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P o w e r , Discourse, and L e g itim a c y in R u r a l·N o r th C h in a : D is p u te s o v e r th e V illa g e H e a d O ffic e in Huailu C o u n ty in lh e 1 9 1 0 s a n d 1 9 2 0 s By HuaiyinLi State-making in early twentieth-century China brought many changes to rural communities and local politics. Paststudi~s .havewell documented how state penetration, in the form of proliferating government agents and increased tax.burden,.resulted in the deterioration and breakdown of old political orders, the enforcement and malfunctioning of new administrative agencies, and popularprotests against internaldecayand external intrusions {see, e.g., Perry 1980; Huang 1985; Duara 1988; Pomeranz 1993; Thaxton 1997; Prazniak 1999; Zhang 2000). What remains largely obscure inthe scholarship on the transformation of local society and politics, however, ischanges inboth the shared assumptions of the villagers about community •leadership and the consciousness of village elites that occurred inthe course of state intrusion and the restructuring of local.power patterns. In particular, weare not quite clear on how the changing values and popular notions about villageleadership were translated into action to form the strategies of both the notables and the ordinaries for their competitions over or struggles against various forms ofpQwer in local communities. The purpose of this essay is to unravel the complexity of institutional changes in village politics ina context ofyhanging discourses on power-holding in order to shed new light on village-state relations in this period. 1 Village leadership intheearlytwentiethcentury was vestedin two distinct yet closely related groups of local elites. One was traditional village notables, most eminently gentry members (usually entry-level degree holders, i.e., shengyuan orjiansheng) and clan elders. We.may also.include in this category agents of the old-style surveillance organizations (baojia orits local variants), although these personnel mostly came from ordinary households and seldom qualified asJocal elites. The other group included new positionsthat came into being as aresultoftheself-government movement in the late Qingand Republican years,including.·villageheads(cunzheng) and school.·masters ( x u e d o n g ) whose duties will be discussed shortly. The most prominent among. all these local notables, old and new,· was no doubt the village head, a position usually filled by the lllost influentialinthe community. Past scholarship on North China villages has explored. at varying length the organization and operation of the Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 28, NO.2 (April, 2003): 73-110 74 Twentieth-Century China newly created village government (Li 1933; Yang 1945; Gamble 1954, 1963), its role in taxation and local control (Myers 1970; Huang 1985 ; Duara 1988; Cong 1995), and its involvement in peasant rebellions (Zhang 1957; Prazniak 1999). My primary concern here, however, is how the creation of the village government resulted in changes in power relations in the village community, and more importantly, how these changes furthers affected the peasants' consensus on village leadership, which in return influenced the exercise of power and the relationship between the village and local government. Critical in understanding these changes, as will be shown below, is·a process in which the new leadership was established and accepted as appropriate and legitimate in the eyes of community members in and out of power. To understand this process, we need to distinguish between the power base of village elites and the legitimacy of their power and status. Depending on the focus and scope of their studies on rural elites, scholars have identified a wide array of resources or bases on which they established dominance in village communities, such as lineage strength and landholding (e.g., Beattie 1979; Huang 1985), social hierarchies and networks involved in local religious and lineage activities (Duara 1988), roles in tax c9llection (Pomeranz 1993), control of corporate property (Dennerline 1979-80; Watson 1990), roles as paternalistic patrons in local community (Duara 1990 and 1995), monopoly of coercive and military force (Zhang 2000), or a combination of these factors (Esherick and Rankin 1990). Obviously, these means and resources, while critical in producing and maintaining...

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