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Guizhou "Ten Households in One" Rural Micro Governance

Challenges and Objectives

Rural revitalization is a major issue that needs to be solved urgently in China. With the development of urbanization, organizations within rural areas have lost power and become decentralized due to changes in functions. Under this circumstance, the local government vigorously promoted village mergers to save administrative costs, streamlined the personnel of grassroots organizations, and institutionalized grassroots governance models began to take shape. However, this organizational model makes village-level governance lose the flexibility that grassroots autonomous organizations should have. Village cadres have a dual role. They are both township agents and villagers’ spokespersons. However, village cadres are unable to balance these two roles, so they focus on performing administrative tasks and neglect their role as rural agents. This prevents them from bringing the masses together. The ensuing problem is that there are deviations in the implementation of relevant national policies at the grassroots level, farmers' needs are not met in a timely and effective manner, and the asymmetry between supply and demand for rural public goods is serious.

The location of this case is Changtan Village, Guizhou Province. The village has completed a series of governance goals by building a "ten households in one" platform and governance system. Specifically, it follows the principles of spatial proximity and similar skills to incorporate villagers into the "ten-household-in-one" micro-management unit, with the ten-household-in-one as the organizational carrier, the household head as the backbone, and the economic development, livelihood improvement, environmental protection, and facilities. The fundamental purpose of micro-governance in eight main areas, including construction, rural civility, conflict resolution, assistance for difficulties, and protection of rights and interests, is to maximize the satisfaction index of villagers.

Collaboration Partners and Roles

The subjects of this case include villagers, enterprises and credit cooperatives, party committees, local governments, and village committees. As the main subjects, villagers participate in the democratic management of the village and participate in public affairs activities in the village. Local businesses and credit unions are responsible for providing financial security. Party committees play a core and leading role in the local rural governance process. They serve villagers with open minds and advanced concepts by accurately grasping the characteristics of village development and carrying out policy propaganda. Local governments are responsible for the distribution of internal administrative power and formulating laws, regulations, and institutional rules to constrain the behavior of subjects; they are responsible for designing reasonable mechanisms to guide villagers' behavior. On the one hand, the village committee serves as the agent of the grassroots township government to ensure the smooth completion of administrative affairs; on the other hand, as the agent of villagers' affairs, it reflects village conditions and sentiments to higher-level departments.

Revitalisation Activities

Within the ten-household micro-governance unit, the household head convenes the rest of the villagers to participate in the discussion of village affairs, giving full play to the initiative of the villagers. When the village group power structure is reformed in the village, some matters and powers closely related to the villagers' daily life of the village's "two committees" will be moved down to the "ten-household-in-one" governance unit, such as discussions and decisions on how to implement village-level construction projects; determination of actual operational standards for needy households and subsistence allowance households and evaluation and approval of their targets, etc. In terms of daily production management, the "Two Committees" of the village branch regularly convene the heads of households in each micro unit to hold centralized meetings. The cadres of the village "Two Committees" convey the national policies and project settings related to agricultural and rural construction, and then the heads of households in the village governance units state the previous work status and new problems discovered in the unit separately for collective discussion to solve the problems. At the end of each year, in accordance with the customary requirements of the village branch's "two committees", each governance unit convenes villagers in the micro-governance unit to discuss the unit's public infrastructure construction plan for the next year, and the unit head will summarize and report to the village branch's "two committees". "The "two committees" of the village branch make reasonable and orderly arrangements based on the actual demand for the village construction plan projects and the national rural infrastructure projects that can be actively obtained. For some infrastructure projects that are in urgent need of construction and the capital cost is not high, the "two committees" of the village branch work together to solve the problem by using the village's collective economic income and mobilizing villagers to voluntarily invest in work.

Revitalisation Outcome

With the cooperation of the "Two Committees" of the village branch and the "Ten Households in One" governance unit, rural grassroots governance has been injected with new vitality, and remarkable results have been achieved in the construction of public infrastructure and environmental sanitation management in the village. Conflicts and disputes among villagers were also resolved promptly and effectively.

In terms of economy, after the establishment of the "Ten Households in One" micro-organization, Changtan Village relied on its strong organizational mobilization and collective action capabilities and adhered to the action concept of "everyone contributes and benefits together". National projects, including road hardening and water canal projects, have received active support from villagers. This solves the “last mile” problem that makes it difficult to implement national agricultural support projects due to the administrative village level. In terms of the environment, through the division of responsibilities and mutual supervision, the scale of governance has been further reduced to the "ten households in one" micro-governance unit, which has completely solved the "public pond" problem in village public environmental sanitation management caused by the increasing atomization of rural villagers. In terms of society, conflicts, and disputes caused by interests, emotions, and other factors among rural grassroots villagers were promptly resolved within micro-governance units. Incidents of villagers collectively petitioning to defend their rights gradually disappeared, and a new normal of grassroots governance was realized in rural grassroots society.

This is the abridged version of a case prepared by AIRI Associate Fellow Li Qiuming. For further information, please email Tsinghua University’s China Institute for Rural Studies at cirs@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.