Abstract:

For a long time most scholastic studies have been focusing on how the villager self-government affects changes of Chinese society; however, few scholars concern themselves with the question of how the village social structure works on the system of villager self-government.The village is a basic carrier of executions of villager self-governments so that its structural elements are directly related to success or failure of enforcing this system, and even related to stability of such a small society.Through a positive research on four villages in Northeast China, this paper points out that in a village system the functions of three structural elements such as state, village organization, villager are extremely imbalanced in enforcing the villager self-governance, which is a main reason to easily make it become a mere formality.Also if the functions of these three elements change violently, the village social system may be pushed into an extremely unstable situation so as to lose its harmony and balance.

Key words: villager self-governance, structure, function