From Personal Ties to Village Welfare: Changing Community Bonding in Post-Socialist Rural China

Background and Purpose:  As China grows as a leading economy in the world, the processes of urbanization and industrialization fundamentally reshape the village communities in the countryside.  Villages-within-cities (chengzhongcun) have occurred (Zhang, 2011), where villagers deprived of farm land receive state assistance to adjust to the urban life in expanded cities while keeping their rural household registrations (hukou).  These emerging communities evince drastic changes in patterns of community bonding and the understanding of community in contemporary China.  Yet to date, little academic effort has been made to investigate the mechanisms of identification, socialization and welfare organization in the urbanizing villages.

In affluent south Zhejiang Province, such communities often design grassroots welfare programs to share the prosperity among members and maintain the cohesiveness of the villages.  This study, aimed to fill the knowledge gaps of changing community bonding in rural China, inquires the processes to create community identity, define membership and responsibility, and articulate welfare rights and exclusion through the village welfare projects.

Methods: Seven-week ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in Zhang Village in Zhejiang Province, a purposefully sampled site (Patton, 1990), in 2013, and qualitative data were gathered through three ways: participant observation, 15 in-depth interviews with villagers and local cadres, and local archives on village urbanization.  The data were synthesized to answer how the community-based welfare programs bond the villagers in a village-within-the-city, and how they construct the meaning of community and the discourses of social justice in contemporary rural China.

Results:  After its resettlement as a village-within-the-city, the traditional community bonding and protection through personal ties was challenged and disrupted in Zhang Village.  Village-based welfare programs were then established to reconnect and organize villager families.  The coverage of the programs are universal and generous, including premium payments for villagers’ social insurance, water and cable-TV bills of the villager households, and cash distribution to every villager at the end of the year.

The villagers accept the benefits from the village welfare system with gratitude to the village cadres, and regard their village community as an important source of protection and security in the changing society.   But at the same time, in order to exchange for the entitlement, they conform, sometimes with reluctance, to the social control of the local government; and discriminate against the non-local residents to maintain community bonding and safeguard their collective interest.  The multiple dimensions and aspects of the meaning of community echo “the new politics of community” (Collins, 2009) in the modern world. 

Conclusions and Implications: This study on the multi-dimensional bonding mechanisms around village welfare projects draws scholarly attention to the complex politics of power and inequality in community-based welfare and service.  In the global retrenchment of centralized social welfare, welfare planning and delivery in local communities can be a promising direction of provision.  But in order for these programs to fulfill the goal of social justice, it is important for the communities to consider the perspective of human rights, and create an open space to democratically discuss welfare entitlement, power equality, and citizenship.