Three Essays on Village Cadres in Contemporary China

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021This dissertation studies village cadres in China. Many researchers attribute the Chinese communist regime’s strong state capacity and resilience to its ability to control its local agents. Less well known, however, is how the state manages to obtain compliance from village cadres, who serve as its agents for governing the countryside. Compared to other state agents, village cadres are unique in several aspects, especially in that they are not classified as formal officials since villagers elect them and the village itself is not a formal level of government. This dissertation unpacks the methods employed by the Chinese state to control village cadres and examines the effectiveness of these methods. Chapter One argues that the Chinese state has sought to elicit village cadres’ compliance by converting their post to something more like those of formal officials through the so-called reform of “professionalizing village cadres,” which took place after the abolition of the agricultural tax in the mid-2000s. Based on an original case study of a county from a coastal province, I demonstrate that the professionalization of village cadres has taken place primarily in four areas: 1) cadre salary, 2) evaluation criteria, 3) bureaucratic structure, and 4) training workshops. I contend that in these four areas, village cadres have been effectively assimilated as formal officials that, in turn, have increased the state’s influence and supervision over them. However, at the same time, I argue that the professionalization reform has been only partially successful in reinforcing village cadres’ compliance with the state. Most critically, the reform failed to establish an adequate reward mechanism for village cadres, who are still excluded from promotion opportunities and receive a generally low salary. As a result, the state’s ability to control and mobilize village cadres remains relatively limited. Chapter Two argues that, to compensate for the meager formal rewards village cadres receive, the state has used corruption as a form of informal reward to motivate village cadres to follow its directives (accepted for publication by China Review). Using fieldwork evidence collected from nine villages in three provinces, I show that local government’s stance toward corrupt activities by village cadres is determined by the latter’s performance. Specifically, the findings indicate that village cadres are allowed to engage in corruption as long as they accomplish the state tasks required of them by their superiors; however, if they fail to accomplish their state tasks, they will be punished by losing their access to corruption opportunities or, worst scenario, being charged with economic crimes. This chapter further argues that the existence of formal and effective institutions, especially the cadre-evaluation system and village elections, enables the state to limit the magnitude of corruption and to make this informal reward mechanism sustainable. Chapter Three provides an empirical test to assess the effect of corruption on village cadres’ performance incentives. This chapter hypothesizes that corrupt village cadres will have a stronger incentive to carry out state directives than do their honest counterparts since the corrupt cadres will face harsher sanctions if they fail to accomplish their tasks. Moreover, it hypothesizes that, even if the state directives assigned to them are profitable, corrupt village cadres will practice self-restraint in their corrupt activities and deliver outcomes that meet their superiors’ requirements in order to avoid the sanctions that may cost them losing all their rents. I test these two hypotheses using an original dataset collected from 101 villages in China. In particular, I examine how the corruptness of village cadres, measured by the prevalence of vote-buying in the previous election, affects 1) their likelihood of proactively building new roads in their villages and 2) the quality of roads they build. The regression results support my hypotheses. While one standard deviation increase in the corruptness of a village cadre increases their probability of building at least one new road in their term by 68%, there is no significant correlation between their corruptness and the quality of the roads they build. Overall, the three chapters suggest that, while the Chinese state acknowledges the importance of ensuring compliance from village cadres, it has attempted to pursue this goal at a low cost, or what I call “compliance on the cheap.” As the first chapter argues, although the state sought to professionalize village cadres to more resemble like formal officials, it has tried to carry out this process without establishing an adequate reward mechanism for village cadres, which rendered the reform only partially successful in reinforcing their compliance. To compensate for the meager formal rewards offered to village cadres, the state has used corruption to incentivize village cadres to obey its directives, which simply entails local officials turning a blind eye to the corrupt activities by village cadres instead of increasing the government’s expenditures. Moreover, my findings indicate that, thus far at least, corruption has worked tolerably well in holding village cadres compliant and improving their performance. Given that exerting control over local agents is crucial for governance, the fact that the Chinese communist regime is able to keep its vast number of village cadres in line at a “cheap price” has contributed to the durability of its governing and rule