Zhang Yinghong on China's Villages

Zhang Yinghong, “Behind the Latest News, the Three Forces Challenging Grassroots Governance”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
On January 21, 2022, an anonymous Vlogger in the Xuzhou area of Jiangsu posted a video of his visit to a locally famous “father of eight children” in Fengxian county.  This was presumably a “human interest story,” because the father, Mr. Dong, had become something of a local celebrity last year due to the size of his family—and particularly his seven sons—and had even posted his own videos on Douyin (TikTok).  In the course of his visit in January, the Vlogger happened onto the mother of the eight children, who had not been featured in previous human interest stories.  She was lightly clad (the temperature was right at freezing), toothless, and…chained at the neck to prevent her from leaving the shack she apparently inhabited. 
 
The Vlogger, visibly shocked, went to find her a coat (in a large room, full of donations from people who had presumably watched the human interest stories and sent clothing for the children) and attempted to talk to her, without much success.  The woman seemed to respond to his questions, but the sounds she made were incomprehensible (the video has been taken down in China, but is still available here; it is worth watching even if you do not understand Chinese.  Another account of the incident, among many, is available here).
 
The video shortly went viral in China, resulting in an uproar of online indignation.  Local authorities responded in a way that would have seemed comic if the situation were not so tragic, finding any number of ways to say “nothing to see here,” suggesting first that the marriage had been consensual and that the woman had subsequently developed mental illness leading to violent outbursts, later saying that the woman had been a beggar who had been kindly taken in my Mr. Dong—as if any of this justified chaining a human being.  This was during the Beijing Winter Olympics, after all.  Local authorities surely hoped it would all blow over.
 
Finally, the higher-ups intervened, and at least part of the truth came out:  the woman had been trafficked from a rural village in Yunnan.  She apparently lost her teeth because of prolonged lack of care.  Whether she had been mentally ill from the outset is not clear, but the image of her, chained to a wall in a shack while her eight children went on with their lives in the house next door, suggested to most Chinese that she had been nothing but a breeding machine.  If she had been mentally deficient all along, it also suggested that her eight children were likely the product of rape.            
 
Although mentalities have changed somewhat in China’s big cities, marriage is a virtual imperative elsewhere in the country, something which creates “marriage markets” and human trafficking, given the stubborn existence of rural poverty.  The details of this particular case throw into high relief just what this might mean, as well as the complicity of local officials and local society.  Local officials not only looked the other way—or demanded a bribe—when the marriage took place, but continued to look the other way as the couple had eight children (and were celebrated for such online), until recently a blatant violation of the one- (and then two-) child policy.  Villagers—and the local school teachers who presumably know some of the other children—ignored the situation.  Mr. Dong took no pains to conceal his wife’s condition, as the Vlog post that set off the entire affair reveals—the Vlogger simply walked in and found the woman chained to the wall.  It is hard not to come to the conclusion that “normal” can cover an extremely wide range of circumstances when it comes to the fate of women in rural China. 
 
The text translated here was actually written in January of 2019, and hence on the face of it has little to do with the events in Fengxian county.  The author is Zhang Yinghong (b. 1968), a prominent scholar of rural issues who works principally at the Beijing Municipal Research Center on the Rural Economy; his Aisixiang page, where many of his writings are available, can be consulted here. 
 
The text was presumably chosen for republication at this particular moment by the editors of Beijing Cultural Review, who gave it a new title connecting it to current events.  The point is to drive home the idea that the tragedy of the woman chained to a wall in Fengxian county, however exceptionally bad it might be, is part of a broader context which, at the very least, is cause for alarm.  The author describes China’s villages as having been impoverished by thirty years of “totalitarianism” and then ravished by forty years of “bigwig capitalism,” whose plunder continues under the “leadership” of the local cadres, alternatively described as “bullies” or “criminals.”
 
That said, Zhang’s text is neither a case study of a particular village or region, nor a statistical portrait of rural trends, but instead a grab bag of recriminations and reform plans.  Like many people working in research centers and think tanks and hoping to have an impact on policy, Zhang oscillates between bold exposure of bleak village conditions and grudging admissions that “progress has been made” “The Center has a plan,” he notes.  “If only local cadres would pay attention, we could achieve parity and democracy in the villages.”  If the text sounds at best plaintive to my ears, it is nonetheless a useful reminder of how scholars working on village issues in China see the situation now.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“The capriciousness of government power (broadly defined) remains the biggest challenge to modernizing governance in our country. For a long time, the muscular intervention of governments at all levels in the public and private lives of villages has been the biggest challenge to the realization of good governance there. It can be said that the natural order and quiet life of the villages have often been upended by the unchecked power of government at higher levels. For example, some local governments have forcibly demolished people's houses on various pretexts, leading to the dissolution of the families that had previously been living there peacefully.”
 
“Since reform and opening, the state has changed its posture and allied itself with capital, resulting in a very strong alliance between political power and capital. For example, some local governments, with the backing of capital, have blatantly taken over traditional villages and their beautiful scenery for their own tourism development, while brutally evicting the original inhabitants from their homes. Building a prosperous countryside definitely requires social capital. But if outside capital is allowed to run rampant, then there is no rural governance to speak of; if the collusion between power and capital is not constrained, then the public interest of society and the individual rights of the people will suffer irreparably huge losses. Thus we can neither suppress capital nor give it free license; capital must be reasonably restrained and secured by the rule of law.”
 
“Third, the supply of public services should be expanded and developed. The deficiencies in terms of rural infrastructure and basic public services are among the most serious problems explaining the lack of balance in urban and rural development and the inadequacies of rural development. Increasing investment in rural infrastructure construction, accelerating the achievement of overall parity between urban and rural regions, meaning that cities and villages are integrated into a single system of basic public services, is the basic responsibility of governments at all levels. These governments should shift the energy currently invested in demolishing people's houses left and right to the proper path of providing basic public services for the people as soon as possible, so as to allow urban and rural residents to enjoy roughly equal and accessible basic public services. We must bring about the national coordination of basic public services so that they follow the people as they move, and similarly guarantee that the social security enjoyed by urban and rural people follow the people when they move, so that peasants are covered in the cities and city dwellers are covered in the villages.”
 
Translation
 
The Art, Practice, and Context of Rural Governance
 
Rural governance is a big topic. Some types of governance aim to control people and restrict their free and comprehensive development. Our governance should aim to promote people’s free and comprehensive development. We cannot simply talk about rural governance in its own terms, but must understand rural governance in the context of the entire national governance structure and the process of social change, looking at the village from a perspective that transcends the village, and looking at rural governance from a perspective that transcends rural governance.  If we merely view these issues from a technical perspective, it will quite likely lead to distortions and to the failure of rural governance. We should not only care about the "practice" of rural governance, but also pay attention to the "way" of rural governance and its “tendencies.” The way is the fundamental direction, the practice has to do with methods and techniques, and tendencies refer to the situational environment. 

The Tripartite Institutional Structure of Rural Governance 
 
For thousands of years, traditional Chinese village society has been a rural social order characterized by imperial rule, patriarchy, a small-peasant economy, Confucian culture, and village gentry autonomy.  Following the 1949 revolution, the traditional Chinese rural social structure was completely overturned. After thirty years of communist revolution and forty years of reform and opening, the Chinese countryside has experienced huge, fundamental changes. When we talk about rural governance now, we must recognize the three basic institutional structures on which it is based, which influence and affect the level and effectiveness of rural governance at the most basic level. 
 
The first is collective ownership.  In the 1950s, all villages in China, without exception, established a system in which land was collectively owned. The collective ownership system is essentially a property rights system in which property is publicly owned and controlled by the state, and its basic characteristics are that property rights are political, collective, communal, and closed. This is the property rights basis for rural governance. Adapting the collective ownership system to the needs of marketization, urbanization, and urban-rural integration is an important focus of rural reform in the new era.
 
The second is the division of China into urban and rural spheres.  This dualist system, established in the 1950s, divided all of China into villages and cities with distinct forms of governance for the two, in which status and public services were completely different.  The distinguishing feature of this system was the unequal rights accorded to city dwellers and  villagers, which included the limitation or appropriation of the freedom of the citizens.  This constituted the institutional basis of rural governance. Breaking down the urban-rural divide and constructing an institutional mechanism and policy system for the integrated development of urban and rural areas is an inevitable requirement for achieving good rural governance.
 
The third is the system of Party leadership. The Party leadership system, which copied the Soviet model, is a new type of state structure and political institution first adopted by the Nationalist Party in the Republican period. The greatest advantage of the Party leadership system is that it can unify ideas, actions, and resources, and "concentrate our strength to accomplish great things." Its weak point, however, is that it lacks to power to constrain and supervise the leadership itself. This is the political foundation of rural governance. Deepening the reform of the political system, reforming and improving the Party leadership system, and accelerating the pace of building democracy and the rule of law will certainly lay the foundation for good rural governance.
 
The Three Forces Challenging Rural Governance
　 
There are many challenges to rural governance, but there are three forces that have a fundamental impact.
 
The first is the capriciousness of power at the higher levels 上级权力的任性化. The capriciousness of government power (broadly defined) remains the biggest challenge to modernizing governance in our country. For a long time, the muscular intervention of governments at all levels in the public and private lives of villages has been the biggest challenge to the realization of good governance there. It can be said that the natural order and quiet life of the villages have often been upended by the unchecked power of government at higher levels. For example, some local governments have forcibly demolished people's houses on various pretexts, leading to the dissolution of the families that had previously been living there peacefully.
 
Three major “domestications” have marked the evolution of the civilization of humankind.  The first was the domestication of animals, the second the domestication of the common people, and the third has been the domestication of those who wield power.  Over the course of thousands of years of evolution, we have managed to domesticate the animals and the common people, but how to tame those with political power, and how to cage this power, is a great enterprise whose accomplishment is still to be achieved. As long as power is unchecked and unsupervised, there can be no good governance in the countryside. We clearly cannot expect good governance in the villages when the government is accustomed to violating the law.

The top leaders of our country have proposed putting power in its cage, which would be a historic breakthrough and a great leap in the philosophy of governance of China’s rulers. Yet how to incorporate all public power within the framework of the rule of law, and how to truly domesticate those in power, so that they will no longer be obsessed with the pursuit of privilege but will instead sincerely protect human rights is, the most significant issue of our era in terms of the promotion the of the modernization of the national governance system and of its governance capacity.
 
The second force is the peremptory character of outside capital.  On the nature of capital Marx pointed out in Das Kapital that:  “Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” 
 
There is also a famous footnote in Marx’s work:  ''With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent will produce eagerness, 50 percent positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime which it will not scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.''
 
Capital is an extremely powerful force in modern society. Over the course of recent decades, we have employed two extreme measures in dealing with capital.  The first was the approach used prior to reform and opening, in which the state allied with the people to achieve the union of political power and the masses, trampling capital underfoot, and even completely eliminating it, thus also eliminating the harm it causes.
 
But a society without capital collapsed into extreme poverty. Since reform and opening, the state has changed its posture and allied itself with capital, resulting in a very strong alliance between political power and capital. For example, some local governments, with the backing of capital, have blatantly taken over traditional villages and their beautiful scenery for their own tourism development, while brutally evicting the original inhabitants from their homes. Building a prosperous countryside definitely requires social capital. But if outside capital is allowed to run rampant, then there is no rural governance to speak of; if the collusion between power and capital is not constrained, then the public interest of society and the individual rights of the people will suffer irreparably huge losses. Thus we can neither suppress capital nor give it free license; capital must be reasonably restrained and secured by the rule of law.
  
The third force is the criminalization 黑恶化 of rural cadres.  In addition to the capriciousness of outside government power and the shameless pillaging of outside capital, the representatives that emerge from within the village community—the village cadres who morph into “local emperors"— have become the chief symbols of criminalization in the villages, and are the source of countless evils.  On January 19, 2017, the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued "Opinions on Giving Full Play to Procuratorial Capacities to Lawfully Punish the Crimes of  ‘Village Bullies’ and Evil Lineages and to Actively Maintain Rural Harmony and Stability," emphasizing the need to resolutely punish "village bullies" and lineage crimes in accordance with the law, attacking those who use their supposed position as "umbrellas of protection" to engage in criminal activities. In the current situation in which evil people govern the villages, there is no point in talking about good rural governance. Looking around the world at modern countries with sound democracy and the rule of law, we note that it is impossible for there to be "tyrants" or "village bullies." The existence of "village bullies" in our countryside shows that the construction of democratic rule of law in the countryside is still lagging. Strengthening democracy and rule of law in the villages is a strategic measure to realize people's needs for a better life.
 
Three Fields of Rural Governance that Should Be Opened Up
 
Rural governance should open up in at least in the following three areas, otherwise it will difficult for governance to perform as it should.
 
First, collective property rights reform should be affirmed and developed. The ambiguity and closed nature of collective property rights has become an important obstacle constraining rural governance in the process of marketization and urbanization. By insisting that the collective ownership of land remain unchanged, the right to use the land can be completely transferred or reassigned according to the law. For example, on land that has been contracted out, the practice of the "separation of three rights" has been implemented, so that the ownership of the contracted land belongs to the collective, the right to contract the land belongs to the farmers, and the right to manage the land can be transferred elsewhere. This represents the development of the property rights of contracted land. However, new steps in the reform and opening up of property rights should target for particular attention rural homesteads, land to be used for collective construction, and equity shares in collective assets .
 
Second, the management of public affairs should be democratic and open. The closed nature of the management of public affairs in rural communities is not adapted to the needs of population mobility in the process of marketization and urbanization. In this process, two different types of villages have emerged in rural China due to the rapid flow of population: one is the "hollow village," where a large number of people have left, and the other is the "upside-down village" where a large number of outside people converge at the margin of urban and rural areas. Rural governance in the new era must break through the double pattern of closed rural property rights and closed community management, and implement open democratic governance. Following the abolition of the traditional dualistic urban-rural household registration system, we should accelerate the development of urban-rural integration and build a new pattern of equal participation in public affairs by all residents of the rural community.
　　 
Third, the supply of public services should be expanded and developed. The deficiencies in terms of rural infrastructure and basic public services are among the most serious problems explaining the lack of balance in urban and rural development and the inadequacies of rural development. Increasing investment in rural infrastructure construction, accelerating the achievement of overall parity between urban and rural regions, meaning that cities and villages are integrated into a single system of basic public services, is the basic responsibility of governments at all levels. These governments should shift the energy currently invested in demolishing people's houses left and right to the proper path of providing basic public services for the people as soon as possible, so as to allow urban and rural residents to enjoy roughly equal and accessible basic public services. We must bring about the national coordination of basic public services so that they follow the people as they move, and similarly guarantee that the social security enjoyed by urban and rural people follow the people when they move, so that peasants are covered in the cities and city dwellers are covered in the villages. 
 
Rural Governance Should Focus on Safeguarding the "Three Rights"

The new era of rural governance requires an organic combination of ideas drawn from China’s excellent traditional culture and from modern politics, the key being to strengthen the construction of democracy and the rule of law, and to maintain social fairness and justice.  At the crux of everything is the need to respect, protect, and bring to fruition the rights of citizens, and specifically to maintain and develop the human rights, property rights, and governance rights of farmers.
　 
First is the maintenance and development of the farmers’ human rights. This means to respect, protect, and bring to fruition the basic rights, freedom, and dignity of farmers. The report of the 19th National Congress points out:  "Maintain the unity, dignity, and authority of the national legal system, strengthen the protection of human rights under the rule of law, and ensure that people enjoy a wide range of rights and freedoms in accordance with the law."  "Protect the people's rights to their persons, property and personality."
 
Basic human rights are clearly outlined in China’s Constitution as well as in various international human rights charters (including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Optional Resolutions of the two Covenants). Respect for and guarantee of human rights are clearly stipulated in our Constitution. The basic rights and freedoms that farmers should enjoy are rich in content, and include the right to equality, freedom of movement, education, health, social security, rights to reproduction, environmental and other basic human rights, all of which should be respected and guaranteed. In particular, leading cadres at all levels should effectively enhance the concept of human rights and awareness of the rule of law, and should truly integrate the concept of human rights and awareness of the rule of law into their daily governance. In rural governance, if there is a lack of respect for and protection of farmers' basic human rights, there can be no genuine good rural governance.
 
The second is to maintain and develop farmers' property rights. This means granting and guaranteeing farmers fuller and more complete property rights. Granting and protecting the property rights of villagers is an important task of the "three rural issues 三农"[2] work of the new era, a basic project to guarantee people's needs for a better life, and an important goal of rural governance. The property rights of farmers can be divided into collective property rights and individual property rights, mainly including the right to contract out land, homesteads, and housing rights, rights to collective assets, and other property rights. Rural collective property rights have problems of unclear ownership, unclear rights and responsibilities, difficulties in terms of transfer, and lax protections. 

These are important property rights factors leading to the decay of the countryside and impacting its effective governance. To carry out rural revitalization and improve rural governance, it is necessary to comprehensively deepen the reform of the rural collective property rights system, develop farmers' property rights, build a rural collective property rights system with clear ownership, complete rights and responsibilities, smooth transfers and strict protection, boost the development of urban-rural integration and improve rural governance. If the collective property rights do not function properly and the farmers' property rights are not brought to fruition and protected, then there is no way to talk about the good governance of the countryside.
 
The third is to maintain and develop the farmers' right to rule. This means to develop socialist democratic politics, to completely implement the rules of democratic governance employed in modern countries, and to use the institutional system to ensure that farmers are the masters of their own fate. The farmers' right to rule is the same as the farmers' right to participate in the governance of public affairs, which is a political right of citizens in a modern state. A basic feature of the modern state is the wider participation of the people in the governance of public life. The idea of the people as masters is the essence and core of socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics. The report of the 19th National Congress stated that:

"Socialist democracy in China is the broadest, truest and most useful democracy that safeguards the fundamental interests of the people. To develop socialist democracy is to reflect the will of the people, protect their rights and interests, stimulate their creative vitality, and employ the institutional system to ensure that the people are masters."
 
To ensure that the people are masters means to guarantee and realize the people's management and governance of state affairs, social affairs, and economic and cultural undertakings. There are two basic aspects of farmers' rights to rule: first, participation in the governance of various public affairs at the state and local levels; and second, participation in the governance of various public affairs at the community level. Farmers' right to governance should develop with the development of economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological construction. If farmers cannot effectively participate in rural governance and become the main agents of rural governance, then it is impossible for rural governance to be good governance.
 
Rural Governance Must Reshape Three Environments
 
The new era of rural governance needs to reshape three kinds of environments, because in the absence of proper political, cultural, and ecological environments in rural areas, there is no good rural governance.
 
First, we much reshape the rural political environment. The totalitarianism 全能主义 that marked the regime prior to reform and opening and the bigwig capitalism 权贵资本主义 since reform and opening have both caused great historical damage to the normal political environment in the countryside. Problems such as rural corruption, collusion between government and business, and village bullying have seriously damaged the rural political ecology. Without a good political ecology in the countryside, good rural governance is not possible. The central government emphasizes the need to build a clean and healthy political ecology. This is needed in the countryside as well. The key to purifying the political ecology of the countryside and reshaping the political environment is to extend to the rural grass-roots level the policy of strictly governing the Party and ruling the country according to law, meaning to vigorously fight against corruption and rights infringement, using the law to crack down on improprieties, and focus on promoting social justice. We must effectively strengthen modern civic education, protect civil rights, and improve the degree of modern political civilization in the countryside.
 
Second, we must reshape the rural cultural environment. It is easy to destroy an old world, but difficult to build a new one.  Since 1949, China's countryside has undergone two long periods of great destruction, one revolutionary and one “constructive.” Traditional rural culture has been dealt a mortal blow. Villages lacking cultural support have also lost their sense of humanism and their spiritual basis. To reshape the rural cultural environment, the ambiguous notions of right and wrong must be changed so that people can distinguish one from the other; inverted standards of good and evil must be reversed so that people can distinguish good from evil. To revitalize the villages we must revitalize village culture. To reshape the cultural environment of the villages, we must bring about a combination of the excellent values of Chinese traditional culture and the shared values of the modern world. For thousands of years, Chinese villages have a history and culture of self-governance tradition, and a deeply rooted moral tradition and moral culture represented by Confucianism.
 
Third, reshape the rural ecological environment. Human beings are a product of the natural ecological environment, and if you destroy the natural ecological environment, you destroy the home of human existence. The destruction of the natural ecological environment by industrialization is unprecedented. Over the past 40 years of reform, although China has made historic achievements in material terms, it has also caused unprecedented damage to the environment. Air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, agricultural pollution, and pollution of agricultural products and food in rural areas are alarming, and when you look around, the hills are almost all bare. What from ancient times has been a beautiful countryside with blue sky and white clouds, green mountains and beautiful water, birdsong and flowers, beautiful villages at peace with nature, all of this has been fatally damaged over the course of these two generations.
 
In the new era, we must transcend traditional industrial civilization, insist on green development, and choose the path of ecological civilization. To reshape the ecological environment of the countryside, we must change the production and lifestyle based on plundering, wasting, and destroying natural resources, and resolutely follow what our leaders have proposed, which is to protect the ecological environment as if it were our eyes, treat it as if it were our life, and resolutely abandon the development model that damages or even destroys the ecological environment, so that the land of China will have a bluer sky, greener mountains, clearer water, and a more beautiful environment. Only if we promote rural governance in a healthy, beautiful and livable natural ecological environment can we achieve a sustainable development of our civilization.
 
Governance should Innovate in terms of the "Three Governance" Methods and Systems
　 
The first task is to look at villager autonomy from the perspective of developing local autonomy, and vigorously strengthen laws to promote local autonomy. Village-level autonomy has been implemented for some thirty years, and while there have been numerous achievements, problems still remain. For example, the village cadres have evolved into "village bullies," low-level officials are corrupt, villagers' self-governance has morphed into cadres' self-governance, all of which means that villagers are not practicing democratic decision-making, democratic participation, democratic management, or democratic supervision. After thirty years of practice, we should take a serious look at the state of villagers' self-governance with an eye toward improvement and the achievement of a new leap in self-governance.
 
The key is to view villagers' autonomy in terms of local autonomy, both to more firmly ground villagers' autonomy and to raise the level and quality of that autonomy. The relationship between the central and local levels should be clarified at the national constitutional level, the system of local autonomy should be improved, and the Local Autonomy Law should be formulated from the top level to implement the autonomy system at the county, township and village levels. The scope of local self-government affairs at all levels should be clearly defined, and the relationship between official rule and self-government, Party rule and self-government, and economic construction and community self-government should be sorted out.  We must actively develop comprehensive farming association organizations and various rural social organizations, to stimulate the vitality of the vast number of farmers and rural society, and to give full play to the key role of farmers and rural social organizations in self-governance.

Villagers' self-governance should not be a matter for the civil affairs department to promote, but should be the great focus of the construction of our national political civilization.  We must raise the political status, and promote the institutionalization, standardization and procedural construction of villagers' self-governance, so that the villagers' self-governance system operates in an effective and orderly manner, thus genuinely protecting the villagers in their implementation of  democratic elections, democratic consultation, democratic decision-making, democratic management, and democratic supervision in accordance with the law.
 
Second, we must view the rule of law in the countryside from the perspective of building the rule of law in China, and effectively promote the construction of the democratic rule of law. In the process of comprehensively promoting the rule of law, we must strengthen the construction of democracy and the rule of law in the countryside from the strategic heights of the construction of China under the rule of law, focusing on the establishment of a sound system of laws and regulations conducive to the realization of good governance in the countryside and the full realization of the democratization of rural governance, that is, the rule of law. The report of the 19th National Congress clearly states that the main contradiction of our society has been transformed into the contradiction between the people's growing need for a better life and unbalanced and insufficient development, and points out that the people's need for a better life is becoming more and more extensive, which not only creates higher demands for material and cultural life, but also increasing demands for democracy, rule of law, fairness, justice, security, and a clean environment. To this end, I would like to emphasize three key points:
 
First, work devoted to the "three rural issues" must abandon the past tendency to solely pursue increased income for farmers, and must accord highest priority to strengthening rural democracy and the rule of law. The goal must be for the majority of farmers to be able to live a rich material life and enjoy modern democracy and freedom under the leadership of the Communist Party. This is the original intention and historical mission of the Communist Party.
 
Second, People's Congresses and their Standing Committees at all levels should change their governmentalized ways of thinking and working, and should strengthen legislative research and legislative work around the construction of democracy and rule of law in the villages, so as to effectively address the situation of deficiency in the system of democratic rule of law in the villages. NPC deputies at all levels have to play a real role in representing public opinion. There is vast room for improvement in this area.
 
Third, as the "key minority," leading cadres at all levels should truly take the lead in establishing the concept of human rights and the awareness of democracy and the rule of law, especially to address the situation in which some local leading cadres clamor to defend the people in the abstract but continue to harm the interests of the masses in their concrete behavior.  This will mean altering the situation where some local leading cadres uphold the spirit of the 19th Party Congress and Xi Jinping Thought at the macro level, but oppose this spirit at the micro level. For example, our national leaders distinctly put forward the "people-centered development ideology," emphasizing that "the people's small concerns are our own big concerns,” which means that our starting point should be the things that the masses care about, the things that make the masses happy. However, while certain local leading cadres are active and excel in political study sessions, in their actual work they openly do things that seriously damage the interests of the masses. This phenomenon of good words and evil deeds requires deep thought and amelioration.
 
Next, we should look at rural moral governance from the goal of rebuilding a moral China and continuously improve the level of moral civilization. China has been a country of rites and rituals since ancient times and has a long tradition of ruling the country by virtue. However, China is now facing a serious moral crisis. In the new era, to achieve moral governance in the countryside, we must emerge from this moral crisis and rebuild a moral China.
 
The first task requires building a government that practices righteousness, integrity, and morality. The moral character of the government determines and influences the moral ethos of society. As Confucius said:  "To govern means to rectify. If you lead on the people with correctness, who will dare not to be correct?"[3]
 
The urbanization model resulting from China’s urban-rural divide has produced a population of some two hundred million migrant workers in the cities, leaving hundreds of millions of women, children and elderly behind in the rural areas, dividing many families. This kind of family-destroying urbanization has had an unparalleled impact on social morality. In addition, some local governments are eager to forcibly demolish people's houses, which immediately plunges them into a miserable situation of homelessness.
 
In addition, it is necessary to build a corps of leadership cadres that practice morality and to create a social elite that similarly practices morality. Confucius said:  “The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it.”[4]
 
The moral standards of Party members and leading cadres at all levels, as well that of other elite groups in society, directly affects the entire social climate. If the upper beam is crooked, the lower beam cannot be. In 1978, the U.S. Congress passed the U.S. Government Ethics Act to legally regulate the professional ethics of government officials. It is also necessary for China to enact similar ethics laws to regulate the ethics of leading cadres at all levels, starting with the strengthening of official ethics which will effect the improvement of public ethics.
 
Notes 

[1]张英洪, “最新通报背后, 基层治理正面临三股势力冲击,” published online in 文化纵横/Beijing Cultural Review on February 22, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The “three rural issues” generally refer to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers.

[3]Translator's note:  James Legge's translation, available online here.  

[4]Translator's note:  James Legge's translation, available online here.