NEWS

2024.01.24

【Report】Ritsumeikan-ANU Public Lecture was held! : Prof. Ben Hillman delivers a public lecture on the expansion of Party influence in China’ rural governance.

Kyoto, 11 January 2024. Prof. Ben Hillman, Director of Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University, in the second seminar of Global China Studies Series moderated by Professor Miwa Hirono, shared the preliminary findings of his recent research and discussed a shift of power in China’s rural governance. The seminar was also attended by GSIR’s students, early-career researchers, and professors.

At the Session, Prof. Hillman shared his observations about how the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been gradually rebuilding its influence and authority in village China. Rural development has become a top priority for the CPC. It is essential for achieving the its two centennial goals to build “a moderately prosperous society in all respects” and to make China become an agricultural superpower. China needs agricultural modernization to reduce its import dependency and to enhance food security. As Prof. Hillman noted, “Trade wars have also heightened alarm over dependence for food imports on unreliable partners such as US, Canada, and Australia while the war in Ukraine, which has been a major source of grain, has heightened concerns about supply chain disruption”.

China’s rural policies, including its much-heralded targeted poverty elimination campaign, have involved much greater participation of Party functionaries. During the poverty campaign an estimated 3 million officials were mobilized to rural areas to implement and oversee projects. Local government leaders who failed to eliminate poverty in their jurisdictions would not be eligible for promotion.

A stronger role for the Party in the village has continued through the new campaign to revitalize the countryside. Party secretaries are taking over village administration and an estimated 500,000 Party-state officials will be mobilized this year alone to oversee rural revitalization projects. This illustrates how the Party is undertaking a radical overhaul of village governance, putting the Party in charge of village farmlands and collective enterprises for the first time since the Mao Zedong era. Prof. Hillman concludes, may be risky and counterproductive to local-driven innovations. It is worth investigating to what extent this new power constellation may have significant repercussions in China’s domestic politics in the future.

The lecture was followed by a Q&A session. Students and academics raised important questions regarding political incentives behind village-level mobilisation, China’s demographic challenges, and also inquired about fieldwork in China.

Prof. Ben Hillman delivering his lecture

A commemorative photo with Prof. Hillman (Prof. Kenki Adachi on the left and Prof. Miwa Hirono on the right)