Governance capacity of Chinese Communist Party in rural area: Changing functions of village party branches under the new rural policies

This paper aims to discuss governance capacity of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by analyzing the performance and leaders’ consciousness of CCP village branch. A series of new rural policies initiated from the beginning of 2000s has changed the conditions of rural governance and also affected the required roles of village party branches. This seems to bring a chance for CCP to enforce its governance capacity. But meanwhile not a few previous studies point out serious organizational problems of CCP village branches. If these problems prevent them from adapting new situation, this chance might rather turn into crisis that would erode the base of CCP’s governance. We need to discuss which could be more likely to happen by examining the actual conditions at the grass-roots level. In this paper we approach this problem by focusing on daily work of CCP village branch and village leaders’ recognition of their role through questionnaire survey. Though our survey has some degree of limitations in quantity of respondents, the result reveals that those organizational problems like less organized activities and difficulty of recruiting new members would not immediately lead crisis of CCP’s governance capacity. There are three reasons for this. First, village party cadres still present high conformity to policies and directions of higher party organization；second, it is possible to proceed “weiwen” (maintaining stability) task which is one of the matters of primary importance, even if the organizational power of party village branch is not strong enough；third, leaders of party village branch can manage to concern or help villagers’ everyday life and economic activities by utilizing the village human resources, especially those of Village Committee. In this way villagers’ expectations for CCP can be met to some extent. Previous studies also suggest there need to be another way to fulfill the new required roles as mentioned above, which is to evoke community’s indigenous power. In this survey we inquired of CCP village branch leaders’ recognitions of their role, and the result is that they rather seem to be bureaucrats, less embedded in village society.