Identifying Trinary Control Patterns in Civil Disputes in Contemporary Chinese Rural Villages

Irwin, Darrell

Examining “self-governance” [zizhi 自治] within Chinese governance structures finds a self-run, yet ideologically-driven, grassroots system. Self-governance is used in China to manage the civil disputes in organizations and companies and community committees, both rural and urban. The language of self-governance reinforces a Marxist structure of democratic centralism that regulates public affairs at the grassroots level where governance is comprised of rural village and urban resident committees. We focus on the role of rural village committees that are given quasi-bureaucratic powers in matters of social order and justice. Using the authors’ 2021 sample data of 2,343 respondents collected from 164 villages in rural China (Jiang et al. 2024) and recent conceptual views on rural social stability (Trevaskes, 2024), we examine the rural village committee’s influence on governance.

Scholars find the “fusing” of governance models for grassroots conflict mediation is administered in rural Chinese villages using a trinary control system (Trevaskes, 2024; Jiang et al. 2024). At the village level, committees exert measures of semiformal control, promote solidarity through informal social controls, often through an elite gentry (or xiangxian), and allow police to exert formal control, to maintain community social order and justice (Jiang et al. 2024). The administration of law, ranges from mediation to punishment, though invoking punishments is normally left to the formal control agents. Semi-formal controls may be effectively used for resource allocation, land management disputes and civil disputes among villagers, who tend to be elderly as their children migrated to urban areas. Village committees are shown to develop autonomous self-governance, through coordination with formal institutions, such as the Chinese Communist Party, and informal institutions within villages, to resolve disputes, combat crime, allocate resources, and establish community solidarity.