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village and then the villagers must raise those funds (Epstein, 1996:412-13). If the
introduce of elections demonstrated the possibility that may take away the obedience of
village officials, that’d be a serious threat to the township’s revenue. The township that
needs to charge more from villages may have stronger incentive to manipulate elections.
This implies:
Hypothesis 1: The more fees the township charges from a village, the worse the
quality of elections in that village.
Incentive alone is not enough; local officials need to have some cards at hand to make
deals in a bargaining. As the lowest end of the Chinese bureaucracy, the township
government is in charge of carrying out national level policies in land use, family planning,
tax collection, and grain procurement, etc. (Brown, 1998; Zhong, 1996). Almost all these
policies are unpopular in the countryside and are the “toughest jobs grassroots cadres face”
(cited in O’Brien and Li, 1999a:170). In an Anhui township, at least 40 percent of cadres’
workload was for family planning; in two Hunan townships, officials complained that they
had to spend more than 80 percent of their working hours in tax collection every year
(interviews, Oct. 2003; Jan. 2004). Since these state assignments are so tough, since at least
some people believed that village elections would undermine local capacity in fulfilling
state mandates (Kelliher, 1997; O’Brien and Li, 1999b), it is reasonable to posit that local
and tongchou, is a major financial source of the village and township. Its rate, while it is not
permitted to exceed 5 per cent of the preceding year’s net per capita incomes of villagers
(Bernstein and Lu, 2000), is very hard to be monitored by the center. Third, irregular fees.
This is so-called “three unrulies,” unruly fundraising, unruly fines and unruly apportionment
(Zhao and Zhou, 2002), most of which are charged by the village and township. Fourth,
money to buy obligated working days. Villagers often have to pay some money to get exempt
from the state obligation that requires working for the collective 15 or 20 days per year (Zhao
and Zhou, 2002).
Convention