The Prereform Structure Of Authority And Settlements

In 1949 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inherited the Guomintang's local administrative hierarchy. Unlike the Qing dynasty, the Guomintang had established the district (qu ) between the county (xian ) and the administrative villages (xiang ) or towns. The qu was a supervisory agent by which the xian government managed the xiang , which, with a fairly well developed governmental structure, constituted the most basic level of government administration (Barnett 1965, 318–38). Large xiang, whose location made them major marketing centers, were classified as market towns, or zhen .^[2]

In their ceaseless efforts to control both the economy and the political administration, the CCP extended subcounty controls. With the qu as the administrative level for organizing land-reform teams, their number doubled by 1955 and became full-scale governments between the xian and the xiang . But as collectivization increased the size of each agricultural producer cooperative, the xiang expanded to ensure continued coherence between economic and administrative organizations. As the xiang grew they began to approximate the size of the qu , so in December 1955 the disbanding of the qu left the xiang as the major administrative level below the xian (Schurmann 1968, 453). Continuing state efforts throughout the 1950s and 1960s to control private marketing killed the market town (jizhen ) as a commercial force and seat of autonomous authority.^[3]

When the 1958 Great Leap Forward amalgamated the agricultural cooperatives and the xiang government and placed the headquarters of the new People's Communes in former jizhen or xiang government centers,^[4] the former bifurcation of the commercial system and administrative control was ended, leaving the commune seat as a powerful node in the rural bureaucratic hierarchy, which combined economic, political, and social control.^[5]

The Great Leap's failure transferred ownership and control over land and most resources to the village or subvillage production team, leaving communes and brigades with weak economic bases. County-controlled market towns, which were not commune seats—by 1978 there were only 1,100 in all of China—disappeared from view, tiny islands afloat in a collectivized countryside with which they had little contact. With commune towns serving supervisory roles for county interests (Butler 1978)—county organizations, such as the Agricultural Bank, Supply and Marketing Co-ops, and the Grain Bureau, had commune-level branches that controlled production and investment decisions, migration, financial exchanges, and labor mobilization—infrastructure in commune seats did not expand, as most investment went into production.^[6]

One common trend throughout this period saw county, commune, and even brigade officials expropriate bank funds, grain supplies, and peasant labor to establish rural enterprises, expand administrative capabilities, and build a semiautonomous political-economic base (Nee 1983, 236; Zweig 1989a). On the eve of reform the commune system defined not only a spatial distribution of rural settlements, smaller villages, and fields, but also a governmental and Party hierarchy from the county to the commune, through the brigade to the village, with each unit's location and rank or status within that hierarchy determining the economic

resources under its political control, its relations to other organizations, and its economic and political power.