Research on China's Grassroots Governance and Its Impact to Political Development

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China's grassroots society, in rural in particular, has been transforming its traditional function and structures. Due to the changing interests and diversifying behavior of rural population brought by market economy, elections of the village leaders demonstrate unprecedented development in terms of electoral process and voting system.In spite of this general direction of the development, however, several results of our field surveys show the negative trend of the village elections monopolized and controlled by the old an new forces such as family clan newly emerging entrepreneurs and underground societies as well as local party cells.The difficulty to gauge its impact to Chinese political system mainly stems from its ambiguity of the concept of "democratization" as well as its political sensitiveness in China's political climate. Survey results show that even local party leaders still fail to obtain clear prospect of future steering the new electoral system due to acute social change.Based upon these micro-level findings, we still can draw a tentative conclusion that tremendous impact of grassroots development to macro political structure has already made China's policy of empowering grassroots governance reached to an irreversible level.