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

中国的基层社会，特别是农村基层社会，正在改变其传统的功能和结构。由于市场经济带来的农村人口利益的变化和行为的多样化，村长选举在选举程序和投票制度上都呈现出前所未有的发展。然而，尽管有这样的发展大方向，我们的一些实地调查结果却显示出村选举被家族、宗族、新兴企业家、地下社团以及地方党组织等新旧势力垄断和控制的消极趋势。衡量其对中国政治制度影响的困难主要源于其“民主化”概念的模糊性以及其在中国政治气候中的政治敏感性。调查结果显示，由于社会急剧变化，即使是地方政党领导人也无法获得未来指导新选举制度的明确前景。基于这些微观层面的发现，我们仍然可以得出一个初步的结论，即基层发展对宏观政治结构的巨大影响已经使中国的基层赋权政策达到了不可逆转的水平。

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.