Eight
Everyday Power Relations: Changes in a North China Village

Yun-xiang Yan

In assessing the political consequences of departures from central planning, a key concern is the impact of market-oriented reforms on power relations within socialist redistributive systems. Iván Szelényi's work (1978, 1988) on social stratification in Hungary implies that the power and privilege of socialist redistributors will be undermined by the introduction of market mechanisms. Inspired by Szelényi's insight, Victor Nee (1989) developed a theory of market transition. The core of Nee's theory is that the increased scope of market allocation reduces the scope of bureaucratic redistribution, eroding the power and privilege of officials, who lose their monopoly over resources. This theory has, however, encountered much contrary evidence of the continuing influence of communist cadres at all levels. Jean Oi has proposed an alternative account that emphasizes the cadres' economic role in industrializing villages as the main root of both corruption and their legal power and privilege. She maintains that market allocation in an unreformed political system creates new opportunities for patronage and corruption, altering, but not diminishing, the power and privilege of officials who deal regularly with ordinary citizens (Oi 1989a, 1989b).

Focusing on everyday power relations in a north China village, the present study addresses the same issue, but offers a perspective different from either of the two abovementioned theories. According to Max Weber, power is "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis

on which this probability rests" (Weber 1947, 152). Following this definition, I examine how people influence the conduct of others in daily life within the boundaries of peasant communities. Changes in power relations are seen as the result of interactions between cadres and ordinary villagers,^[1] and attention is thus paid equally to both cadres and ordinary villagers as political actors.

From the perspective of social-exchange theory, I start with a discussion of how rural economic reforms generated a dynamic of change in power relations. Then I examine the political outcomes of these changes in two ways—namely, the altered behavior patterns among the grass-root cadres and the political mentality and actions of the villagers. To conclude the essay, I relate this village study to the general impact of reforms on cadre power, an issue raised by the two aforementioned theories.

Xiajia village, where I conducted my fieldwork from February to August 1991, is located on the southern edge of Heilongjiang Province. It is a farming community with a population of 1,564, growing mostly maize and soybeans. Owing to its poor transport links, there was no rural industry in the village during the collective era, and only a few grain-processing mills exist now, all of them family businesses. According to my survey in 1991, the average net income per capita was 616 yuan in 1990 (the national average was 623 yuan), which places Xiajia at the midpoint economically among Chinese farming communities. In other words, Xiajia will never be designated a government showcase of rural development. It is an ordinary place in every sense except for one thing: I lived in the village for seven years (1971–78) during the collective era and thus know most of its residents' life histories. I revisited Xiajia and carried out a field survey during the spring of 1989, which made it possible to discern the most recent changes when I went back yet again in 1991.

Like most rural communities in China, Xiajia has undergone dramatic social changes over the past four decades. In addition to the influences of the larger social environment, the village's fate was also closely associated

[1] In this chapter I mainly discuss power relations between the village cadres and peasants. There is no doubt that peasant communities, especially after the reforms, are not isolated universes, and residents have to be involved in power relations with people outside their villages in both economic and social as well as political terms. But these are different kinds of power relations, involving hierarchy and inequality between rural and urban sectors. Moreover, the village cadres are usually treated like ordinary villagers when they go beyond the village boundary, because they are also "rural potatoes" in the eyes of those who are living within the system of state distribution and social welfare. Analytically, it is necessary to distinguish village cadres who do not belong to the state bureaucratic system from cadres in local government or other state organs. Hereafter, by cadre I mean village cadres, and I use the term state officials to describe the cadres within the state bureaucratic system, which begins at the "township" (xiang ), the administrative level immediately above the village.

with its leadership. Radical local leadership during the first decade of socialism subjected Xiajia to most, if not all, of the irrational social experiments of the Great Leap Forward. Despite these experiments and the devastation of the 1959–61 famine, by the late 1960s Xiajia had become relatively successful in collective agriculture, and it remained so throughout the 1970s. One of the key factors in the village's achievements, according to many informants, was good management by brigade and team leaders. The collectives in Xiajia were dismantled at the end of 1983.^[2] Consequently, the number of cadres at the village level decreased from thirteen to five, including the party secretary, village head, deputy party secretary, village accountant, and head of public security. More important, as shown below, after 1983, these cadres began to play a different role in village politics.

The Bases of Cadre Power in the Collective Economy

To examine the dynamics of current changes in power relations in village life, we must first understand the structural basis of cadre power prior to the reforms and then see what has happened to this basis since then. In this connection, social-exchange theory provides an instructive perspective.

From a social-exchange point of view, power can be seen as "the ability of persons or groups to impose their will on others despite resistance through deterrence either in the form of withholding regularly supplied rewards or in the form of punishment, inasmuch as the former as well as the latter constitute, in effect, a negative sanction" (Blau 1964, 117). Here the availability and control of resources are crucial for establishing power in social interactions. According to Richard Emerson (1962, 1972), exchange relationships are based on the predicated dependence of two parties upon each other's resources. To the extent that A is unwilling voluntarily to surrender a resource desired by B and able to use this resource to force, coerce, or induce compliance by B, A is said to have power over B. Moreover, if A can monopolize all the resources B needs, B will be dependent on A. Unless B can furnish other kinds of benefits to A as an exchange, this dependence compels B to comply with A's requests. Hence an unbalanced power relationship is established between A and B.

In his analysis of "power-dependence" relations, Emerson presented four ways for a given individual to avoid becoming involved in a power-dependence relationship. When one needs a service another has to offer, one can (a) supply him with another. service; (b) obtain the service elsewhere; (c) force him to provide the service; or (d) give up the original

[2] Heilongjiang was the last province in China to dismantle the commune system, and the main reason, according to Luo Xiaopeng and others, was the relative success of collective farming. See Luo et al. 1985. For a detailed introduction to Xiajia village, see Yan 1993, 17—39.

demand. If the former is not able to choose any of the four alternatives, he has to become dependent on the latter and accept the latter's power (Emerson 1962, 31–41). Peter Blau reformulated Emerson's schema and applied it further to specify the conditions of social independence, the requirements of power, and their structural implications. According to Blau, the conditions of independence include strategic resources (like money) for starting an exchange relationship, the available ways to escape the other's power, coercive force to compel others, and self-reduction of demands. Being complementary to the conditions of independence, the basic strategies to attain and sustain power are indifference to what others offer, monopoly over what others need, law and order, and support of a value system (Blau 1964, 118–24).

Applying this approach to examine the previous structure of power relations in Xiajia, it is evident that because cadres were able to control almost all resources in the collective economy, villagers were left no other choice but to subject themselves to cadre power. Cadre power in the prereform era was based on four main conditions.

First, collectivization provided cadres with the most efficient way to monopolize resources, from the basic means of livelihood to opportunities for upward mobility. In the collectives, Xiajia peasants worked in groups under the supervision of cadres, and their basic needs were distributed annually by the collectives. They had no right to decide what activities they would engage in. During the more radical periods, for all social activities outside the collectives, such as visiting relatives or going to nearby marketplaces, peasants also needed the formal permission of cadres. Complaints about cadres or about state policies were severely punished, and the complainants were often accused of counterrevolutionary activities. In short, peasants were deprived of all rights to basic economic, social-cultural, and political resources (see Oi 1989a, 131–55; Parish and Whyte 1978, 96–114; Zweig 1989).

Second, their loyalty to the party state helped prevent cadres from being seduced by bribery or other forms of corruption, and thus increased their overall ability to exercise power. Owing to the emphasis on political correctness and class origin in cadre recruitment, only those who closely followed the party line and their superiors' instructions could stay in power, and their political loyalty was consistently tested in numerous political campaigns. Political rewards from higher levels of government served to raise their social and political status, bringing psychological rewards and reinforcing their political loyalty. Compared to the current situation, economic corruption was not a serious problem among cadres in the collectives. Many cadres lived in conditions similar to those of ordinary villagers, and the main material privileges they enjoyed were better meals and less manual labor. The

revolutionary, honest cadre was a generally accepted ideal. This probity in turn strengthened cadres' capacity to exercise power over team members (see Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992, 26–30; Huang Shu-min 1989, 105–28; Potter and Potter 1990, 283–95).

Third, state penetration into village society established the legitimacy of cadre authority, and "mass dictatorship" provided a coercive force to compel peasants. Commune officials supervised all village work and always supported village cadres when conflicts occurred between cadres and villagers. Political struggle sessions and the use of village militia are the most common forms of mass dictatorship, and in many cases village cadres took advantage of these means to attack their personal foes (see Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 1991; Hinton 1983, 169–261; Oi 1989a; Siu 1989, 189–243).

A fourth source of cadre power was the hegemony of communist ideology. Cadres could enforce their authority by claiming that they represented the party's political line, and their correctness thus could not be questioned by the masses. By resorting to the official ideology, cadres were also able to justify actions that proved to be against the private interests of the peasants, such as eliminating any life chances outside the collectives. "Revolutionary ideologies, which define the progress of a radical movement as inherently valuable for its members, bestow power on the movement's leadership" (Blau 1964, 122). Moreover, the domination of communist ideology made villagers pliant to the dictates of political campaigns that empowered only the movement leaders (see Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992; Potter and Potter 1990, 270–82; Zweig 1989).

For analytic purposes, the conditions needed for villagers to avoid cadre power are: (1) freedom of physical mobility; (2) a supply of strategic resources able to undermine cadre power; (3) personal ability to resist, or the use of protective networks; and (4) indifference to ideological mobilization. Obviously, none of these conditions existed during the collective era. There was no alternative available to villagers. The household registration system, the ban on rural-urban migration, and the requirement of official certificates to travel, all imprisoned villagers within the boundaries of the collectives (see Potter 1983, 465–99). They had little to offer cadres except bodily service, and what they did have all came from the collectives, which were run by the cadres. Under the totalitarian rulership of the CCP, personal resistance to cadre power or to ideological mobilization was virtually impossible. It would have resulted in grave political trouble.

The Dynamics of Change and Market-Oriented Reform

The rural reforms brought fundamental changes to this seemingly immutable power structure by creating alternative resources and opportunities

outside the bureaucratic redistributive system, and by attenuating the conditions that made villagers dependent upon cadres. There have been four key components of this process of change.

First, decollectivization has undermined the most important basis of cadre power: monopoly over resources. This is mainly because of the distribution of land to families and the shift to household farming. In the eyes of Xiajia residents, the most significant aspect of rural reform was the distribution of land. They always refer to the date of land distribution when discussing recent changes in village life. Farmland in Xiajia was divided into two categories: ration land (kouliang tian ) and contract land (chengbao tian ). Every person in the village (regardless of age or sex) was entitled to have two mu of ration land, and every adult male laborer received ten mu of contract land. Peasants' obligations to provide the state with cheap requisitioned grain and taxes only applied to contract land. The effective duration of land distribution was fifteen years, and within that period no further adjustment would take place.

For ordinary farmers in Xiajia, land is not merely a fundamental means of production; it is the most reliable source of social welfare. Control over land is nothing less than controlling one's fate. From the first day that villagers could make their own decisions about what to plant on their land and how to use the surplus, the very basis of cadre power began to crumble. It was common for villagers to express their feelings about decollectivization with a modern term: freedom (ziyou ),^[3] and they then added a footnote to it by quoting an old popular saying: "People have to obey the person who controls their rice bowls" (duan shui de wan, fu shui guan ). An old villager once told me: "With a piece of land, you have a rice bowl of your own. It is not the iron bowl that urban people have, but you don't need to beg anybody for a bowl of rice—you dig it up from your own land."

The significance of this change is best illustrated by the simple but profound fact that more than 90 percent of the adult males in Xiajia village now have their own private seals (or "name chops"). In the past this was a privilege enjoyed only by the cadres who ran collectives. Nowadays the peasants need private seals for signing a wide variety of contracts with companies and with local government agencies. The immediate consequence of the departure from collective farming is that they have gained the status of independent legal persons.

Second, as many economists have noted, agricultural productivity surged suddenly after the switch to household farming, and living standards in rural China have generally improved to a remarkable extent. One of the most important consequences of the improvement in villagers' economic

[3] It is interesting that peasants in other places, such as Anhui province, also used the word freedom to describe their new experience as independent farmers (see Chen 1990, 31).

circumstances has been the eclipse of the previous social hierarchy by new patterns of economic and social stratification. This is suggested by a household survey of family incomes that I conducted during the spring of 1989 (see table 8. 1).

Table 8.1 suggests that while village cadres have taken advantage of the reforms to accumulate private wealth and have become prosperous, a number of ordinary peasants, including some of the formerly disadvantaged, have also benefited both economically and socially. In particular, peasant households of former "middle-peasant" origins have done extremely well. As a result, the previous socialist hierarchy is being replaced by a dual system of social stratification that is characterized by the coexistence of bureaucratic rank with a market-based class order. The emergence of this new structure of social stratification, which echoes what Szelényi (1988) found in rural Hungary, has contributed a great deal to a new pattern of power relations, which was quite visible when I conducted my second field survey of Xiajia in 1991.

The rise of a new group of rich peasants presented a challenge to cadre power in two ways. Many peasants, especially those who have become relatively affluent, suddenly came to possess the strategic resources (money or goods) for social exchange. According to social-exchange theory, "a person

who has all the resources required as effective inducements for others to furnish him with the services and benefits he needs is protected against becoming dependent on anyone" (Blau 1964, 119). The shift in control of resources to peasant households constitutes a decline in villagers' dependence on cadres. The rise of peasants' economic well-being further broke the superiority of cadres in the previous social order and made cadres susceptible to material inducements offered by villagers (I shall return to this point later).

The third dynamic factor generated by the reforms is that the party state has begun to retreat from rural society, and mass dictatorship as a means for controlling society has gradually dissipated. A similar indicator of this change is that the village militia has disappeared—although it still exists on paper, the position of militia head has been eliminated. Everyone is so busy trying to advance their economic status that even state officials are no longer interested in monitoring villagers' behavior. In 1991, few state officials came to the village to supervise policy implementation or other work, since the local government's primary concerns were now grain procurement and tax collection.

In contrast to the retreat of the state, social networks made up of connections—referred to in Chinese as guanxi —have become increasingly important in village life. It is true that network-building persisted during the collective era, despite the state's efforts to transform traditional patterns of interpersonal relations in China (see Gold 1985; Oi 1989a; Walder 1986). However, since the reforms, the social scope of personal networks has expanded remarkably, involving not only kinship ties but also friends and partners both within and outside the village. As a result, gift exchange, the traditional method of cultivating personal ties, has intensified over the past decade. My survey shows that in 1990, 202 households in Xiajia village (54 percent of the total) spent more than 500 yuan apiece on gifts, with the highest reaching 2,650 yuan. Most of the gift-giving activities took place in the context of institutionalized rituals, such as weddings and funerals. If we take 500 yuan as the average expenditure, this means that most households spent nearly 20 percent of their annual incomes to maintain and expand their social networks (for a detailed account of this change, see Yan 1993).

This recent rise in network-building results from newly emerged demands for cooperation, self-protection, and self-realization among peasants, who have now become independent producers. Today, peasants have to deal with all kinds of problems in agricultural production, from purchasing seeds to selling grain. Mutual assistance during the busy season, financial aid from private loan sources, and social connections outside the village are thus all vital to the peasants' pursuit of a better life. Moreover, a larger web of personal relations provides a stronger protective network for peasants

when they come in conflict with village cadres or agents of the local government.

Finally, it is widely recognized that communist ideology no longer provides a compelling basis for the legitimacy of the party state or normative values for organizing society. At the village level, the end of communist ideology is reflected clearly in peasants' cynical attitude toward politics and the state, as well as toward cadre power. They have become indifferent to political campaigns (such as the recent one called "socialist education") and suspicious of cadres' corruption. Paralleling the decline of communist ideology, many new ideas and values have been introduced into rural China, and they play an important role in changing peasant mentalities. Indeed, the flow of information into rural areas today merits much more attention than it currently receives.

Television is one important example. One evening in 1978, I joined several young Xiajia villagers in a five-mile walk to another village in order to watch the first TV set in the area. By 1991, there were 135 TV sets in Xiajia alone, including eight color sets, which translates into one set for every three households. While it is true that the TV stations are under state control, one should note that since the reforms, television programs have changed greatly. In addition to the conventional propaganda, there are many other programs introducing new values and new ideas. For instance, I found myself watching the American TV police series "Hunter" in Xiajia village, the same show having been broadcast in Boston several months before. As a consequence of such programs, during my fieldwork, I was asked to explain such things as how the U.S. Supreme Court works, why an American state governor has no right to control a district judge, and who was fighting for justice in the Gulf War.

In table 8.2, I have summarized the main points discussed above. All the dynamics of change resulted directly or indirectly from rural economic reforms, especially the radical departure from central planning—namely, decollectivization and the restoration of household farming. Each of the dynamics may influence the previous order of social relations in general and thus have structural implications in a broader sense. For instance, household farming may lead to a market economy and privatization, economic development may cause social differentiation, the rapid expansion of personal networks indicates the rise of a social force, and if all these are the case, a postcommunist political culture may well be on its way.^[4] Although it is

[4] In an earlier essay Gordon White 1987 discusses the new patterns of power and new axes of political conflict and cooperation generated by the economic reforms. He suggests that a possible political consequence of these changes might be the emergence of a new political process in rural China.

hard to predict the long-term consequences of these changes, the current political outcomes can be seen clearly in two aspects of village life: changes in the interests and behavior of cadres and the new political mentalities and actions of villagers.

"Play the Game Wisely": Changing Patterns of Cadre Behavior

Two questions are crucial in assessing changes in village cadres' interests and behavior. What is the criterion of a successful village cadre —political reward from the party state or personal achievement in the family economy? And what is the locus of cadres' legitimacy—the trust of their superiors or the support of the masses? Prior to the rural reforms, neither of these two questions was significant for cadres, because the former answers were the only real choices. During the collective era, the Xiajia leadership was characterized by its strong commitment to the public good, an imperious and despotic style of work, and (for much of the time) relatively successful management of collective agriculture. While enjoying various privileges, including higher work points, most cadres considered political rewards most desirable, and many cadre families were financially on a par with ordinary villagers. The reforms have changed this, however, because alternative resources and opportunities were created outside the bureaucratic system as the collectives were dismantled. Gradually, cadres changed their

interests and behavior. The differences among the three party secretaries in charge of Xiajia during various periods are the best example of this.

The party secretary from 1952 to 1960 was considered the worst leader by my informants, because he was extremely loyal to higher-level officials. He endeavored to implement all the irrational policies of the Great Leap Forward, thus making Xiajia residents suffer more than their neighbors during the 1959–61 famine. Relying on the full support of his superiors and the coercive force of the village militia, he controlled Xiajia tyrannically, acquiring the nickname "Big Wolf." An example frequently cited by my informants was that he had ordered a villager tied up and beaten badly just because he had missed a meal in the collective meal hall and complained about it. While the villagers struggled with the threat of hunger in 1959, this party secretary climbed to the highest point in his political career—he was selected as a model grass-roots cadre and invited to participate in an official ceremony at the National Day celebration in Beijing. When I interviewed him about the Great Leap, he was still immersed in happy memories of his glorious past. He went into minute detail, telling me how many cities he had visited during that tour, how happy he was when he met Marshal Zhu De, chairman of the National People's Congress, and how he learned to use flush toilets in fancy hotels. Back home, however, he lived in the same conditions as the village poor, and he was widely recognized as an honest cadre, free of corruption. It seems obvious that he believed in what the party said and worked wholeheartedly for the state, which, by its ideological definition, should also have conformed with the interests of the Xiajia people. For this reason, many villagers have an ambivalent attitude toward this man: on the one hand, they hate him for inflicting famine and poverty on the village; on the other, they respect him for his commitment to public duty and his selfless character.

The party secretary from 1978 to 1987 oversaw the most dramatic turn of events: the dismantling of collectives. Xiajia's collective economy achieved great progress under his leadership during the early 1980s; in the best year (1980), the value of ten work points reached 2.50 yuan. As did his predecessor, he also resorted to coercion to exercise his power and tightly controlled the social life of villagers. He confessed to me that he could not remember how many people he had beaten during his ten-year reign as party secretary. Given this patriarchical tradition among village cadres, it was natural that he and his colleagues first resisted decollectivization and then encountered tremendous difficulties dealing with villagers who were no longer dependent on the cadres' management of production. He told me that after decollectivization, "doing thought work"^[5] was no longer effective,

[5] The term thought work can be applied to many means of controlling people, from personal persuasion, informal interrogation, and study workshops to public struggle sessions. The ultimate goal of doing thought work is to make the subject comply to the authority of cadres.

and people did not respect the authority of cadres any more. He tried to organize villagers to carry out such projects as opening a collective enterprise and transforming a dry field into an irrigated rice paddy, but people did not respond to his call. Worse, the party did not appear to appreciate cadres' political achievements, and higher-level state officials withdrew their support of village cadres when the latter needed it most. The most upsetting incident for him was when he became involved in a public conflict with a villager in 1987. Rather than supporting him, the township government pretended to know nothing about it. "It is meaningless to be a cadre now," he said when he explained to me why he had resigned after that incident. Obviously, as a figure mediating two periods, he could not adapt to the new type of power relationships after the reforms and thus had to retreat.

The decline of appreciation for "revolutionary cadres" did not bother the next party secretary, because he simply did not care about political rewards. During one of my interviews in 1989, he gave an interesting explanation of his motives: "Society has changed now. Who cares about the party and the state? Even the top leaders in Beijing are only interested in getting rich, otherwise they should first educate their own children. Why am I doing this job? Simple—for money. I was not interested in the title of party secretary, but I do like the salary of 3,000 yuan per year. In other words, I am working for my children, not for the party." Two years later, I was told that the same cadre had designed his strategy in terms of three "nos": saying nothing, doing nothing, and offending nobody. When I checked this with him myself, he did not hesitate to admit it. His "three-nos" strategy is best illustrated by the way he dealt with a dispute between the village vice head and a peasant, in which the latter blamed and then cursed the former in the village office, where all five cadres were present for a meeting about population control. As I was an invited visitor at the meeting, I witnessed the whole affair and was surprised when the party secretary kept silent until the end. I also found that he did not use the local phrase "sitting on the throne" (zuo yi di ) to describe his position, even though it was the popular term used by both cadres and villagers for the act of taking the top position in the village. However, he does have something to be proud of: he has advanced his family from one of the poorest to one of the richest in Xiajia, and his two sons' families also moved to the top of the "rich list" in the past two years. This advancement, many informants suggested, was because he was party secretary.

It is clear, in short, that economic benefits have replaced political rewards as the key object of cadres' careers, and these benefits are generated within

the village, not granted by political superiors. Even the party has realized that money now speaks louder than political slogans, and has adopted a market mechanism as a means of maintaining its political control over local cadres. According to Xiajia cadres, the township government has divided their salaries, which draw on local taxes paid by villagers, into a basic salary and bonuses. The bonuses make up four-fifths of their entire incomes, and are linked to the completion of specific tasks. For instance, if they accomplish the work of supervising spring plowing, they may earn one-fifteenth of their annual salaries as a reward, and if they fail they lose the same amount as punishment. Ironically, this method has not raised the cadres' motivation, because many feel manipulated by their party superiors and have thus lost their last vestige of political loyalty. As a cadre commented, "We are treated by our own party as circus dogs — you play a little game well, you get some food in return. Play it one more time, you get another tiny reward."

The locus of cadre legitimacy has also changed remarkably. During the collective era, although in theory village cadres should have been elected by the masses, few attained their positions through such means. No one could stay in power without the trust and support of higher levels of government, and unpopular leaders, like Xiajia's party secretary during the 1950s, were able to hold power as long as they were appreciated by their superiors. Therefore it was out of the question for cadres to put the support of the masses ahead of the demands of their superiors. There was only one known exception in the recent history of Xiajia. Immediately after the fall of the first party secretary in 1960, in an attempt to protect themselves, villagers (through party members) elected a demobilized soldier as the party secretary. He was a well-known anti-authoritarian character and was afraid of no one. This man stayed in power for only a couple of months and was removed from office after he made his first serious effort to resist the orders of the commune party committee. This incident might be seen as failed resistance from below, but it also demonstrates that the authority of village cadres during the collective era depended completely on higher-level officials, and the villagers could do little to affect the power structure in their village.

After the reforms, however, village cadres have gradually come to depend more on support from below than recognition from above. As a result of the reform effort to separate the party committee from government and the polity from the economy, along with the end of political campaigns, village cadres receive fewer administrative instructions and less political support. The recent reform effort to establish "autonomous village committees" based on mass elections also constituted a potential threat to their power base (see Wang 1992). One attempt at free elections was made in 1983 in Xiajia, resulting in the village head being voted out of power by the villagers. That incident scared the cadres so much that they have stifled any kind of election since then.

In addition to the changes in the broader environment, a new feeling of being salaried public servants is also affecting cadres' behavior, because their salaries draw on the money collected from peasant households in the name of "public funding." The cadres, who can no longer claim they are working for the party, feel indebted to the local people, especially when the latter repeatedly make reference to this sensitive subject during public disputes. Moreover, to carry out unpleasant tasks like collecting taxes and grain, or supervising birth control, cadres need the cooperation of their subordinates. As the current party secretary in Xiajia said, "I know that the villagers hate to feed cadres. I would too, if I were them. Collecting grain and money, forcing women to submit to sterilization, all the jobs I do are awful. The most important thing is to play the game wisely. Who knows what is going to happen after you fall out of power?"

Being aware of their newly developed dependence on their subordinates' support, village cadres have lost the incentive to enforce unpopular policies and have instead begun to play a role of mediator or middleman when the state's policies are in direct conflict with local interests, such as in the case of population control. It has long been recognized that the one-child policy causes widespread resentment among peasants. Nonetheless, it should be noted that a broad gap has always existed between this policy and its implementation. From the very beginning, the implementation of the one-child policy encountered resistance from the peasants. In the mid 1980s, the state seemed to retreat silently by allowing couples whose first child was a daughter to have another child in hopes that it would be a boy.

In Xiajia village, the implementation of the single-child policy started at the same time that the rural reforms began. Those who had a second child after April 1980 were fined 700 yuan by the commune government. Fortunately, the village office (the production brigade at that time) showed sympathy to those whose first child was a daughter by giving them a 500 yuan allowance, which meant that the fine was reduced to only 200 yuan, an amount the peasants could afford. But things soon went sour, because the local policy changed in February 1983, and the fine was raised to 1,200 yuan. In the same year, the collectives were also dismantled. Consequently, allowances were no longer available, and those who violated the one-child policy had to pay the entire amount for their second baby. This situation lasted for only one year before state policy changed again. In 1984, women who were over 29 and had a daughter as their first child were permitted to have a second child. To help villagers who wished to have sons, the village cadres had always tried to avoid asking women who had only daughters to submit to sterilization, sometimes by submitting false reports to the government.

To explain the cadres' dilemma, the head of Xiajia village said, "We are peasants, and we know exactly how painful it is for a man to have no son. We

don't want to stop anybody's bloodline. This is something that could destroy our own fortune and merit. But we are also cadres, and we have to do our job. So the only way is to have one eye open and another closed [zheng yi yan, bi yi yan ], to cheat the state while coaxing the villagers.^[6] And the current party secretary told me that the secret of doing work now is yi tuo er bian, which means to deal with any order or policy from above, one needs first to delay implementation and then to alter it, turning the policy to the interests of the village if possible.^[7] As a result of resistance by ordinary peasants and a slowdown by village cadres, the 1990 census in Xiajia village shows that none of the villagers were really affected by the one-child policy during any period. The only difference is that some of them paid for extra children and some did not.

Indeed, the cadres' double-role strategy is well reflected in the phrase "cheating the state and coaxing the villagers" (pian shangbian, hong xiabian ). Because of increasing demand to protect private interests, cadres have deceived the state in recent years more often than in the earlier 1980s. Moreover, the phenomenon of cheating the state is by no means confined to village cadres; state officials at both township and county levels share the same mentality and strategy — otherwise, many of the village cadres' efforts could not possibly succeed. For instance, in the spring of 1991, the county government required all villages to finish corn planting before April 20. But, as Xiajia village land is located on lower ground, the ground temperature was not warm enough for planting by that date. To meet the deadline, the township cadres indicated that Xiajia cadres had completed the task in time. Although everyone knew that the work could not start until two weeks beyond the deadline, the cadres at the county level were satisfied with the report and dealt with their superiors at the provincial level in the same manner. The cadres at township and village levels were happy too, because they completed their bureaucratic duties without bothering the peasants at all. The group that benefited the most, however, were the peasants, and they did not even know what had happened.

This change can best be demonstrated in a comparison with the collective period. The implementation of government policies in the 1950s and 1960s resembled an inflation process. Cadres at every level would add their own efforts to state policies, because they had only one purpose — to be

[6] This kind of mentality is quite common among village cadres in other parts of China. Huang Shu-min reports an interesting story in which the party secretary in a South China village employed a sophisticated strategy to protect some women from abortion, meanwhile meeting the requirements of the upper-level government. See Huang 1989, 185–90.

[7] This constitutes a sharp contrast to the attitude of the former party secretary during the 1950s, who told me, "When I was ruling the village [he used precisely the term ruling, i.e., zuo tianxia in local terms], if the party leader said to do one thing, I would try to complete two, or even three. We believed that if we failed, the landlords would return and take our land away."

appreciated by superiors. A good example of this was the false reports on grain yields among rural cadres during the Great Leap Forward, which eventually caused high procurement of grain and the famine of 1959–61 (see Bernstein 1984). Nowadays, cadres pay much more attention to the reactions from below, and thus policy implementation has become a process of deflation. As rural cadres passively and partially carry out orders from above, central government policies lose their original meaning. This has been captured in a popular saying, "Villages cheat towns, towns cheat counties; it's cheating straight up to the State Council" (cun pian xiang, xiang pian xian, yizhi pian dao guowuyuan ). In a sense, the new pattern of political behavior among the rural cadres might create an informal mechanism to counterbalance and resist state control of society and the negative effects of central policy.

Another interesting outcome of changes in power relations is that village cadres found themselves involved in more resistance, bargaining, and compromise in the process of exerting their power. While passively carrying out unpopular policies from above, they have become much softer when they have to interfere with the private interests of peasants, in order to avoid open resistance from the latter. A simple indicator is that incidents of cadres beating villagers have declined rapidly since decollectivization; instead, more conflicts have ended up in the reverse: cadres being beaten up by villagers. Imposing fines became the only powerful weapon left in the cadres' hands, and it was applied to almost everything the cadres carried out. However, its efficacy has diminished, because some villagers refused to pay their fines, which again led to direct confrontation between cadres and villagers.

All cadres agreed that compared to neighboring villages, Xiajia was by no means a troublesome place, and in recent years, to get a beating was not the worst of fates for cadres. In neighboring villages, cadres' houses have been set afire by peasants, and at least one cadre was killed by two outraged village youths taking revenge. In many cases, violent conflicts were caused by insignificant incidents that would not have been contemplated if the cadres had still held the same power as during the collective era. While I was doing my fieldwork in Xiajia, two cases of arson occurred, and the victims were both cadres. It seems that the local government could do little to protect the village cadres, except to compensate them economically. After the two arson cases, the township government proposed to raise the local taxes paid by villagers and use the money to buy personal insurance for village cadres, in the hope that this would make the villagers reluctant to attack the cadres' property.

In addition to the loss of their monopoly over resources, economic corruption has weakened village cadres' ability to exercise power. In one case I witnessed, a villager's application for a loan to buy chemical fertilizer was

rejected by the village cadres, because funds for agricultural loans had already been diverted to pay the debts of the village. Misappropriation of state funds was nothing unusual at the village level, and the rejection of this personal application would ordinarily have been viewed as a small incident. To the surprise of all, the villager was outraged and started a public dispute with the party secretary on the street. When many people gathered to watch their dispute, the villager suddenly said that he knew where the agricultural loan had gone — it had been lent out as usury by the son of the party secretary. He also accused the village office of collecting extra taxes over the previous year and threatened to report the case to the county government. The party secretary left the spot without saying a word to defend himself. A few days later, I learned that the villager had been allowed to borrow some money from the village office, which was actually a gift to him, because both sides knew the loan would probably never be returned.

Interestingly enough, the same cadre was well known for both his bad temper toward villagers and his commitment to central policy when he was a team leader during the 1970s. People often said that, for this cadre, to curse or beat someone was as normal as eating a bowl of noodles. Despite all complaints, the villagers still supported him and recognized his authority, because he was also responsible for improving the management of the collective. During its successful period of collective farming, most cadres in Xiajia were this type of "iron fist." They ran the village in the style in which a tyrannical father controlled his family in traditional China, and their brutality was justified by their sincere devotion to central policy. Today none of the five current cadres (all of whom were in power before the reform) can boast of being "corruption free," and it is no accident that they have all improved their tempers to a remarkable extent.^[8]

It is true that cadre corruption, which surged markedly after the reforms (Gold 1985; Meaney 1991), reveals that cadres still control resources in many ways and can thereby impose their wills on their subordinates (Oi 1989b; Rocca 1992). Nevertheless, the current rise of cadre corruption does not necessarily strengthen cadre power, for two reasons. First, economic corruption should be distinguished from political corruption. As Gong Xiaoxia writes: "It is after the reforms that cadre corruption began to appear more and more in economic forms…. Since China was a highly politicized society prior to the reforms, cadre corruption during that time

[8] In their follow-up research, the authors of Chen Village found a similar trend of character change among the cadres. For instance, Chen Longyong, once a tyrannical party secretary who controlled the villagers' life tightly, turned himself into a private entrepreneur and "had softened with the years" (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992, 315). His successor, the current party secretary, Baodai, "is fully aware that a leader's power to exact cowed compliance from the peasantry is a thing of the past, and he generally intrudes on the affairs of his neighbors only when mediation is called for" (1992, 320).

presented itself mainly in political forms" (Gong 1992, 52). In the case of Xiajia, many cadres during the collective era were free of economic corruption, but they abused the villagers in more obvious ways than the current cadres. Economic corruption may increase cadres' personal wealth, but it does not allow them to compel obedience from their subordinates.

Second, corruption based on exchange of resources should be distinguished from that based on distributing resources. Because people involved in social exchange need to observe the norm of reciprocity (see Gouldner 1960), the recipient of a gift or a favor is reduced to a position inferior to the donor until the "debt" is repaid (see Mauss 1967). This is well captured in a Chinese proverb: "Eating from others, one's mouth becomes soft; taking from others, one's hands become short" (chi ren zui ruan; na ren shou duan ). It is obvious that when a cadre receives gifts from his subordinates, his superiority is weakened, because such exchanges reduce the recipient to a position of mutual dependence. Moreover, the obligation of reciprocity implies that corruption based on exchange of resources will benefit both sides: the giver as well as the recipient. This is something quite different from transactions based on the more one-sided dependence of the collective era, when cadres distributed resources to villagers who had no real alternatives.

"Leave Me Alone": Political Mentality and Action Among Villagers

The village power game is played out by both cadres and ordinary villagers. These days village cadres must play the game more wisely, because as indicated above, the economic reforms have broken the previous pattern of dependence and raised the position of villagers. More important, market reforms have changed the villagers' mentality as well as their living standard. New attitudes toward cadre power and authority, the rise of individualism, and an emerging conception of personal rights have also served to redefine the power game in Xiajia.

The most dramatic change is in villagers' perception of cadre power and authority. As I have explained elsewhere (Yan 1992), social life in Xiajia was previously far from "egalitarian": the collectives were perhaps no less hierarchical than the prerevolutionary community. When the cadres stood on the top of the social pyramid, fear dominated popular perceptions of cadre power. Nevertheless, villagers still placed their hopes on good leadership and respected those who led the collective to prosperity. Because cadres controlled all resources and opportunities, they represented the only hope for collective betterment. This is well captured in a popular saying of the collective era: "It's better to have a good team leader than to have a good father" (you ge hao baba, bu ru you ge hao duizhang ).

Villagers' fear and respect of cadre power came to an end when the collectives were dismantled in 1983. By the time I conducted my first field survey in early 1989, anger and discontent over cadre corruption had reached a peak. Complaints about various kinds of local taxes and accusations of cadre misconduct were common subjects during my interviews with villagers. To my knowledge, at least two anonymous letters have been sent to the county government in an attempt to bring corrupt cadres into court. Conflicts between cadres and villagers occurred frequently when the latter felt unfairly treated, and quite often a conflict ended in violence. One such public fight in 1987, as noted above, forced the party secretary to resign. This vividly symbolizes the collapse of the authority and power of all village cadres. At that time, many villagers started showing disrespect by refusing to present gifts to cadres in ritual situations, such as weddings or funerals. The village office lost its prestige in the eyes of ordinary farmers, and the focus of public life has gradually moved from the brigade headquarters to the village retail store (for more details see Yan 1992, 15–16; Yan 1993, 167–78).

Obviously, the major reason for the sudden eruption of dissatisfaction with cadre behavior resulted from the advent of family farming, which allows villagers to control their own livelihood. A further reason is that in recent years, the diversification of life chances has raised villagers' sense of individualism and thus changed their views of cadre authority.^[9] A widely cited saying in both urban and rural China is now: "A fish has its way, and a shrimp has its way, too" (yu you yu lu, xia you xia lu ). Here, "way," lu in Chinese, may indicate back doors, social connections, personal skills, and so on — all the means needed to make oneself affluent. During my fieldwork, I heard both rich and poor villagers quoting this popular saying when talking about somebody who had done well economically. In Xiajia, many capable individuals have found a way to make money, such as growing cash crops, developing family sidelines, or working in the cities. One of the best chances for financial advancement in the past two years was created by the establishment of a milk-products factory owned jointly by the local government and the Nestlé company of Switzerland. Five people in the village found jobs in the factory and earned a high salary (300 yuan per month versus an average annual income of 616 yuan per capita). Several dozen villagers responded to the new demand for milk by raising dairy cows and have subsequently gained considerable benefits.

In the place of fear and respect, the villagers began to view the cadres' credibility critically, and few still trust leaders unconditionally. In the eyes of my informants, the good cadre has become a myth. When the story of Baogong, an upright and honest official of the Song dynasty, was shown on

[9] For an instructive study of public perceptions about life chances and the political implications for China, see Whyte 1985.

TV, many commented cynically that Baogong could not survive in today's environment, because his honesty would hurt the interests of other cadres, and he would thus soon be removed from power or forced into corruption.

The suspicion of cadres is so strong that it sometimes causes unnecessary trouble. In a case I witnessed during my fieldwork, three men came to Xiajia to purchase pigs and cheated villagers by using a platform scale rigged to reduce the weight. Their cheating was discovered, but the villagers did not dare to claim compensation, because these three men came in a military truck and stated that they were soldiers. Finally, the village head intervened in the name of the village office and made the three cheaters return the money to the pig farmers. The villagers were not satisfied with this solution and demanded that the cheaters be punished. When the three men left, I was surprised to see some villagers accuse the village head of making a secret deal. They insisted that the village head must have accepted a bribe from the culprits.

When I asked the accusers why they were so critical of the village head, who deserved some credit for handling the problem, I was told that it was his job to resolve problems like this. After all, they said, he earned 2,600 yuan a year, and his salary was extracted from their incomes. "He is fed by us," one said. Here the practice of paying various local taxes in a direct and open way has given the peasants a new perspective from which to view their relationship with cadres. As I indicated earlier, such an awareness of themselves as tax payers not only diminishes villagers' fear of cadres, but also results in cadres realizing that they are, in fact, employed by the villagers.

In 1991, I also found an increasing cynicism about cadre behavior. While some villagers still complained and even directly confronted cadres if their private interests were challenged, their words of discontent rarely turned into action. Most villagers were tired of complaining about cadre corruption and did not even care about the size of cadre salaries. In response to my inquiries about this newly found complacency, I was frequently met with the popular saying, "It is not proper to refuse paying the taxes and procured grain; you cart them away, and leave me my freedom" (huang liang guo shui, bu jiao bu dui; ni na ti liu, gei wo zi you ). Indeed, the typical view among Xiajia residents was put into three words by an informant: "Leave me alone" (bie guan wo ). And the most common strategy adopted by them was to fulfill their prescribed obligations to the state and local government without question and then to protect their personal interests against any additional levies.

In the early stages of my fieldwork, I took this "Leave me alone" mentality as the villagers' passive reaction to the social problems they encountered, and as a sign of their indifference to village politics, including cadre behavion After a few months of observation, however, I became convinced that this posture concealed other meanings. "Leave me alone" conveyed a

strong message — namely, awareness of personal rights and an intention to protect them. Given the heritage of patriarchal authority in Chinese culture and the influence of totalitarian rule under the party, it is not easy for the peasants to tell cadres, "Leave me alone." It could not possibly have happened during the collective period, when the only acceptable demand a peasant could make was for better leadership, and a refusal to accept cadre leadership could lead to accusations of the most serious crime — counter-revolution. It could not have happened immediately after the decollectivization either, because the peasants were still living under the shadow of socialist culture, which conferred patriarchal status on cadres. Such an expression itself symbolizes the development of a consciousness of independence and the rise of political self-confidence among the villagers.

In this regard, the increasing flow of information through TV programs and other means has, as noted above, provided the villagers with new conceptions of economic and political rights and thus encouraged them to resist the imposing power of cadres should their interests be violated. This is best illustrated in their confrontations with state officials from the township government, which usually require more courage and strength. For example, in a case of conflict with the township officials, a villager was detained by the township policemen for a few days. He was so angry that he finally refused to leave the detention room when the township cadres grew tired of him and wanted to send him away. He accused the local policemen of "violating the law and human rights" because they did not have an arrest warrant. I met him in the county seat where he was demanding justice from the county government. He showed me a booklet about the criminal law, and we also talked about the American TV detective Hunter.

It should be noted that rural cadres generally do not welcome the diffusion of political information, especially about personal rights. A state official in the township government, who was a village cadre a few years ago, complained to me that the "education of legal knowledge" was a stupid campaign launched by the state. "From ancient times, the policemen have had the right to beat people," he said. "This is the way it works. The ordinary people are just slaves, pigs. They can be ruled only by whips. Look at what is happening now. Everyone wants to have his rights, and the law protects the tough guys. The result is that these tricky people never commit crimes, but they never stop making trouble either. It just annoys the police department to death, and puts the court on the spot" (da cuo bu fan, xiao cuo bu duan; qi si gong an ju, nan si fa yuan ).

In another interesting case I witnessed, a widow was suspected of stealing public trees. When two local policemen tried to confiscate a motorcycle from her family as a fine, a physical confrontation occurred between the two parties. The widow accused the policemen of beating her and threatened to use her personal connections in the county police department to punish

the offenders. Although no one knew whether she had relatives in power or not, the local policemen decided not to risk offending higher authorities and encouraged the Xiajia village office to give the widow 50 yuan in compensation. The policemen did not, however, want to lose face in the village; and so two weeks later they detained the widow's son on a four-month old charge of gambling, and asked the widow to pay a fine of 300 yuan to free her son. Everyone, including me, thought the widow was defeated when she paid up; but, to the surprise of all, she went to the county seat and came back with a note from somebody in the county government requesting that the local police department return her money.

Many studies of the guanxi complex in China have focused on the instrumental function of these personal connections (see e.g., Gold 1985; Huang Kwang-kuo 1987; King 1991). The Xiajia case demonstrates that the recent expansion of guanxi networks may have something to do with changes in power relations and, in some circumstances, personal networks may give peasants a way to impose their will on cadres. This parallels Mayfair Yang's argument that the gift economy and personal networks have created a distribution channel outside of the bureaucratic distribution system, and thus constitute a counterforce to the power of the state (see Yang 1989; Yan 1993).

Along with their altered perception of cadre power and newly developed political self-confidence, Xiajia residents' attitudes toward the authority of the party state have also changed. They attribute all social problems, such as inflation, cadre corruption, and public disorder, to high-level state leaders. The best example is perhaps their reaction to the campaign of socialist education launched nationwide in 1990 and 1991 in rural areas. The purpose of this campaign was to clear up problems of village finance and to reeducate peasants about socialism. Xiajia was selected as one of the first villages to launch this campaign, and, as during the collective era, a work team was sent down from the county seat. When I arrived in the spring of 1991, the campaign had been under way for several months, but nothing had happened except that some slogans and posters had been placed on the walls of the village office. Not even a single meeting had been held for the campaign. When I discussed this unusually quiet campaign with my informants, they regarded it as a joke. They maintained that it was a trick by the top leaders to put the masses in the hot seat and thereby hide the serious mistakes made in Beijing. One villager put it this way: "When the people at the top fall sick, they force those at the bottom to take medicine" (shang bian de bing, gei xia bian chi yao ). We did nothing wrong. Why do they always want to educate us?"

This attitude constitutes a sharp contrast to the ways peasants reacted to state campaigns during the collective period. At that time they told themselves: "The scriptures [state policies] were good, but the monks [the cadres

at lower levels] are reciting them wrongly" (jing dou shi haojing, xia bian de heshang gei nian wai le ). As some informants recalled, even during the famine of 1959–61, few people doubted the correctness of policies from above, and they directed all their discontent toward the village cadres. When relief grain was finally allocated to the villagers, who had suffered from hunger for several months, their first reaction was to thank the party state and Chairman Mao. In their own terms, they once had "good feelings" (gan qing ) toward the state, but these feelings are now gone.

Concluding Remarks

Now let me return to the issue raised in the beginning of this chapter: how shall we understand and assess the impact of reforms on cadre power in Xiajia, and how does the Xiajia case relate to current debates about this issue? According to Nee's theory of market transition, if the allocation of goods and services is shifted to marketplaces rather than monopolized by the cadres in the socialist redistributive system, power "becomes more diffused in the economy and society" (Nee 1991, 267). "Therefore, the transition from redistribution to markets involves a transfer of power favoring direct producers relative to redistributors" (Nee 1989, 666). This theory is based on survey data of peasant income collected in 1985, and Nee's key argument relies on the discovery that "current cadre status, following a shift to marketlike conditions, has no effect on a household's chances of being in the top income quintile, nor in its avoidance of poverty, nor in the rate of increase of household income" (Nee 1991, 280).

It is at this point, however, that Oi (1989b) found evidence demonstrating that cadres did take advantage of the reforms by exercising their remaining power. Focusing on the policy context in which the reforms were implemented, Oi conducted a structural analysis of cadre corruption and abuse of power, and offered an instructive counterinterpretation to what Nee proposed: "The most obvious conclusion is that a freer market environment does not necessarily lead to the end of bureaucratic control nor the demise of cadre power" (Oi 1989b, 233). Oi also noted that postreform rural politics remained clientelist in nature (ibid., 231).

It seems to me that in addition to their different conclusions, Nee and Oi also differ from each other in the ways they examine the issue. While defining power as "control over resources" and equating relative income with relative power, Nee emphasizes personal income as the criterion by which to evaluate gain and loss among cadres. In contrast, Oi pays more attention to the institutional aspect of power, with a focus on cadre corruption, and takes the extent to which cadres abuse their power in pursuing personal interest as the standard by which to measure the role of cadres after the reforms.

Applying these perspectives to Xiajia, both seem to have a basis in fact, but neither is sufficient to explain the tremendous changes in power relations. As indicated above, the power of Xiajia cadres has declined to a great extent, and they have lost much of their superiority in social and political terms. But my survey in 1989 also demonstrated that 54 percent of the cadres who were in power on the eve of decollectivization have become affluent, while only 9 percent of the villagers became rich (see table 8.1). This suggests a correlation between cadres' status and their postreform economic achievements. Furthermore, this indicates that neither income nor corruption can be employed as the definitive index of cadre power in the postreform era.

A third criterion, which may be more useful in examining this issue, is the degree of peasant dependence or, to put it another way, the degree of control cadres have over resources. In studies of state socialism, it has long been recognized that the party state's power and authority are based on its monopoly over resources and opportunities, which is maintained and reinforced by the new ruling class of officials (Djilas 1957; Szelényi 1978). Such a monopoly leads to citizen dependence upon officials for the satisfaction of material needs and social mobility, a social phenomena characterized as a form of "organized dependence" by Andrew Walder (1983, 1986). In the context of village society, the fundamental feature of cadre power was villagers' dependence on cadres for the resources under their control. "Men are powerful when many want what they, the few, are able to supply or many fear what they, the few, are able to withhold," George Homans notes (1974, 197). Among many other things, the resources of living, working, resting, socializing, and self-expression are the basic needs of everyday life. These basic resources were, until the reform era, tightly controlled by village cadres, in a situation where villagers were highly dependent. It follows that by examining what happened to these control mechanisms and the degree to which ordinary peasants depend on resources controlled by cadres, one can obtain a better understanding of recent changes in power relations.

My findings from Xiajia lead me to conclude that market reforms have changed the previous balance of villagers' dependence on their leaders and, in some respects, have made cadres dependent on villagers for their incomes. The reforms have eroded cadres' previous power and privilege by breaking their monopoly over resources and by creating new income opportunities that make the accumulation of personal wealth more attractive than the political rewards offered by the party state. Their political role in village society has also changed from that of the tyrannical "local emperor" ruling the village as the agent of the party state to prudent middlemen who negotiate between the state and village society. For villagers, the reforms have ended their dependence on the collectives and the cadres who ran them,

and have thereby to a great extent freed them from cadre domination. While cadres have benefited economically from the reforms, villagers have gained much more in social and political terms — that is, they have attained new individual rights (the right to work, rest, move away, and speak out). Even though the ratio of rich households to ordinary villagers is lower than that to cadres, the reforms have opened the way for the former to compete with the latter in the same market order. In short, the most significant change in power relations has been the erosion of cadres' former monopolized superiority in village life.

The Xiajia case, however, has particularities that speak to important issues of regional variation. Xiajia was and still is a farming community, with an economy characterized by agricultural production. Peasant income still derives mainly from farming and family sidelines. Unlike parts of southeastern China, the trend of marketization and commercialization has yet to play an influential role in the Xiajia economy. Nevertheless, as everyone in farming relies on similar resources, and as land — the primary means of production — was distributed evenly among villagers at the time of decollectivization, the reforms may have produced a more profound political impact on Xiajia than on other industrial or more prosperous areas where a diversified commercial economy has emerged since the reforms. As Ákos Róna-Tas has observed in the case of Hungary, a shift to a market economy tends to have a more egalitarian effect in household farming than in larger enterprises, because agricultural production requires less political and social capital (1990, 205–7). Had there been collective enterprises in Xiajia, or if the majority of its residents had engaged in nonagricultural business, the village cadres would probably have had more resources on hand, and thus might have been able to compel or induce the villagers to respond to their power (see Oi 1990). This contradicts the prediction that the significant weakening of cadre power should coincide with a rather mature development of market transactions (see Nee 1989, 1991).

Among the various dynamics contributing to this fundamental change in power relations in Xiajia, decollectivization and the cessation of mass dictatorship have been the most crucial. As this chapter has shown, collectivization was the key institution through which cadres monopolized all economic, social, and political resources and thus controlled the life of villagers. Mass dictatorship, supported by the state and communist ideology, provided the most powerful instrument for cadres to maintain their monopoly of resources and suppress any resistance. These two mechanisms existed everywhere in rural China prior to the reforms and have subsequently eroded. I therefore regard the Xiajia case as illustrative of recent events in rural communities in China and believe that my study has implications that go well beyond Xiajia's boundaries.

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