On the mainland, it is a common impression that men dominate village governance. However, in the process of the recent centralized election of village committees and committees, the proportion of female members in village teams has increased significantly, and the data is in line with the actual reflection at the grassroots level. Judging from public information, in many rural areas across the country, the number of female village cadres is generally increasing, and the proportion of female village cadres in some areas has exceeded 50%.
Get out of the house and participate in rural governance
At the end of 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics released the 2022 Statistical Monitoring Report on the Programme for the Development of Chinese Women (2021-2030), which attracted attention. The report points out that the proportion of women participating in decision-making and management at the village level has increased, "women actively participate in grassroots social governance", and all localities "guide women to actively and orderly participate in grassroots democratic management and consultation, and pay attention to the training and selection of grassroots female cadres".
In 2022, 491,000 village teams across the country will successfully complete the centralized re-election. The results of the election show that the proportion of women members has increased, accounting for 28.1% of the village team, an increase of 7.1 percentage points from the previous term, and each village team has at least one woman member.
In some places, the proportion is even higher. In Chongqing, 32.9 per cent of village committees are women, and in Anhui 36.7 per cent. Wei Chenglin, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the School of Politics and International Relations at Tongji University and a part-time researcher at the China Rural Governance Research Center at Wuhan University, told Banyuetan reporters that according to its research, the proportion of female village cadres in southern Anhui, Shanghai and other regions has generally reached about 50%, and most of the female village cadres are young women with college degree or above.
Cadres visit villagers Photo by Ou Dongqu
Wei Chenglin believes that this is related to the social and cultural factors that have continuously improved the status of women since the reform and opening up. A more direct factor is that many village committees and committees have promoted the rejuvenation and knowledge of the village cadre contingent by recruiting young women.
"Have a college degree or above" and "be under the age of 35", in recent years, when recruiting grassroots cadres, such a rigid threshold has been generally set in various localities. According to a township party secretary, under such rigid rules, men are more inclined to go out to work to get more income, while women left behind in grassroots villages are more willing to participate in "social security stability" and "family care".
In addition, the promotion of local women's federations and other organizations is also particularly important. During the period of the centralized election of the two village committees across the country, Hanzhong in Shaanxi Province expanded its propaganda efforts to let the vast number of women "know the election and the rights of everyone", and carried out special training for more than 200 women who participated in the election.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, systems such as the "quota system" and "full-time special selection" have raised women's awareness of participating in social governance. But for a long time, the quota of "at least one woman" became "one woman is good" in some places. Wei Chenglin believes that in today's village-level governance, the trend of women's participation from "one" to "half" is also a deep motivation for the modernization of grassroots governance.
Is the village committee more and more like a neighborhood committee?
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, while the proportion of women in village committees has been rising, the proportion of women in neighborhood committees has remained stable at about 50%, and the proportion of women in directors of neighborhood committees has also stabilized at more than 40%. According to Wei Chenglin's analysis, the gap in the proportion of female members of village committees and neighborhood committees is narrowing, and this phenomenon is inseparable from the process of new urbanization and the integration of urban and rural governance.
"Working in the village committee, I am becoming more and more on par with the neighborhood committees in the city. A female cadre in Xinqiang Town, Yueyang County, Hunan Province, told Banyuetan reporters that now, the grid governance model and the citizen hotline model that originated in the city are extending to the countryside. "Rural governance is more standardized, service-oriented, and technological, and the organizational structure has begun to imitate urban communities. ”
Abolish agricultural taxes, adjust family planning policies, and carry out human settlements improvement...... Behind the policy transformation closely related to grassroots rural areas, county and township governments have also begun to transform from a regulatory government to a service-oriented government. Grassroots cadres said, for example, that in the past, there was a large "room for favors" in some rural areas to apply for subsistence allowances and enjoy preferential policies, and there was an atmosphere of "drinking alcohol first if you want to do things." Nowadays, the rural work field is "window-based", the content is "archival", and the role is "full-time", and the gradually standardized process system provides more space for young women, temporary cadres and other groups to participate in rural governance.
"Under the process of agricultural and rural modernization, for farmers, rural areas are shifting from a production space with agriculture as the core to a living space with public services as the priority. Wei Chenglin believes that modernization and transformation require corresponding institutional costs, and one of the significant manifestations is to put forward higher requirements for the knowledge level and time and energy investment of village cadres.
Under such governance needs, village cadres began to move towards shifts. "This has had an exclusionary effect on some groups of men, who used to be able to juggle village work with agricultural or other business activities, but now it is difficult to have a 'part-time' space. Wei Chenglin believes that in the period of modernization and transformation of rural governance, the family and gender factors that previously prevented women from becoming village cadres have been transformed into their advantages and resources.
Provide more organizational support for women village cadres
The higher the degree of urbanization, the higher the degree of women's participation in rural governance? Wei Chenglin believes that this is not necessarily the case. His research found that in some areas of Zhejiang and southern China, some village collectives and other relevant parties have complex interest demands and distribution issues, resulting in the rare participation of women in village-level governance.
At the same time, in places with a high proportion of young women, some cadres have reported that when rural areas are faced with high-risk and physically demanding jobs such as forest fire prevention, front-line law enforcement, and environmental impact assessment and testing, there is indeed a shortage of men.
In Pingzi Community, Weixin Town, Nayong County, Bijie City, Guizhou Province, five of the seven village cadres are women Photo by Ou Dongqu
Grassroots cadres believe that higher-level governments can carry out professional training in the modernization of village affairs, mass work, project management, and agricultural management for female village cadres and reserve female cadres, promote the rotation of village workers at the town and street level, and improve the ability of female village cadres to preside over community work. At the same time, for some special positions, further promote the implementation of the system of special personnel and posts.
Wei Chenglin suggested that local governments could set up small and micro public projects led by female village cadres to prevent female village cadres from becoming "fictitious". For example, through the setting of policy agendas, we will link up with mass organizations such as women's federations to carry out governance projects such as elderly care, women's employment, child care, and community micro-autonomy, and learn from relevant organizational experience from urban neighborhood committees to strengthen the advantages of female village cadres.