training for the army to make sure that it remained under the absolute leadership of the Party. By uniting the army and the local Party organizations to implement the political lines and concrete policies of the Party central, a unified configuration of leadership in the Taihang Base Area was established, the Party, the army, and the people all united as a whole, and the Chinese Communist Party earned tremendous support for the war against Japan. This process involved at once the relationships between the Party central and the army 中央与军队, between the military Party branches and the army 军队党与军队, and between the local Party branches and the army 地方党与军队, and it was an arduous journey rather than an easy walk.
查看更多>>摘要：The development of the Chinese revolutionary movement in the early twentieth century absorbed cultural resources from traditional secret societies and associations. The White Lotus, the Tiandihui, the Gelaohui, the Triad, and the various secret societies that had emerged in the Taiping and the Boxer rebellions were all incorporated into the discourse system of revolutionary history. The secret societies’ slogans of “overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming” and “rob the rich to help the poor” merged with the revolutionaries’ platform of “drive out the Manchus” and “relief for people’s livelihood,” and finally advanced the success of the Xinhai Revolution and was turned into a coherent historical narrative. After the founding of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren carefully assessed the function of secret societies and distinguished them from modern political parties. On the other hand, leaders of the Communist Party, such as Mao Zedong, Qu Qiubai, Yun Daiying, and Chen Duxiu, emphasized the ideological transformation of secret societies and the suitable role they could play in the revolution, thus showing a dynamic strategy of allying with these organizations. The history of the relationship between the Chinese revolution and secret societies reflects the changing characteristics and logic of the underclass of Chinese society.
查看更多>>摘要：The patterns of labor use in land-intensive farming, represented by grain production, and in labor-intensive farming, represented by fruit production, are both undergoing quiet changes. The input of family labor and the number of hired laborers are decreasing in grain production, while in fruit production the decrease in family labor is accompanied by increases in the number of hired laborers and the proportion of hired labor in the overall labor input. These different trends of labor use are determined by various factors, including the difficulty of replacing labor with machinery, the reallocation of family labor, and the decline of labor exchanges among peasant families. The difficulty of labor supervision is not a critical obstacle to the use of hired laborers, because it can be relieved through various mechanisms, such as hiring laborers from acquaintance communities, working alongside the hired laborers, firing unqualified laborers, using the employer’s knowledge and experience to evaluate the efforts of hired laborers, and suitable practices of labor division. These changes in the patterns of labor use indicate that Chinese agriculture is undergoing a process of modernization, in which family labor is dominant and seasonal short-term labor is supplementary, and the new managerial units, like family farms and co-ops, are inclined to operate under appropriate farm-scales in an environment of market economy and commercialization but still with collective land ownership as their institutional basis.
NSTL