New Challenges in China’s Rural Governance

Jean C. Oi will speak about rural governance in China at Harvard University.

Chinese Politics and Foreign Policy Seminar
In this series, experts from academia and government offer unique perspectives on contemporary trends in Chinese politics and society and in foreign policy.

New Challenges in China’s Rural Governance
Jean C. Oi, Stanford University

The dramatic increase in markets and the restructuring of China’s economy during three decades of reform have created new job opportunities for the rural population, along with new problems. Large-scale migration out of villages has left some with only the feeble and young at home, and the struggle over land pervades the countryside as industrialization and development compete with agriculture. At a crossroads, China’s leadership is experimenting with a new form of rural organization and governance—the creation of rural shechu—to handle the new challenges in a demographically, economically, and politically changed countryside.  Drawing from recent fieldwork, Professor Oi will discuss the dilemmas facing the leadership as it considers whether and how to reorganize rural China.

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and leads Stanford’s China Initiative.  Currently, her research concerns the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She also continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China.  Her recent publications include Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou; “Fiscal Crisis in China’s Townships,” co-authored with Zhao Shukai, inMerle Goldman and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China (2007); and At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks and State-building in Republican Shanghai (2007) co-edited withNara Dillon.